Suzy, by Bill

Here is Bill's eulogy for Suzy, delivered at her memorial service on October 27, 2007:

Welcome to Suzy's 68th birthday. What I would like to do is tell you about my version of the “Essential Suzy”, show you some of the things that are fundamental to her magic. I do not pretend that these glimpses do her richness justice, but the perspective I was privileged to have may help all of us as we try to cope with what we now face.
That perspective had its beginnings in the summer of 1985, when I was first hired to work as a systems analyst for the Libraries. Suzy was on the search committee. Those were the days in which we interviewed almost everyone even more intensely than we do now (if you can believe that). As the supervisor of two programmers, one of whom was on loan to FCLA, even my lowly position was interviewed for more than a day. Neither of us knew at the time where the result of that job search would lead us. Amid the myriad of people who blurred before me in that whirlwind process, my primary image of Suzy was “Nice legs” .
It didn't take long to learn there was a great deal more to appreciate. Shortly after I arrived, I helped her debug a small problem in her current programming project. Not too long after that, we came to better understand each other's skills when we ended up on the same group during one of the insipid ARL OMS workshops that were popular in the mid-80s. The relationship remained mostly professional until almost twenty years ago, the point at which, as Suzy always put it, “we became we.” Once it happened, we remained we, until the horrible night this month when she slipped away, the victim of the sudden massive bleeding which destroyed her brain.
Between those times, we were together almost constantly. I attended several ALA events with her, and I shunned travel which didn't include her. We came in to campus together, ate lunch together, bought a house and built a household. In the summer of 2001, she finally consented to wear my ring, and we were married in a small destination wedding at Bayfield, Wisconsin.
These are bits of history, but they don't tell you much about her. Here are some of the views of her essence which I think she would be glad to have stay in our memories.
Suzy loved novelty. She liked technology, but I have always believed that the true interest behind that was her love of new things in general. For example, she very much wanted to be one of the first tourists in space, and would have gladly risked almost anything to have that novel experience.
The quest for novelty in everyday life took her to a love of the study of popular culture and mass media. A member of the Popular Culture Association, Suzy always wanted to know what the next great trend would be. She frequently caught the wave before most people detected a ripple. She was captivated by the number puzzle Sudoku long before it became cool. She was one of the very earliest users of Tivo, the programmable video recorder, and had to constantly schedule viewing time to try to keep enough space cleared on the machine to capture her next targets. She wanted to experience it all.
She also loved many aspects of popular culture on a personal level. Her childhood love of comics led her to both collect those comics, and to work with comics of all types professionally. She pioneered in extending and developing Comics Markup Language as a tool for making both the text and graphic content of comics searchable online. She spent a lot of time in Special Collections, especially after she retired, working on organizing the Libraries comics collection. She became a major fan of Neil Gaiman and his graphic novels, particularly the Sandman series, on which she presented conference papers.
Suzy loved music. She had perfect pitch, and deeply understood music long before she studied it formally. She once told me that one of the most joyful moments of her life came when she learned that all of her friends, the musical notes, actually had names and identities. She had an undergraduate degree in music from UC Berkley (her beloved Cal), and she had musical instruments and recordings with her constantly. One of the highlights of her life was when she played in a rock band while a librarian at Johns Hopkins. That group was a caveman sendup of Bruce Springsteen, entitled Bruce Springstone. The visual theme was the Flintstones, with Fred as the Bruce avatar / frontman. Suzy played keyboards, and in the video the group produced was clad only in a scant fur dress and a lot of makeup. She was very proud of that role, which she termed Cave Whore. The group has the distinction to this day of having produced the single that has been played more than any other on radio: Take Me Out to the Ballgame, which is how that music found its way here.
Suzy was a fan. Very few earned her fandom, but if you ever managed to attain that glorious status, her loyalty was unconditional and unending. The only real enmity I ever saw her express was when she thought someone was being evil to me or someone else in her circle of devotion.
The fan and the music came together in her love of the work of Bruce Springsteen. She had attended literally dozens of his concerts, sometimes traveling across the country to see one more show of a tour she had already seen more than once. She liked everything he did, defending his numerous stylistic changes from cretins like me who thought The Boss should stick to being The Boss.
