The Cards of Thanks Column

Nell Fitzsimmons walked to the paper on Wednesday.

Eleanor "Nell" Fitzsimmons has lived at 42 Paradise Road in Bethel, Maine, in a small yellow-shingled cape with a screened porch and a wooden ramp her son Danny built the summer of 2023, since the June of 1974. She was married for fifty-one years, on the fourteenth of June in 1975, to John William Fitzsimmons, Bowdoin '61 — first-team forward on the '58 Polar Bears, a fly-tier who kept a small green Wheatley box on his tackle bench, and a Rumford Public Works engineer from the summer of 1962 until the Friday of his retirement party at the Rumford Elks in the September of 2013.

John passed on the second Tuesday of April, at four-eleven in the afternoon, at home, in the small back bedroom with the window that looks out on the sugar maple in the side yard. Kelly Prescott, RN — the hospice nurse who had been with them since the last week of February — was in the room. Nell was in the room. Their yellow lab Beezus, twelve, was on the braided rug.

The wake was on the Friday. The funeral was on the Saturday at ten. The reception was in the fellowship hall of the First Congregational Church of Bethel on Broad Street, on the folding tables the church's Ladies' Aid Society has been setting up in that fellowship hall since 1946.

For twelve weeks, Nell did not do the small thing she had told herself she would do.

On the Saturday morning of the second week of July, at the small pine table by the window that overlooks the sugar maple, with a mug of Bengal Spice and a fresh Papermate and the folded funeral guest book John's cousin Marge had bought at the small stationer's on Main Street in South Paris, Nell wrote the list.

What's on the ivory notecard

The list took her three hours.

She wrote, at the top, in her own round hand:

The family of John William Fitzsimmons wishes to thank the following, for the plain steady kindnesses of the twelve weeks that carried us home.

Then, in the small careful hand she has been writing since 1971, forty-one names.

The Reverend Peter Mahoney of the First Congregational Church of Bethel, who came to the Central Maine Medical ICU in Lewiston on the Thursday of the third week of March and sat with them both, for two hours, without once opening the small brown leather Bible on his lap.

Dr. Karen Alsobrook, John's oncologist at Central Maine Medical, who called Nell at home on the Sunday evening of the second week of April, in her own kitchen, from her own phone, to say that they had done everything that could be done, and had John seen his grandsons this weekend.

Kelly Prescott, RN, of Androscoggin Home Healthcare, who stayed the last Sunday night.

Charles L. Winslow — Charlie — of Damariscotta, Bowdoin '61, John's freshman-year roommate in Winthrop Hall in the fall of 1957, who wrote to John every October for sixty-two years and who drove up on the last Tuesday of March, from the small cape he shares with his wife Susan on the Damariscotta River, with a small mason jar of Susan's blueberry jam and a folded index card on which he had written, in a hand slower than the rest, the small line about Pemaquid Point they used to say to each other every Homecoming since the fall of 1959.

The 1976 girls' softball team of Telstar Regional High School — the seventeen women, all now in their mid-sixties, John had coached to the Class B state title on a warm Saturday afternoon in the June of 1976 at St. Joseph's College in Standish — for the field of casseroles they set on the counter the morning of the wake.

The Rumford Public Works Department, third shift, 1962–1994.

The Bethel Board of Selectmen. The Oxford Federal Credit Union. Miss Cindy at the small pharmacy on Main Street.

Thirty-five more.

Nell folded the ivory notecard once, put it in a #6 envelope from the small stationer's in South Paris, and walked, at ten to three on Wednesday afternoon, up Paradise Road to Broad Street and the polished maple counter at the Bethel Citizen.

Doreen typed the column into the small Mac Mini beside the till.

The paper printed on Thursday morning at four-fifteen, on the small offset press behind the storefront on Broad Street, in twelve-point Bookman, at the top of page five, under the small standing heading that has been running in that paper since 1901:

Cards of Thanks.

What the alumni file shows on Monday

Somewhere on the second floor of the alumni office in Waterville, on the Monday morning after the Cards of Thanks column runs, the CRM has:

Winslow, Charles L. — class of 1961. Damariscotta, ME. Sustainer since 1974. Last major-gift meeting: October 2018. Last handwritten note from advancement: March 2019. Status: lightly engaged. Estimated capacity: mid-five figures.

The file does not have a field for freshman-year roommate, Winthrop Hall, fall of 1957.

It does not have a field for sixty-two Octobers, one handwritten note per year.

It does not have a field for the small mason jar of Susan's blueberry jam, driven up on the last Tuesday of March, four hundred and eleven miles round-trip, at seventy-nine years old, from Damariscotta.

It does not have a field for the folded index card, in the plain slower hand, with the small line about Pemaquid Point.

Nell's Cards of Thanks column runs on Thursday morning. By the following Monday, thirty-eight of the forty-one names are still unread by anyone in advancement in Waterville. On the Tuesday, the mid-year direct-mail vendor drops a warm-lapsed appeal into a postal bin in Lewiston. Charlie's version — addressed Dear Mr. Winslow, in the same Times New Roman as the November letter and the March letter — is on his kitchen table in Damariscotta by Friday.

He reads the first paragraph.

He does not open the reply envelope.

