Blog-TOWER OF BABELI woke up on Saturday October 9th at 9 am, I slept late due to the fact that I did not have to get my son up for high school. I felt a foreboding, a feeling of certain news was coming that was going to make me whirl. I opened my email at 910 am and I received an email from my friend Debbie Morris from Palm Beach FL. She told me my friend Mimi Humphery has died. I could not swallow or focus on anything.
I met Mmi Humphery at Jet Aviation, when I was director of Cabin Service. In 1998, my VP Dwain Gadway, had hired her to handle the Palm Beach region. She was small, thin, with tousled bright lucille ball hair, and was funny and interesting. She did not kiss my ass like so many before her had. We made eye contact and were no bullshit friends forever. We shared secrets, had on another’s back, word. Mimi could not handle the cold. Her skin was used to 88 degrees sunny and clear, being born in Honolulu. I am not sure she knew what Uggs, snow shovels and ice scrapers were., so she went back to Florida.
I went to see her anytime I could, Mimi Loved the night life. I remember drinking from 4 PM to 3 AM, and throwing up in the Palm Garden Marriott bushes, curding her the next day at show time. No one laughed like Mimi. She was irreverent, self deprecating, Irish, fun, with a heart bigger than Texas. She struggled to make the ends meet. She was a hard worker, who never gave up or in. She, like me, never talked about her upbringing. I just know it was a tough road. I cannot remember she ever being mad, evil or whining. She, if born at the turn of the century, could have been Nellie Green, a sweet but tough bootlegger in CT, who would never turn her back on a soul.
Mimi called me 1 month ago. I did not call her back. I was busy with my own mess. I am a shit. I am suffering for this now, and will for the rest of my very existence. I am/was honored to know mimi. I will miss her deeply. She was a flight attendant who always went the distance, a person always with a up idea in the darkest night. I think she died of cardiac arrest because by todays standards, her heart was too big.