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.
Here’s a link to the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation, specifically the obituary that Lionel wrote: https://sctf.org.uk/2017/05/14/r-i-p-patrick-meadows-1934-2017/ The article is dated 14 May 2017, six years ago today. (The photo is from the article.) My niece discovered it when searching for pictures of her grandfather.
A few notes I recorded on Mother’s Day 2017 while in search of coffee in Spain. Posted exactly six years later, but I’ll reset the date a few weeks from now.
A letter to Patrick, written one year after his death, but not shared on the website until much later.
Here’s a 2014 recording of a conversation about friends and family and the choices we make, Patrick said “Choose the people that are important in your life.” It’s good to hear his voice again.
I have found myself of late with a sort of refrain in my head, often repeated aloud (when I am alone) “My heart” is the refrain, always seeing her in the garden, in the countryside, in the car.
Here’s a long recording from exactly eleven years ago in which Patrick talks about Chopin, Vida, Valldemossa, and more. We were eating dinner, probably at Vesuvius, probably served by Adriana.
This seventeen-minute recording starts with me telling Patrick about a couple of events at the inaugural IRL race at Las Vegas Speedway, then goes on to discuss various risky activities and concludes with a Unix/eunuchs pun.
Eleven years ago today, Patrick talked about some of his friends and their fascinating (and sometimes tragic) histories. Here’s the recording. We were having a late lunch in Santa Maria.
This long recording (almost 20 minutes) from 9 November 2012 is too large to upload to this web site, but here is an imperfect transcription. UPDATE on 17 Nov 2022: I was able to use a different approach to upload the audio, so you can hear his voice once more, telling this story. The recording […]
This is a recording from eleven years ago today, 16 Nov 2011, in which Patrick talks a bit about his first father-in-law (John, who subsequently adopted me) as well as Patrick’s paintings and poetry, stories ahead of their time, Dori teaching reading through dance, and Patrick repeating the 11th grade.
This was a surprise. I came across this receipt on Tuesday night. It’s for the Zambak, the boat that cost a fisherman his finger and almost cost my dad his life.
I found two short pieces of Patrick’s involving Xingo. Here’s the first: The Spanish Civil War officially ended in 1939, but unofficially went on for many decades. Especially in the Basque country, dissidents fought a continuous battle of resistance. Two brothers from Bilbao became members of the feared and despised Guardia Civil, but luckily for […]
Today is Patrick’s birthday. He would have been 88 years old, a nice round number full of curves and circles, an Oldsmobile number, a number never reached. Even as I prepare to bury my brother – more accurately, eulogize him, for he’s to be cremated and scattered – I think of my dad. (This brother […]
Jeff A recently found these three paintings on e-Bay and reached out to me through the comments section of the Brian McMinn posting. He wrote, “They were listed as “mystery artist” and in my research I concluded they are by Brian — I hope I’m right. Your post and the obituary by Charles Darwent are […]
Lionel posted this recently as a comment to Patrick’s 87th Birthday but I want to give it more prominence, so here it is separately. Just an update to my last contribution, really: Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective have just released a CD on Chandos of the three early Coleridge-Taylor chamber works which Patrick type-set. Very appropriately, the […]