~ Fifth Reactualized Life ~
Norma Davries, Attorney
1881 - 1957
Alameda, CA
My boots were stylish ... but hellisly uncomfortable.
Norma is on the left; to her right is her lifelong best friend and writing partner, Philippa Clyden.
This picture was taken shortly before Norma's wedding.
It took me a while, but I finally found her: the mysterious woman in the Applebee's photo.
Ironically, I found her when I wasn't even looking for her. The night she reactualized, I was focused on Mims, the sad mysterious young woman whose husband had her beheaded. But once I was hypnotized, the information that floated to the surface of my consciousness didn't take me back to sixth century Tudor England, as expected.
It took me instead to 19th century Alameda, California.
Her name was Norma Davries. She was born in December 1881 in Westfield, Illinois, and moved to Alameda, California with her father and her younger brother Robert when she was fourteen years old. (Her mother had died of typhoid when Norma was a baby.) A prodigiously gifted child, Norma read the entire Bible, front to back, when she was just four years old; by the time she started public school she was able to converse fluently in four languages. Her best friend was Philippa Clyden, daughter of C. Philip Clyden, inventor of the flavored toothpick. Norma and Philippa both loved to write and sing, and spent much of their free time co-authoring plays and musicals, which they would perform for their neighbors on a makeshift stage in Philippa's backyard. As teenagers, Norma and Philippa enjoyed spending Saturday afternoons at Neptune Beach. (Although Philippa almost always showed up late for their swim dates ... a fact that drove the obsessively punctual Norma crazy.)
After graduation from high school, Philippa moved to Seattle to attend art school, while Norma stayed in Alameda and enrolled at a local business college. They continued to exchange cards and letters, but eventually their friendship waned. Philippa married a man she met in art school. Norma was briefly engaged to the son of her family's dentist, but broke it off when it was discovered that he had been married previously and had never bothered to obtain a divorce. She dated quite a great deal ... some may say indiscriminately ... but never seemed to find the one true love of her heart. Instead, she focused on her college studies, and then, following graduation, on her career as a legal secretary for an Oakland law firm. She worked for the firm for seven years, until a forward-thinking partner in the firm convinced her that she should go to law school and become an attorney herself. She graduated with honors and became the first woman in Alameda to open her own law practice.
The year she turned forty, Norma began corresponding with a widowed bookseller in San Francisco. She wrote to him originally seeking a signed copy of Prascall's "Enmity and Charity" for her father's birthday, but they found that they had a great deal in common, and their correspondence swiftly became personal. Although they lived within ten miles of each other, they confined their friendship to written correspondence for the first two years of their relationship. When they finally met face-to-face for the first time, over dinner at an Italian restaurant in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, it was love at first sight. They wed six months later -- Philippa stood at Norma's side as Matron of Honor -- and were blissfully married for nearly thirty-five years, until her death from tuberculosis in 1957.
Both her husband and Philippa were at her side when she died.
Norma's last conscious thought, as she slipped from actualization to eternity, was a prayer of gratitude for the two people she loved most on earth: her best friend and her husband.
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~ in life, hope: in memory, truth ~