Message in bottle comforts mother
Girl tossed note at 10, died at 18
PATCHOGUE, N.Y. — More than a dozen years ago, a 10-year-old girl scrawled a message on a piece of notebook paper, sealed it up in a green plastic bottle and tossed it into the ocean.
The note contai ned a line from the movie “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” that reflected the girl’s personal philosophy: “Be excellent to yourself, dude!”
But that bottle was swept away and forgotten. The girl grew up, went away to school and died in an accident at age 18. Her family mourned and did its best to move on.
It took Superstorm Sandy to churn up the bottle and the memories of a little girl in the exuberance of her childhood.
A sharp- eyed worker cleaning up the beaches in the Long Island village of Patchogue just before Thanksgiving spotted the bottle amid piles of garbage washed ashore by the hurricane’s powerful storm surge. The note inside was signed Sidonie Fery and contained a New York City phone number.
“I was just sobbing when I heard they had found it,” said Mimi Fery, the girl’s mother. “These are very, very kind people.”
This weekend, Fery will return to the seaside village about 60 miles east of Manhattan where she will again thank the workers and attend a ceremony where a small plaque will be dedicated as a remembrance to Sidonie, who died in a 2010 fall from a cliff in Switzerland while attending boarding school.
Fery described her only child as a creative youngster who was always writing poetry. She knew instantly when told what the message contained that it had been written by Sidonie because “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” was her daughter’s favorite movie.
She said her daughter was a “very artistic and vivacious young woman” who was so independent that she traveled by herself to visit relatives in Iran every summer beginning when she was about 7.
Born on Sept. 11, 1991, the little girl was often teased and harassed after the terror attacks on her 10th birthday by people who didn’t understand her Persian heritage, her mother said. “She had to deal with a lot of things,” Fery said. “But she stood her ground.”
The bottle only traveled a mile or two from where it was likely deposited to the location where parks workers found it.