Patrick Meadows and Stephanie Shepard Memorial Site
This page page highlights the articles that I think you’d like to read first, since new visitors overwhelmed with the amount of information posted on this web site. Some provide simple entertainment – stories, jokes biographical and semi-biographical musings – while others reflect the impact Pat and Stephanie had on peoples’ lives.
In this excerpt, set in Tampa in the early 1970s, Patrick describes how he first learned of Dr. Weightnovel, which turned into a writing project he worked on for the rest of his life, but never finished. I’ve made only minor edits, primarily fixing typos and punctuation. Caution to the reader: this story includes a (more)
Create a montage of those events that most often recur in memory. Mari got a a job teaching elementary art in Centereach. We found a cottage in Lake Ronkokoma to rent. Since she was teaching under the name on her teaching certificate, we lived under that name – last name Irvin. Her sister Nancy and (more)
Happy Thanksgiving to all. I am reminded of an earlier time.
Of the various awards I’ve earned over the years, the badges of honor that mean the most to me now are the titles “Granddaddy” and “Uncle JP.” As I write this I’m in Florida in that latter role while Abby deals with the sudden and unexpected loss of Rui, my niece’s new dad. I’m here (more)
It’s really hard to say goodbye sometimes. Years ago my sister Heather said that it’s sad when we lose a member of the family, but it’s especially sad when we lose “one of the good ones.” Therefore I am deeply saddened to report that we had a death in our family yesterday, one of the (more)
I found several versions of this letter from December 2006 to March 2010, but the differences were mostly cosmetic. This is pasted from the 2010 version. Around St. Patrick´s day 1976, I left Tampa with my five year old daughter. We returned to Mallorca where she was born. Dear Stephanie. You always believed in something (more)
This is another autobiographical story with a familiar theme–Patrick and Mari’s journey to Izmir, Turkey. I’ve made only minor edits. About nine o’clock in the morning, Mari and I stepped down from the train onto the platform in Istanbul. Beside us were the two bulging suitcases I had wrestled from Luxemburg to Paris, from there (more)
Here’s another letter to Patrick I found in the backup (Planck) of a backup (Fourier) of a backup (GWG6) folder, originally a XyWrite file dated 20 February 1988. It includes a challenge to help me find a job in Spain, and to develop an app to transmit music between computers via phone connections. (Of course, (more)
I can’t find the original postcard, but here are the contents of a XyWrite file I just stumbled across that was used to print it. It was dated 8 August 1988. Thought you’d enjoy my first record. [A 45 RPM disc with two songs about racing.] The racetrack has been my surrogate girlfriend these past (more)
Conversation about a drawing, and Norman.
Here’s a little recording I just stumbled upon. Patrick, Christine, and I were enjoying breakfast at the Busy Bee Diner in Ventura so there are occasional interruptions from our server in the audio. It was 8 October 2014 and Patrick had just finished his visit with me. We were on our way to the Santa (more)
This was a conversation between Patrick, Ivonne, and JP. It started with information about learning Spanish (there’s a separate recording that covers that in great detail), and then building a home, and from there to types of police officers in Spain and the U.S. There are places where Ivonne spoke in Spanish too quickly for (more)
Here are pictures of Patrick’s 1978 passport pages. He was traveling quite a bit with Stephanie getting their concert series up and running but I don’t see a lot of stamps.
I’ve been busy working on a web site for my adopted parents and haven’t had a chance to do much here on Patrick-Meadows.com. My brother Randy has scanned thousands of pictures for the new site from their dozens of photo albums. He also just scanned the attached photos from 20 years ago. Stephanie had been (more)
This is the transcription of a dream I recorded on the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima. In it, Patrick was living next door to me but didn’t say so.