I count myself infinitely lucky to have known Mary LeBlanc. I was one of the now countless grad students who read Greek with Mary at UC Berkeley, during the long and stimulating decades of her retirement. I have lived for a long time in Pennsylvania, and I hadn’t seen Mary for years. But that didn’t stop us remaining close up to these last months – though she was always the better correspondent. After she took the Berkeley Greek Workshop in 1993, Mary hired one of the instructors as a “tutor”, and then by word of mouth was always able to get a new tutor, cohort by cohort, right up to 2020. For many years she could be found at a table in Dwinelle Hall or Doe Library translating long passages from Homer … Aristophanes … the Greek Bible as the tutor listened. In my experience, the tutor’s role was only occasionally to correct her. More often it was to learn something new, either about Greek or about the world, as the reading led into a discussion of, well, anything under the sun. (The mind boggles to think that she was, apparently, doing something similar with biblical Hebrew all through the same years!) Once I asked Mary who she had read Greek with, and she replied, “As for whom I read with when, yes, I kept a list of whom, when, and what.” That is classic Mary. Here are the names she gave me in 2012, and I have supplemented as far as I could (leaving some gaps, I think, in the mid-teens): David Chamberlain, Sarah Stroup, Matt Pincus, James Ker, Pat Larash, Sonia Sabnis, Corinne Crawford, Jared Hudson, Daniel Walin, Derin McLeod, Marissa Henry, Hamish White. There is a sad note in here: Corinne Crawford worked with Mary from summer 2005 till summer 2007, when Corinne was tragically killed in a cycling accident. Mary was devastated. As she wrote to me in 2012, “I still want to cry when I think about her”. I only read Greek with Mary for two years, but as I soon discovered (and I know I was not the only one!) reading with her was just the beginning: we could be friends for ever. The first sign was the steady updates over email every couple of months, with news on all manner of things, sometimes worldly and sometimes close-to-home, but always with amazing observation of life. Here’s something she wrote to me in the summer of 2013: “I have been serenaded around the clock of late by a mockingbird whose preferred perch is atop my chimney. I hear him at night – and pretty much all night – through my bedroom window, and during the day the chimney serves as a sound pipe to broadcast his versatile repertoire through the fireplace and throughout the downstairs. I hope his lady love appreciates the concert as much as I do! He is far more welcome than another wretched specimen of local wildlife, the raccoon who was picking my green oxheart tomatoes just for the pleasure of running his delicate fingers over the smooth outside. …” Then there was the pumpkin bread – so good and so reliable, fall after fall, that after she finally wasn’t able to produce it we have continued the tradition by making it here. (Fortunately she had sent us a hand-sewn recipe book called Cookies and Fruit Breads.) In the summer of 2009 it was my honor to visit Mary at home on Colleen Street for a delicious lunch with her, Jim, and Anne. One of the most amazing gifts to me as the parent of young child was that Mary was there every step of the way with age-appropriate advice and gifts, such as an extremely practical bath-cape she had hacked from a standard-issue towel, and also a photocopy of the hilarious 1960s children’s book “Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead”. I recognize that Mary was a truly unique figure in many ways, and quite path-breaking, I suspect, in the world of science. I never found out as much as I would have liked about her extended family, her career as a researcher, and her cello-playing, or about her journey from the midwest to California. It’s probably because we were so often diving down odd rabbit-holes, or relating funny anecdotes! (She told me in detail about how she became self-appointed proofreader of the church newsletter …) In her years of story-telling, I witnessed both her fairness and her scathing wit. I also learned how much she proud she was of her children and grandchildren! I want to thank Mary’s family for sharing her with all of us who were her friends, and especially to Anne for helping to keep us in touch during the last year or so when Mary wasn’t always able to write. Mary was generous, down-to-earth, curious, and inspiring. I will never forget her, and the pumpkin bread tradition will endure with her memory. James Ker Philadelphia