Badass

This is the Carol that I like to remember. She referred to this image as Badass Carol and used it for her Facebook page. The picture was taken on one of her hiking trips out west. Like many of her profile images over the years, Carol asked me to retouch it before posting it. I brightened up her face and fixed that dark tooth that she had damaged years earlier that always bothered her. When she finally got that tooth fixed, we joked that she wouldn’t need me to retouch her profile photos anymore.

When I first met Carol at Commodore in the mid-1980s, she was the super-efficient, super-polished, super-professional assistant editor. She would march across the hallway (for some reason the “art” department was separated from the rest of publications by a hall) to hand me galleys to send back to the type house to be corrected (no Mac typesetting back then), and I was in awe of her perfectly tailored suits with perfectly matched pussy-bow blouses worn with perfectly coordinated shoes (always high heals), topped off, of course, by her perfectly curled and blown-dry hair. As a recent college graduate just starting out in the corporate world, Carol seemed to be the epitome of the mid-1980s working woman.

I quickly learned that beneath the professional veneer was a funny, goofy, generous, adventurous person. She took great joy in decorating our department Christmas tree with bows made from the perforated computer tape and hanging Commodore pocket protectors along the cubby walls as stockings. We amused ourselves popping bubble wrap; one time running (literally, running) through a whole huge roll that (as I recall) Carol pulled out of dumpster somewhere. We laughed so hard that I remember at least once falling down laughing. She loved hiking and mountain biking. She canoed on the Schuylkill (even helped run a canoeing business on the river for a few years). Carol loved to gossip, and we could talk for hours. She was my confident and counselor. We traded stories about dating (back when we were both dating), and sympathized with each other over how the job market treated us as we got older. When I got married, Carol was my maid of honor.

Carol would have turned 61 this June; a birthday that she sadly did not live to see. I miss her and I think of her often. And in honor of her birthday this month, let’s all try to be a little badass. The world needs more badass women.