Joan Sincic

Alice Joan Sincic, 96 years old, died Thursday in Orlando. For fifty-five years a loving wife to her late husband Edward, charter member of Pine Hills United Methodist Church, kindergarten teacher at Open Air School, and a community leader for decades, she is survived by her four children (Carrie, Alan, Glen, Paula), her step-son Chris, twelve grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.

Born in 1928, she grew up in a two-story wooden frame house perched on a hill overlooking the Cleveland Zoo. On summer nights she could hear, from her bedroom window, the seals bray and the lions roar in the valley below. She played pick-up ball in the neighborhood and was a passionate fan of the Cleveland Indians in the Bob Feller era – always a part of the hometown crowd at the stadium.

As a young woman, on break from her teaching job in Ohio, she ventured south to Miami, Florida to see some old college friends. On the long bus ride back she happened to meet, by chance, her future husband. They were riding on separate busses that traveled in tandem. At the door of a roadside diner, she shuffled through her purse, dropped a five-dollar bill by accident, and there he was, behind her, quick to retrieve it, to start a conversation, and to launch them both on a journey to last a lifetime.

From the very beginning, Ed and Joan were keen to pursue a life of adventure. In 1960 they bought an old beer delivery van (a Volkswagen bus), converted it into a camper, drove from Orlando to California with their three small children, then onward another 3,000 miles through the Canadian wilderness north to Skagway, Alaska. Inside of a dozen years they’d camped with family in every state but Hawaii.

Ed was always the worrier; Joan was always the playful one, quick to see the fun in any situation. That extra touch at holidays, when the Easter bunny would get into the shaving cream and leave a trail of footprints throughout the house. The silly toys she bought at Christmas to remind her adult children how to play again — Nerf guns and ping-pong ball bazookas and mini frisbees and unstoppable zippy little battery-operated cars. The fanciful T-shirts she hand-painted for the grandchildren to commemorate Christmas or Valentine’s Day, birthdays or Halloween or just because.

As a couple over the years they managed to marry both work and play. Hand-built half the house they lived in, so they could add their own special touches. Do-it-yourselfers – you want a pool? Grab a shovel and start digging. Avid Square Dancers. One year at Orlo Vista Firehouse Squares they built -- simply for the fun of it -- a “Computer Caller” from a refrigerator box with a reel-to-reel recorder hidden in its belly. It had a bucket for a head, blinking lights for eyes, a breastplate oscilloscope and, up top, a spinning radar dish fashioned from a tin spatula. They created a cheat sheet, where every call (allemande left, etc.) was assigned a number the dancers would memorize in order to follow the commands of a “computer” that spoke only in numbers. Then at the state convention they staged a demonstration, complete with a team of dancers sporting e=mc² badges and metallic headbands with antennae sprouting out the top. An elaborate joke that bore fruit at just the right moment: the dance disintegrating as the computer spouts out numbers faster and faster in a frenzy that ends in a complete break-down: the laughter, the siren, the smoke pouring out the back.

A memorable moment, and in keeping with a favorite saying of hers: let’s make some memories. At every turn she took seriously the Biblical reminder This is the day that the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

Joan could steer a canoe or swing an ax or throw a baseball, charm a child or tend a wound or soothe a broken heart with the best of them, but it was in the gentlest of arts that she most excelled: her ability to listen, that act of love we often overlook in our hurry to be heard. She knew how to listen to the birds sing, to listen to the whispered voice of God in the person of Christ, and (most especially) to listen to those of us who would invariably seek her out – the child with the rambling tale, the neighbor with the secret grief, the friend with the puzzle or the joke or the family tangle.

To strangers she was gracious and warm; to those who knew her, a joy to behold; to her children and her children’s children, she was like the center of the solar system, the warmth at the heart of it all, the sun around which all the other planets orbit. Her gift to us (and her reward in heaven) is that capacity for love so aptly expressed in the Prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.