Katharina Lialios

Friend

I remember meeting Ruth for the first time on a visit to L.A. with my parents in 2007. We were staying with friends in Santa Monica and Ruth invited us over for lunch. My sister and I were still teenagers at the time. Our trip had been a disaster thus far, because our luggage got stuck in Heathrow on a tight transfer and we had spent our first two weeks in LA, equipped with only backpacks and a few essentials.

I had never met anyone as dynamic as Ruth. My sister and I were barely in the house, when Ruth handed us garden chairs and told us to set them up outside. We exchanged weary glances, wondering how the afternoon would turn out.

It turned out great! Ruth had the most amazing stories to tell. The one that struck us the most was about her recent scuba diving trip (in Australia). Ruth was in her 60s when she went on the trip. This alone impressed me and my sister. We had just completed our scuba diving certificates and remembered the lessons as incredibly difficult. 

But Ruth dived into the ocean without a second thought. She told the story as casually as if she were telling us about parking her car. And while she was telling us about all the fantastic colorful fish that she saw, she said she suddenly found herself face to face with an extremely ugly grey fish. It had no shiny colors and she thought that it looked a bit dull. When she surfaced she told her instructor about it. He said, “Oh, that was a small shark.”

It took a lot of reassurance from our diving instructor to get us into the water. And there Ruth was, telling us about the ugly gray fish that made her diving trip less spectacular than it could have been. When we left her house that afternoon, my sister and I decided that Ruth was one of the coolest adults we’d met.