JULY 9, 2022 – Blogger’s note: The duty of friendship mandates that yesterday’s tribute be supplemented by another, this time in honor of two more people who’ve celebrated “big, if numerically unspecified, birthdays.” My self-imposed, single-post word limit has been doubled to match. Tomorrow will bring back the series, “True Story: An Explanation of Life on Earth, as Told to an Alien.”
Among the many wonderful friends who enrich my life are Sally Scoggin and Liz (alternatively known as Liza) Cutter. Like my spouse, Beth d’Arc, these two friends celebrated “a very big birthday” at the front end of this July. Given the significant roles that these two law school classmates of mine—forever fourth graders while I’ll always be a second grader—play in my life, I’m duty-bound to honor them with a blog post.
The Honorable Elizabeth Cutter and I are from the same home town—Anoka, Minnesota, self-proclaimed Halloween Capital of the World. Her family was one of the most distinguished and distinguishable families in town—a clan shaped by tragedy and defined by awe-inspiring resilience. My earliest memory of Liza formed around noon on a July day in 1960. I was a month out of kindergarten; she, a month beyond second grade. Liza, her younger sister, Sarah, and my younger sister, Jenny, and I played in the bucolic setting outside the spacious Cutter home on the edge of town while our moms were visiting inside.
What stands out most about that day was Mr. Cutter pulling up to the house in a late model, turquoise car. He stepped out and gave us children a friendly wave and a “Hi, kids!” before letting himself into the family castle. He was wearing a suit.
Just a month later, Liza and Sarah’s dad, a lawyer in town, a fighter pilot who’d been shot down in the Pacific and survived serious burns, perished on a fishing expedition in the high Arctic. Sadly, that was only the first of a string of tragedies that would visit the Cutters.
Yet, by the time Liza and I shared a law school class in “Business Organizations,” she’d become among the most cheerful, positive, encouraging people I knew. She was also a thinker, a philosopher, interested in all things, a genuine and reliable friend to all people who entered her life; someone determined to make the world a better place. She and her husband, the extraordinary Perry—also a law school classmate—would have three amazing children and wonderfully precocious grandchildren. After a distinguished career practicing law, Liza emulated her Grandfather Cutter and become a respected jurist.
If Liza’s exemplary life has influenced my own, perhaps the most tangible effect is a musical one. During law school, she regularly landed wedding gigs for us—she playing the flute; I, the violin. Decades and many diversions later, she called to draft me for another wedding gig. With her classic enthusiasm, Liza mentioned that Sally, another law school classmate and accomplished pianist, had already agreed to join . . . us. By then, however, I’d decided that the world was a better place without my violin playing. In response, Liza did everything but cheat and steal to convince me I should “join the fun.”
Though two years out of school Sally and I had crossed paths at the same old, St. Paul law firm. We’d gotten acquainted there, and Beth and I had socialized with Sally, her inimitable husband, Don. In time, however, our social and career courses diverged and stayed apart until the wedding gig at which the three of us played in 2009.
It was a delight to catch up with Sally—and her husband, Don, and their two highly accomplished sons. After exchanging updates, we talked music, and Sally asked me if I’d ever played Beethoven’s Romance in G—one of her favorite pieces. I had, and she suggested we get together sometime to play it.
One thing led to another, and by January 2010, I’d talked Sally into joining me in a recital I dubbed, “Fiddler Under the Roof.” Except for the music, which we took as seriously as Sally, Liza, and Perry—not I—had taken law school, my version of the “violin recital” was whimsical, experimental, and otherwise “off the wall.” In a role reversal, we conscripted Liza.
The quirky “show” was a success, and we continued if for a decade, drawing a loyal crowd to our annual set of three house “concerts”—until Covid struck
In advance of each of these performances, Sally and I rehearsed innumerable hours at her and Don’s house, where Sally shined at her finely restored, vintage Steinway. Ever the student and scholar of so many things, Sally devoted heart, mind, and soul to the effort. Often Don, himself a highly accomplished musician, and by training and vocation, a PhD psychologist, served as a cheerful, supportive, and critical coach.
Throughout these years, Sally, Liza, and I—and spouses—would become steadfast friends, finding refuge and reassurance in a common world view.
As I reflect on the same “big July birthday” of the Joans d’Arc of my life, I find hope and meaning; courage and inspiration. I find in the friendship of these extraordinary women, meaning in life’s challenges and a calling to higher aspirations.
There can be no richer or more motivated man than I. May these Joans d’Arc continue to enrich and motivate for years to come.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
