I had a joyous encounter with Frederica Warner by chance three weeks ago at the Wingate at Beacon nursing home. I had to pick up some medical papers from when I was a patient there last year.

As I was passing the nurses’ station, I heard my name being called, “Peter, Peter.” I turned and there was Frederica, sitting in her wheelchair in the corridor greeting passersby. It was a Public Lovefest. Tons of love and kisses were shared. She had arrived there only a few weeks earlier. She told me to bring her Love to as many friends in Newburgh as possible which I tried to do.

We reminisced on our personal encounters shared over the past six decades starting when I was her paperboy delivering the “Newburgh News” to her house on Chamber Street in the early fifties. Frederica and her husband, Loren, began our friendship on those Saturday mornings when I collected the $30 cents for the newspaper. Frederica was as cheerful as ever.

Frederica and Loren moved to Roe Street, which has been renamed in her honor, “Frederica Warner Way,” next to NFA High School. Since I was a teacher at NFA, many times, when the weather cooperated in the Spring, I would take my peanut butter & jelly sandwich lunch to sit with them on their front porch and have our lunch together, continuing our friendship that had started in 1952. She would remember just about everything we shared over all the years.

As I was driving home that day, over the Newburgh Beacon Bridge, I suddenly realized that it may have been my last goodbye with her last “Toodeloo.” It was.