Tolstoy wrote,  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

He got the first part wrong, or at least he never met the Fox family of Paxton, Illinois. 

There were five kids -- two boys and three girls -- all with Beach Boy blond-like hair and then there was Mom Fox. They lived in a big-porched house on Orleans Street and their big living room with big old comfortable chairs and couches was the place where we hung out a lot in the first half of the Sixties, when my generation was coming of age. 


You could call the family cool and come close to it in some ways.  Three of the Fox kids were older than us and the collective, pooled purchasing power meant they had every Kingston Trio album ever made.  The girls were drop-dead gorgeous.  The guys were rugged but laid back.  The college-age siblings sense of fashion and style filtered down fluidly to the younger brothers and sisters, and so if you saw a shirt that was a "bleeding madras" in the early 1960's, you saw it on the Fox kids first.  


But it was effortless. Floating.  There was no strain in it.  What the family emoted was an ease and kindness and comfort that enveloped visitors.  


At the core of that was Mom Fox, who most nights sat with the television off, reading, or so it seemed, looking up and from under a book and her glasses with a smile that was all-knowing and a bit mischievous.  If that was not a welcoming enough sign, cats would dismount from various nooks and eases in the big house to come rub against your shin.  


We'd sit and talk and listen to music for hours in that living room, with the various generations of the Foxes and their friends passing through of an evening.  It was a sort of salon with a touch of the south. But it was also a place where you could speak in front of an adult about the political issues of the day and find an ear rather than a glare. 


Delon and Charlene were the Foxies of my generation.  Delon was a member of the band of buddies we formed at age 16 and a kindred spirit forever.  He was the gentlest soul I knew, off the football field.  On it, he was all raw bone raptor, pure power and muscle, setting conference records as a defensive end. 


Charlene moved down the halls of our high school in a sweet and slow samba as if she were in her own vignetted film spot -- close focus on that Fox smile of content, confidence and spritely mischief.  She seemed to know a secret of sorts, a comforting punchline to the cynical straight lines life often serves up.  


They lost her in August,  by all accounts the same person I knew and loved 50 years or so ago, with that same smile.  She was a remarkable ambassador of good will from a remarkable family whose existence in and of itself made my life in a small town so much larger.