Google Headlines brought the news this morning that the actor Patrick McGoohan died yesterday at the age of 80. My high school friend Lorna and I were big fans of his series "The Prisoner" in which he was some sort of spy being held in a "Brave New World" setting of "The Village" for unknown reasons. He was Number 6, always unsuccessfuly trying to find out from a different Number 2 each episode who was Number 1. Nothing was ever fully explained which was very different for the time and in this way it was a ground breaking show. McGoohan was not only a fine actor, but wrote some of the episodes as well and the series spoke directly to the sense of alienation that she and I felt growing up in the 50's atmosphere of a conservative, working class town.
All these memories brought me to try to find Lorna again. She and I had kept up through the beginning of my turbulent college years but, eventually, she and I lost touch. I had heard from someone that she had moved to California after college, but they didn't know where and no one else that I had contact with knew where she had gone. Lorna was another of a bunch of us who had left the stultifying atmosphere of our hometown after high school never to return. As with many people, her solution to the problem of where to go after college was to head west. But no one I knew seemed to know where.
Of course, the Internet now allows us to pick up threads that we've dropped many years ago. I had tried to find her a few years ago via the Net, but I was unsuccessful -- she just wasn't to be found via the net. Today was something different.
Unfortunately, the first hit that I found was from the San Francisco Chronicle and it was her obituary. Lorna died peaceably last month at the age of 57. According to the an anonymous but lovingly written account, she had spent 27 years as a senior administrator in the office of the California State Bar and raised prize-winning Corgi's in her spare time. Knowing Lorna, I'm sure that she had a good full life, though there is no indication that she ever married or had children. For some of us, our lives are measured in the influence that we have on the people around us and she was such a person. I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance to re-connect with her. I'm sorry that I was too late. I'm sorry that we didn't get a chance to talk about "The Prisoner" one more time.
So, not a good day today. Losing McGoohan would have been bad enough, but to think that I'll never see Lorna again is very, very sad.
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