Pippin Seales

Quotes from those who knew

Pippin in his many walks of life:

"so sweet"

"so beautiful"

"guileless"

"the stalwart kid"

"his contribution to our lives

is everlasting"

"so full of wonder and love"

"so kind"

"such a good friend to everyone"

"a bright shining star"

"Every time I saw him,

he opened my heart."

Pippin Seales died at Natural Bridges, a place he loved, shortly after celebrating his eleventh birthday. He and two friends were playing in a cave below the entrance kiosk, when it collapsed. The injured friend is beginning to recover and needs your prayers. It took long, long minutes of frantic excavation to get Pippin out - first with the help of so many people who were nearby, and then by the rescue crew. He could not be resuscitated.

Pippin's passing leaves a terrible hole in the lives of everyone who knew him. He was a truly wonderful human being: bright, curious, generous, thoughtful, considerate, friendly, interested, caring, eager for new challenges and new things to learn, with a fierce power of concentration and a delightfully wicked sense of humor. He was equally at ease in the company of adults and his peers. None who knew him can remember him saying an unkind word, or recall him in a knowingly thoughtless, selfish or unkind act. He was an old soul, with a sense of self, forbearance and patience beyond his years, and beyond many adults. The world needed Pippin.

Pippin was homeschooled through the Mountain Elementary School Independent Study Program. This gave him a classroom full of children and teachers who knew him well and loved him over the course of years, while also giving him time to become deeply involved with pursuits at home and in the community.

He loved animals, and for six years, rain or shine, he volunteered weekly with his mother caring for the farm animals at Wilder Ranch State Park. He had birds, fish, a dog, cats & chickens at home in the Seabright neighborhood where he lived from the time he was born. He was especially interested in birds, and felt a deep connection to the Peregrine Falcon which gave him part of his name.

Pippin loved sailing, and with his father's involvement, Pippin enjoyed several years of captaining his 8-foot El Toro through the SCYC Pinto Lake program. This summer in the Junior El Toro North Americans he came in 2nd in the Silver Fleet. He was growing beautifully into his role of mentor of the younger sailors, and was always ready to help with a tricky knot or confusing rigging. He had thoughts of becoming a naval architect a designer of boats.

He loved plants and gardening, and with one grandmother he was a frequent visitor to the Capitola Senior Garden, where he made many friends. He could seldom pass a beautiful flower without checking to see how it smelled, and he particularly loved succulents and cacti.

Pippin loved science, and with one grandmother he was a frequent guest or helper in her high school science classes, as well as always being at work on some project or other with her - often along with cousins - exploring properties of the world around us.

He loved learning new things about nature, and with one grandfather he was a member of the Santa Cruz Fly Fishermen & a frequent student in fly-tying classes, as well as joining fishing trips and fishery management workdays, where he would work right along with the adults. He loved camping, especially with friends, and was looking forward to learning backpacking skills. He spent six hours every week with a pre-teen nature exploration group in the back-country of Wilder Ranch State Park.

Pippin loved working with his hands, and had been blessed to be mentored by a gifted shop class teacher, with whom he discussed everything from how a screw works, to why we should fix and reuse things rather than throw them away, to the nature of the universe. He had been with the same well-loved painting teacher from early childhood, and was a careful, methodical painter with a fascinating personal imagery. His last work of art was to decorate his own birthday cake, with the facilitation of a lifelong friend who works in a bakery.

Pippin loved to play games, and he and his father spent hours not only playing complex board games, often with historical themes, but also inventing modifications to improve the play. He had thoughts of becoming a game designer.

He loved books, and after many years of being read aloud to, learned to read on his own around his 8th birthday. The summer he was 9, he read over 20,000 pages. He completed The Lord of the Rings at 10. He was a testament to patience and faith in the natural timing of the development of a child's brain and personal learning style.

Pippin loved music. He played ukelele and recorder at school, but his true interest was in appreciation - from Cabrillo Music Festival to San Jose & San Francisco Opera, from old rock albums to world music to seeing Phil Lesh & Jackie Greene in concert. As a wakeful infant his daddy danced him to sleep with P-funk and James Brown. In school and at gatherings he was an avid and unself-conscious participant in folk dancing. He was open to anything.

He loved food, and not only did he love to eat - with a powerful interest in new things - but he also loved to cook. He made the best scrambled eggs, created spice mixes, and had recently mastered risotto. Sushi was a passion, a trip to Engfer Pizza a frequent pleasure, chocolate a treasured ritual of sharing, and eating out in San Francisco something to be treated with great seriousness and delight.

Pippin was proud of his British heritage, and loved to talk about the trips he had taken to England and Wales, some of the time travelling with one grandfather & his wife, as well as visiting his namesake great-grandfather in a seaside shipbuilding town in northeast England. He loved to talk to people in general. His speech was not always clear, though his thoughts and ideas were, and more than once he was jokingly accused of having either an English accent or a Brooklyn one. He took this in stride, assuming others would be as patient with his own challenges as he tended to be with theirs.

Pippin loved trains. He loved trains. More than one family vacation was centered around trains: steam railways in Britain, rail travel in California, streetcars in San Francisco. He was passionately interested in public transit, and in the hours he spent planning & working on his model train layout with his father - drawing wiring diagrams, solving design issues, perusing catalogs - he always kept alive the connection between the imaginary world he was creating and the real world of trolleys, buses, streetcars, and trains. He would have made an excellent civil engineer.

Pippin finally, and perhaps most absolutely, loved the people in his life. His delight in his relationships with people from his great-grandmothers to his youngest "kissin' cousin" was inspiring. So many of the adults who mourn him knew him not just as a child, but as a friend. His lasting connection with friends he'd known from toddlerhood, as well as the vital rough'n'tumble friendships of his boyhood, were such a source of joy for him. He played, and played, and played. He played with friends older than him, friends his own age, and many younger friends. He was well-known for his diplomatic ability to include younger siblings, and was passionately attached to "playing fair".

Pippin was so many things to so many people. He was adored, he was respected, he was admired. He loved, and was loved in return.

A grandfather writes:

"Losing Pippin is a double tragedy:

We have lost the delight that Pippin was to each of us and the world lost the incredible person he was well on his way to becoming.

Pippin had the parents we each wish we had, and wish we could be or could have been. The second tragedy is that his parents have so much to give to us through their child becoming an adult, but they no longer have that child and can't give that gift to us."

The life of each who knew Pippin is diminished by his absence. We miss him terribly.."

Pippin is survived by his parents, Conrad & Anne Seales, of Santa Cruz; grandparents Kent & Sharon Hull of Aptos; grandmother Pauline Seales of Santa Cruz, grandfather & step-grandmother Alan & Irene Seales of Los Gatos; two great-grandmothers; aunts and uncles, two "proper" cousins, and a number of children who claim him as a cousin through close family relationships. ."

Pippin was a junior member of the Santa Cruz Yacht Club, the Santa Cruz Fly Fishermen, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.."

Interment services will be private. A public memorial service will be held on Saturday, Oct. 25th, 10 A.M. at Oakwood Memorial Chapel, 3301 Paul Sweet Road, Santa Cruz. Contributions in Pippin's memory may be made to the Market Street Railway (SF historic streetcars; www.streetcars.org; Acquisition and Restoration Fund), or donate towards meeting Pippin's dear friend Aiden Dawn’s, medical expenses. Those donations can be sent to: Chazz Hacking, Specialized Bicycle Components, 15130 Concord Circle, Morgan Hill, CA 95037. ."

Thank you.