Dan Hope
On his way from southern Maryland to attend Loyola College Brooke stopped off to see some friends at the University of Maryland. Fortunately, he decided to stay in College Park and I met a lifelong, best friend. We lived in Chestertown Hall, but Brooke later moved into the Phi Delta Theta house. At one point, during our college years, we both lived in Baltimore. I would pick him up in Roland Park, in my 1950 VW Beetle, and we would commute to College Park. On occasion the horn on my car would cease working and Brooke would hang out the window become the horn.
One year we were both in the same history class and the professor used the work “trundle” often to describe wandering around from place to place. So, we decided we should trundle around the campus and visit every building. To our surprise, one of those buildings housed a nuclear reactor and we were given a grand tour.
Over the years jobs, family, and other things took us our separate ways, but we always kept in touch. When we didn’t talk on the phone we often visited each other. Brooke ended up in Texas for the most part and I in Georgia. Brooke would stay with us in Athens when he was working in the area. We also stayed with Brooke and Rhonda in Garland and later with he and Anne.
My wife, Ann, and I even visited him at the Hermitage in La Plata, MD on occasion. On one of those trips Brooke wanted to show me something he had hidden in a closet under the main stairs in the house. To my surprise it was jugs of dandelion wine he had decided to make while we were in college. I had helped him pick some of the hundreds of dandelions he needed for his brew. We sampled the 25+ year old wine and determined it okay, but not something we wanted to drink again. There were a few gallons of the wine, but I never knew what he did with it.
Brooke became my “Texas connection.” Whenever he called or left a message it was from my “Texas connection,” not Brooke. He didn’t really need to identify himself though, his classic, calm, southern gentleman voice gave him away.
Nurse Anne’s e-mail this morning brought instant tears. It was supposed to be the start of a much better year than 2020. It will be impossible to fill the hole Brooke will leave in my life and, I am sure, the lives of many others in the years to come.