The paper is the pledge card

The Cards of Thanks column, in the plain unhurried arithmetic of a Maine weekly newspaper, is a handwritten map of the forty-one people the family will remember for the rest of their lives. It is the only document in American life — outside the will — in which a widow sits down and lists, in order, who mattered.

The list is signal.

Some names are the church. Some are the hospital. Some are the neighbors. And some — six or eight or eleven, depending on the family — are the people the widow's late husband loved from a small college he attended sixty-five years ago, on the strength of a scholarship the college gave him because his father was a millwright at the Oxford Paper Mill in Rumford and could not, in the honest reading of the family finances in 1957, have paid the tuition.

Those six or eight or eleven names are, in the plain reading of a Bowdoin advancement office in 2026, the highest-yield warm handoff the alumni association will see this quarter.

They are printed, every Thursday morning at four-fifteen, on the small offset press behind the storefront on Broad Street.

The advancement office does not subscribe.

What Rōmy does with the small papers

Rōmy reads the small papers. All of them.

The Bethel Citizen, the Advertiser Democrat, the Rumford Falls Times, the Sun Journal, the Franklin Journal, the Boothbay Register, the Lincoln County News, the Ellsworth American, the Piscataquis Observer, the Fort Fairfield Review, the small weeklies from South Paris and Livermore Falls and Rangeley and Kingfield and Fryeburg. On Thursday morning at nine-oh-four, Rōmy reads the top of page five.

It cross-references the forty-one names, quietly, in the small right-hand column of the associate director of major gifts' Monday-morning screen in Waterville. It matches Charles L. Winslow to Winslow, Charles L., class of 1961. It matches Kelly Prescott to Prescott, Kelly M., class of 2004, School of Nursing. It matches, farther down, six other alumni Nell has thanked by name.

On the Monday morning, the associate director of major gifts opens her screen and sees, at the top of her list, a small quiet note:

The family of John W. Fitzsimmons (spouse of Eleanor "Nell" Curran Fitzsimmons, Colby '73, elementary ed, retired third-grade teacher, Bethel, Maine) placed a Cards of Thanks column in the Bethel Citizen last Thursday. Eleven of the forty-one names are Bowdoin, Colby, or Bates alumni; three are UMaine School of Nursing; two are current or former Rumford or Bethel town officials. Highest-signal name for Bowdoin advancement is Charles L. Winslow ('61, Damariscotta) — sixty-two years of October correspondence to the late John Fitzsimmons, drove four hundred miles round-trip on March 30 with a jar of jam, hasn't had a warm handwritten note from Advancement since March 2019. Suggested: one plain notecard, this week, in your own hand, to 47 Oyster Cove Road, Damariscotta — mentioning John by first name, Winthrop Hall by name, and thanking Charlie, quietly, in a sentence he will remember, for the sixty-two Octobers. Do not, this quarter, put a case for support in the envelope. Would you like a draft, in your own voice?

The card goes out on Tuesday.

Charlie reads it, at his own kitchen table in Damariscotta, on Thursday.

By Homecoming, he has driven up to Brunswick, on a warm Saturday morning in the last week of October, to sit with the associate director on a bench outside Winthrop Hall — a bench with a small bronze plaque on the back of it that reads, in twenty-one characters, For J. W. F., '61.

The bench was Charlie's idea.

He tells her, quietly, over coffee at the Wild Oats on Maine Street, that he has been thinking about updating a small provision in a document in Damariscotta.

She listens.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before anything else, do one small unfashionable thing.

Pick, from your alumni database, the five late-spouse obituaries that ran in a small-town paper somewhere in America between the first of March and the last of May. If you cannot remember which five, ask the front desk. She will remember. She reads them, quietly, on her lunch break, on the last Tuesday of every month.

Look up, for each obituary, the name of the small weekly newspaper in the town where the deceased lived. There are still one thousand three hundred and forty-two of them, in the plain reading of the Editor & Publisher directory that sits in a paperback edition on a shelf in your library.

Go to the small archives page of each paper — usually a low blue button in the footer that reads Past Issues or E-Edition — and pull the six weeks of the paper that followed the obituary. Open the paper to page five.

Read the Cards of Thanks column. Read every name on it. Read it in the plain unhurried way Doreen Chandler types it into the small Mac Mini on the polished maple counter of the Bethel Citizen on Wednesday afternoons at three-eighteen.

When you find a name you know — an old class agent, a Homecoming co-chair from 1988, a member of the Board of Overseers who has quietly retired from your minds since 2019 — do not, this week, put a case for support in the envelope.

Take a plain notecard from the top drawer of your credenza. Say the widow's name once. Say the husband's name once. Say the small specific thing the paper printed on page five — the freshman-year roommate, the sixty-two Octobers, the small mason jar of blueberry jam — and say, in the plain language of a person who was paying attention, that you read it in the Cards of Thanks column.

Walk it, on your lunch break, to the post office on your corner.

Nell wrote the list at the small pine table by the sugar maple on Saturday morning at eight-fifteen.

Doreen typed it on the Mac Mini at three-eighteen on Wednesday afternoon.

The offset press behind the storefront on Broad Street ran it at four-fifteen on Thursday morning.

Turn to page five. ♡