Remembering Jan Fine

My neighbor's moved on.

For all my formative years, I lived next to the Fine family. Beth and Mike Fine were my best friends growing up. Jan and Morris, their parents, were among my parents’ closest friends too.

I don’t know if Mom and Dad would care to give a ranking, but they were physically closest for sure. There were a lot of reasons I had a happy childhood, but one of the biggest was that friendship was always just fifty paces away. Mom got to know Jan around the time I was born, and I can’t remember a time when talks with Jan weren’t a part of her life.

Jan was already mother to one child when I came along—Robbie, whom I remember less but in whose happiness she was always invested. Beth and Mike came along a few years after, and they were my near-constant companions for many years. Parenting work shared is often parenting work halved, and I’m sure the job of raising me and my brother was that much easier for Jan’s supportive example. (Or just for the times when she played host while Beth, Mike, and I—and later, Graham—hung out.)

Together, Mom and Jan showed me a lot about how adults should be friends and how families should work.

Good humor covers a lot of it. Jan and Morris’ lives weren’t without challenges, but she met each one with a sunny attitude and ability to find joy, and a quirky, dry sense of humor well matched to Morris’s. Jan loved life and gave others, especially her family, permission to love it too.

What about life did she love? Shall I start with the a’s? Animals were one of her best-known loves. I remember visiting the house many times to be greeted by a pair of barking dogs, sniffing to investigate what level of threat I posed to their master before settling back into their lives of luxury. Jan’s work with the Virginia Beach SPCA helped it thrive to the point where I could mistake it for a national organization.

Then there was the arts—I could see that in the taste with which she decorated her home, and Dad could see it in the two art galleries on whose boards she served along with him.

Oh, and adventure! I’ve long since lost count of the exotic trips she and Morris took, many of them right alongside Mom and Dad. When Beth, Mike, and I were younger, we were often part of these journeys, which expanded our understanding of the world. After we grew up and put down roots of our own, I’d still get used to hearing about some new exotic excursion—especially in France.

Beyond the a’s, Jan maintained an alphabet of interests. Her handsome yard space still stands much how she cultivated it, an isle of green I would see every day on my way to the beach. She was one of the owners of a retail store downtown, the Freckled Fox, which sold curios with character to decorate the home. And while I’m told her book club could be more of a late-night social, she was an avid reader—she and Mom seemed to be trading books all the time.

Memorials are always incomplete; some parts of our lives are hidden even from those closest to us—and while I remember Jan as a good family friend, she had many people closer to her than I was. Which is part of her legacy. But from my vantage point, I see that legacy in the resilient spirits of my childhood friends, the happy lives they’re leading, and the families they’re raising with her example to guide them. We should all aspire to inspire so well.