She loved books, and she loved the concept of a library. She believed in the goodness of the library mission, and she combined those feelings with her love of novelty to produce a never ending quest for new things to do in the library. She was one of the prime movers in the Florida Union List of Serials project (FULS, pronounced fools), and when its leadership was taking it in a potentially disastrous direction, she combined forces with Barbara Oliver to get it finished and keep everyone out of jail. She started with the UF Libraries as an LTA in serials. She went to library school at FSU to improve her professional prospects, only to return to a job as a serials librarian here that paid less than she would have been making had she not gone to school. A bit later, her personal life led her out on what she called the great year-long camping trip, where she traveled across the country in a van on what might best be called a spirit quest. She ended that saga, and worked in several other academic libraries before returning to UF.
She was fascinated when SOLINET came out with their modified IBM PC computers as dedicated cataloging workstations. She combined her OCLC user skills with her desire to learn to use the new technology to produce the only software the Libraries have ever had widely distributed: How to Search OCLC. This program was a combination of tutorial and game, designed by Suzy and programmed by a student assistant working with her. It was widely used in the English speaking world, with shipments to several countries outside the US. She later went on to be the sole progammer and developer for CyberLib, the pre-Web, multi-user mainframe tool that organized the mass of professional email lists into a single archival reference source that was widely used here.
Suzy hated waste, which she pretty much defined as anything that needed to be discarded. Even things which she agreed were pure trash, things like bottle caps and popsicle sticks and old food in the fridge, cause her pain to throw away. I could help her with those things, but in other areas it was more difficult. She had that pack rat condition common among library denizens, which led her to accumulate things. The collector combined with a love of the library concept and a hatred for using a shared library herself led her to build a massive personal library. This is one of the places where our weaknesses reinforced each other to our peril: the house is overrun with our books.
Suzy was totally nonreligious, and yet completely spiritual. She was totally understanding and supportive of my unorthodox religious beliefs, but had no interest at all in taking them up herself. She incorporated them into our wedding, and emerged unchanged. Suzy was a golden child of the universe, a person so in touch with the ultimate godhead that she simply didn't need any intermediaries to guide her way.
Spirituality notwithstanding, Suzy was supremely sensual. She loved good food, and good wine, and .... things sensual.
Overall, the way we lived was very much in touch with our inner Peter Pan, adult in body, but quietly indulgent of ourselves. Think of it as the Boxcar Children with too much money. Suzy was an experienced innocent. Her innocence was not the naive uninformed state of childhood, but a refusal to embrace cynicism, despite understanding the problems in the world. She never let herself become corrupted enough to understand politics, even though she was fascinated to see political intrigue unfold. Interpreting that for her was one of my jobs.
In exchange for political analysis, Suzy gave me far greater gifts, the most unlikely being coffee, cats, and baseball. I was never much of a coffee drinker until Suzy. She introduced me to the joys of fresh hand ground, brewed with a Melita cone, and I quickly joined her in her love of it. I never made it to her level of addiction, though. She was totally non-functional in the morning until that first cup found its way into her being. This caused her something of a dilemma when she lived alone: how do you make that first cup fresh when you do not know which planet you are standing on? The answer for the last twenty years has been that my morning routine begins with the grinding and boiling and brewing, so that she only needed to awaken enough to swallow.
She gave me cats shortly after we bought the house. Our neighbors had around a dozen, and one young one boldly came every morning to visit at our backdoor. This cat, whose orange forehead blaze lead Suzy to name Carrot, needs more human attention than is available in a house full of cats, and slowly came to spend most of her time with us. The neighbors left, but Carrot is still here.
The thing this tells you about Suzy is that in her supremely gentle way, she led me (then a cat disliker if not cat hater) to understand what wonderful creatures really great cats are. She never objected to letting the almost kitten come in to live, accepting the inevitable small damages that occur as cat and household come to know each other. She nurtured my relationship with Carrot until we bonded. She did this a lot, getting me to first tolerate and then come to deeply appreciate things I thought I could do without. Baseball was something I regarded as a boring waste of time, until she patiently explained the game, how to keep a box score, and how her baseball fandom belonged to the Orioles and Cal Ripken.
A final glimpse of the mysterious essential Suzy. After she saw the movie Raging Bull, she wanted to be a boxer. She never actually did any boxing or training to box, and although I am sure this is highly significant to understanding her, I to this day have not a clue as to what it means.
All of this is only a series of snapshots into an amazing life. The totality of experiencing her is beyond anything I can begin to express in words. The blessing of our time together is the greatest happiness I have ever known. Rock on, Miss Suzy.