The Flanagan-Moores

I met Tom Moore, Lynn Flanagan and their two-year-old daughter Lexey in Rota, Spain, when the University of Maryland's European Division sent me there in the spring of 1982. We spent quite a bit of time together, eating mariscos in Puerto de la Santa Maria and tapa-hopping around Rota. A couple of years later, we all wound up in West Germany, me in Erlangen and the Flanagan-Moores first in Augsburg and later in Schopp (near Kaiserslautern). Somewhere along the line, they had a second child, Andrew — and I had my one and only, Becca. By 1991, we were all back in the US of A, me in Cleveland and the Flanagan-Moores in Norwich, Connecticut. We saw each other occasionally, more often once Becca started going to school at Choate. Lynn has become a well respected social worker in Norwich, and Lexey and Andrew have sprouted from cute li'l tykes into actual people.

Tom is a fanatic Thomas Pynchon scholar, and wrote a lengthy study of Pynchon's work for the University of Missouri Press. He's also a fanatic collector of tiny mineral specimens from around the world, of a size called "thumbnails," and I've spent many hours — over many beers — admiring the pretty ones and pretending to admire the gray ones. He makes a mean omelet and fancies himself a cribbage player, though I can kick his ass, oh, a good two games out of five....

After years as a regular contributor to the Mineralogical Record, Tom moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 2000 to become the magazine's associate editor. In March of 2006, Lexey joined them, but Andrew is staying in Norwich for school and work, at least for the time being....

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