Cathy Bynum Maurer Memories

A letter from Winnie, Tina's mom, please click here. It is a pdf file and will open and download to your hard drive. It is called "Winnie.pdf" if you need to use FIND to locate where it is hiding. It is a scan and I could not make both pages appear in the same orientation. I'm sure you will enjoy reading it anyway.

From Judy Dekker, Jean's stepmother

In memory of Cathy
Perhaps they are not the stars
But rather openings in heaven
Where the love of out lost
Ones pours thru.
And shines down upon us
To let us know they are happy.

I e-mailed Eddy, wanting to share some photos we took while visiting Cathy and him in London. He asked me to send them on to you. The photos are not really very good (I wasn't smart enough to set the camera on 'auto), so I didn't think they should be posted. However, that is what Eddy wanted, so I am following through. By the way, my husband, Marv Wooten is Cathy's cousin (Marv's mother and Cathy's father were sister and brother. As a child, Marv spent several summers living with the Bynum's after his mother died. I am Barb Wooten, Marv's wife.

Yours, Barb Wooten

From: Eddy to David and Kay Marrero

Would you believe that I was in Dublin for 3 days last week and 1 day the week before, working on a performance problem at the Bank of Ireland (BOI). When I landed and took a taxi from the airport north of town the BOI south of town the taxi driver took the shortest route right through the centre, so we ended up in a traffic jam heading south down O'Connell street. It brought back memories of when Cathy and I met up with you guys for that long weekend. We really enjoyed that short time we had with you. I felt that she was with me while I was their in the back of the cab crawling in that appalling traffic they have in Dublin

Thinking of you,
Love Eddy

From David and Kay Marrero to Eddy in response to above e-mail:

Subject: Re: Dublin

Hi Eddy,
I always marvel at how space and time can fuse to bring our minds into a reflextion of the past while making us filter it through the present. I can imagine how you must have felt in the back of that taxi. I am sure that in that moment, our spirits were joined with you, capturing the wonderful energy that we all shared in Dublin, proving once again that the universe does indeed curve back on itself.

David

Jean Loback

It was 1974 when I met Cathy. Our friendship started when I asked her name. She was a programmer, working on a conversion project and the results of her program were on microfiche. I worked in the microfilm lab and saw her almost every morning and thought if I was going to work with her I should know her name. At that time she was living in Denver and I was living Phoenix, but we both worked for what was then called Mountain Bell (now Qwest). Eventually I asked her if she wanted to see the city sights and take a ride up to Carefree & Cave Creek. Little did we know what her answer "yes" would mean to both of us. We talked and found out we both liked to travel, we were unattached, no children, and had extra money in our vacation "pots". So we started to plan our first of many, many travels together.

At first we would plan our trips over the phone, mostly at "Ma Bell's" expense. There was no e-Mail then, so we would call each other at work. Through the years Cathy had met most of my family, and my friends and I met hers. If they lived out of state or out of the country--all the more reason for a trip. We went to Europe, both coasts of Mexico, and canoed over the Canadian border eating freeze-dried food for a week. If she read about it, heard about it and was interested in it, she would be planning a trip. If we traveled by car we would try not to use the 4 lane highways. It was always more interesting on the back roads. I guess what I am trying to say is that Cathy was a very curious person and needed to live life.

Of course, traveling doesn't come without its pit falls, and no, we didn't always agree, but those times became memories too and make for colorful story telling. The one thing I always knew was that we could, and did, totally trust each other, and it doesn't get much better than that.

One of our early trips to Mexico encapsulates most of what I am trying to say. Cathy came down to Phoenix, picked me up, we rode a Greyhound bus to Nogales, walked across the border with our suitcases, and caught the Mexican train to Guadalajara. We spent several days there visiting the sights and then we flew to Manzanillo. We stayed at Hotel La Posada, a place she had read about in a How to do Mexico on $35 a Day or something like that, with little rooms facing a courtyard and everything done on the honor system (you have to remember this was the 70's). There were 23 rooms all facing the beach. It was a small, quaint place, painted pink. At this place there was an old fashioned cooler filled with beer & soda and above it was a shelf with pottery cups/bowls with our room numbers on it. If you drank a soda or a beer you put the bottle cap in the cup that had your room number on it, and if you left your room for the day, you put your key in the same cup. There was a large open-air family/dining room where you could commune with your fellow travelers, get out of the sun, read, eat, drink and watch the sunset over the ocean. Here we met many interesting "characters," one a fellow American who lived there and ran the local garden nursery. Of course we had to go to see all the plants, and when Cathy was asked if she wanted to pet his resident tarantula, she eagerly complied. I went the other direction; it still gives me goose bumps to think about it. Along the way we met three cute young men who had sailed into port; we just knew they were drug runners because they could afford to stay at the expensive hotel down the road. Another was a wife of one of the men running for political office. Her husband's VW mini bus, with speakers on top, went down the street yelling the reasons why you should vote for him. There was a couple from Spain staying with us, and visitors just walking down the beach would stop in for a drink and talk. It was a very interesting and curious place that she picked out of the book.

During that week we took a bus to the town of Colima, which was inland, and Cathy knew that from there she could visit a volcanic mountain. That is when I first learned about her fascination with volcanoes. Much to her dismay, we could only see it far off in the distance. Colima was not a tourist town and when we walked the streets young men would whistle and yell something at us. Eventually we learn it was a loose translation of "blondie". At the end of our stay the owner tallied up our bottle caps and bar bill and informed us it was the cheapest bill to date. It was one trip that neither one of us wanted to end.

This is where the story gets fuzzy; I don't remember how we got back to the States. I assume we flew home because I don't remember any train or bus ride going back. We always joked that I would remember my side of the trip and she would remember hers and together we had the whole story. It is true.

A few years back Cathy gave me a small lace-trimmed card. On the back it has magnets and on the front it reads:

My Friend
I always like to think of you
And all the joy we've shared,
And how nice it's been to have
A friend who really cared.

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