With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir by Christine Quinn Read Free Book Online Page B

at our house or at a restaurant after the funeral, which is typically done, because the funeral was held on Christmas Eve; people had other places to go and things to do.
    After the burial, I couldn’t wait to get home, but Ellen had other ideas. She wanted to finish the Christmas shopping and insisted that we go home, change, and drive to the Miracle Mile shopping area in Manhasset, which isn’t far from where we lived. What I didn’t know at the time was that among the notes our mother left for Ellen were instructions regarding Christmas gifts. The note listed the gifts she’d already bought and the ones she wanted Ellen to buy, and she explained where they were supposed to go, including which ones were for me. In the instructions she wrote, “This gift is for Christine,” and each time she wrote my name, she underlined it three times. Ellen thinks she did that because she wanted to be sure that I received the gifts she’d bought for me.
    I can’t remember what I got for Christmas that year, but I know what I got from my mother. She left me with a sense of worth and possibility. She left me with a sense that I have a responsibility to continue her mission, to improve people’s lives, and to make sure that nobody is left behind. The urgency she conveyed—because she knew her time was short—gets me up and out every morning. My mother taught me to use every minute, because we never know when our time is up.

C HAPTER 4
    High School Follies
    O ur house was a much quieter—and sadder—place at the start of 1983. My mother was gone. My grandmother, too. She had moved into a nursing home before my mother died. Her age and related conditions made it too difficult for us to take care of her. So now it was just Julia, my father, and me living at home. Without any discussion, we quickly fell into our own routines and very much went our separate ways. For me that meant focusing on school and school-related activities, spending time at the stable, and going out with my friends on the weekends.
    That sounds sad, and it was, but there were a lot of bright spots for me in those years. I loved high school, Old Westbury School of the Holy Child. It was a place of salvation and great comfort for me in many ways. It hadn’t been my first choice—I’d wanted to go to a coed public high school—but that wasn’t in the cards. My mother and father were both extremely religious, so there was never any question that Ellen and I would go to Catholic school. At my high school, being Catholic was a given, but it was background noise to me. You were taught the way things were, and you weren’t expected to ask questions.
    What made Holy Child so special was the fact that it was a small school: there were only twenty-four students in my entire class, and they were all girls. A small school was a great place for me, especially after my mother died, because everyone was so supportive.
    Because there were so few of us, we got a lot of individual attention, and no one fell through the cracks. Everyone participated in every aspect of school life, including the sports teams, because you needed everybody to play. So there wasn’t the kind of hierarchy you might have found at a larger school. We did have cool kids, smart kids, and athletic kids, but our classes were so small that nobody cared.
    My experience with a single-sex high school was also positive. When you take boys out of the equation, girls wind up focusing on their potential and their skills. I think if every girl went to a girls’ school, regardless of ability to pay, it would be an extremely empowering experience. It certainly was for me.
    Also, the emphasis on reading—from the very beginning of my Catholic education right through the Great Books course I had in high school—gave me a lifelong passion for libraries. (In my role as an elected official, I’ve always been a big advocate for keeping libraries open and protecting them from budget cuts. In my early years as City