1969 – 1994
I knew Cely for 50 years. That started in August 1968 when she visited me at the AID guest house in New Delhi, sent by a friend to prop me up as I coped awkwardly with life in small temporary quarters with a one- and three-year old in staggering humidity and a confusing search for more permanent housing. At that point, the Arndts had been in Delhi for more than a year; they had four-year old Channing, the two-year old twins and Christopher on the way–busy lives. But she had quickly figured out how to make the most of India and also found a world of friends, and she made a place in that world for me.
My husband David, our girls and I spent a lot of time with Cely and Tom and the boys in India, including weekends at a tiger sanctuary guest house (no tigers seen) and a guest house at Easter on the Jumna River where the Easter bunny hid candy that melted and the kids had a wonderful time rafting on rubber tires. We also rented the house next to theirs in Pahalgam, Kashmir, for six weeks to avoid the Delhi heat, a great place for children; the husbands came when they could on weekends in colonial India fashion. The houses had wonderful mountain views but life there was complicated. Cely coped splendidly with truly primitive conditions, though we all paid a real if fortunately temporary price for being slow to figure out that the streams that ran beside the houses and provided our only water supply were far from clean and that it’s hard to purify water at 8,000 feet. (Thinking of Kashmir, if David Arndt will forgive me, I must interject one of Cely’s favorite stories. The flight route from Srinagar to Delhi goes through a famously turbulent pass. The day the Arndts flew home the winds were especially wild, and Cely said she was terrified when the Air India plane rocked like a roller coaster, with crockery crashing and even stewardesses screaming. But she reported that in his seat, three-year-old David was laughing and saying, “bumpety, bumpety.”)
Our friendship continued when we were all back in the Washington area. I remember well the sad 1972 election night, mourning McGovern’s loss at their house in McLean while shivering in the Tom-Arndt-designated low temperatures. The Mathiasens lived in downtown D.C., all our lives got complicated by work and children’s needs and we saw each other somewhat less than we did in India, and of course not at all during the Arndts’ time in Sri Lanka. After Tom’s death David and I spent more time with Cely. We marveled at how strong she was under lonely circumstances, especially after her dog (was it named Muckluck?) was killed by a car. But she carved out a new life working on anti-nuclear proliferation issues and seemed so independent that we were surprised when she invited us to a party to meet “the new man in my life” Sonny Fox. It was wonderful to see her so happy after that.
When Cely moved to California to be with Sonny our friendship did not fade and we saw her both at our houses in Maine and during her visits to D.C. She took real trouble to retain her Washington friends; she emailed and called and didn’t slip in and out of town without visiting, which could have been tempting given how many friends she had there. When she came to dinner or stayed overnight, we were always impressed by how much there was to talk about—not “whatever happened to so-and-so?” as is often the conversational fodder with old friends—but concerns she raised that ranged over the low quality of public high-school education, environmental protection and population control and beyond. We were in Washington, which ought to be the center of that sort of thought, but she brought a wider world to us.
She was a brave and special person and we will miss her always.
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I am writing this on Sept. 8, wishing that we had been able to attend the memorial service. I hope the various speeches will be posted on this site for those of us who didn’t get to hear them.