Alfred & Bill

Maybe we don’t often think about the fact that we have our life because of a certain other person. Much less does a sense of gratitude permeate our being as an ongoing thing. My uncle Alfred died at age eighteen, drowned in the wreck of the twin-masted fishing schooner Annie & Jennie when she hit a violent squall while transiting the Old Pass, on a bitter cold winter night in January 1918. My father, who was six years old at the time, remembered his brother’s casket resting beside the fireplace directly in front of where I’m sitting at this moment. My grandparents were so devastated by the death of their son, that in a couple years they left this house in St. Andrews, and moved up to central Georgia to get away from the sea. Over the next ten years they moved several times, penultimately to Pensacola, where my father met my mother, and they were neighbors in East Hill, friends, students together at Pensacola High School, sweethearts in a courtship that continued after my grandparents ultimately returned to St. Andrews, and my parents. If Alfred had not been aboard Annie & Jennie and died that night, my parents would never have met, and I would not exist. I have my life because of Alfred, and the sense of it never leaves me.

Soon after retiring from parish ministry in 1998, Linda and I became involved in the project to renovate the old Cove Elementary School (where I was a student first grade through eighth grade graduation, 1941 to 1949), to serve as Holy Nativity Episcopal School. The renovation project was daunting, major, seemingly almost impossible. In charge was Panama City native Bill Lloyd, recently retired Professor of Finance at Auburn University. Bill and his brother Rayford grew up in a pretty blue house at the NW corner of Cove Boulevard and Third Street, just around the corner from the Massalina Drive house where I grew up in the Cove and where, half a generation apart, we all had walked the two blocks or so to Cove School.

So impressed was I with Bill and the task he had taken on, that I soon started showing up at Cove School every morning to help. Tear up carpet, remove dropped ceilings and lighting fixtures, take out partitions, scrape paint from windows, replace broken window panes. The part of the job that was most time consuming for me over the next nearly two years was reglazing nearly every window in the building, Hamilton Avenue front side and playground back side. Some days, Bill would bring a ladder and work next to me, and we would talk all afternoon, partners in scraping and glazing. The tiny group of people who are the Holy Nativity School Foundation somehow came out of the Cove School project in a friendship bond that has been unique in my life.

Sunday, October 17, 2010, after another summer of working vigorously dawn to dusk five days a week, on yet another renovation project at Cove School, by then named by the Foundation, the Bill Lloyd Building, I was taken to hospital and diagnosed with heart issues that would kill me in “two to five months,” the doctors agreed, and “inoperable” they concluded. One doctor told me that facing such a grim prognosis I should look around to see if a major medical center would consider taking me for open heart surgery, “Cut you open, fix everything, and put you back together.” Long story short, I was accepted by Cleveland Clinic, the number one heart institute in the nation; but by then, two and a half months into my two to five month allowance, I was in no shape to travel from Panama City to Cleveland!

However, Foundation friends Rayford, Mary and Bill had taken me on as their project! As my Cleveland Clinic appointment loomed near, Bill and June Lloyd informed me that I would be flown to Cleveland in the corporate jet belonging to the company in which they are partners. January 18, 2011 three hours and forty five minutes from Panama City, Florida to Cleveland, Ohio. Incredible surgery at the hands of the world’s best. February 4, 2011, four hours from Cleveland to home at last, home at last, thank God Almighty, home at last!! Bill Lloyd is in my heart and mind, from our latter Cove School days, as one to whom I owe my life. Because of Bill, I have my life. The awareness, the sense of it, my gratitude never leaves me.

William Pitts Lloyd. April 16, 1948 - July 12, 2012

Tom+ in +Time, grateful