Out of Shadows and Into Light, a Mother Marks a Big Moment

By C.K. WOLFSON

She walks through the chilly arena, pointing out details of the
rink, the pro shop, first aid room, coaches' rooms and the trophy
case, pausing in front of the framed displays, the board posting the
week's schedule: open skating, instruction, Mites, Squirts,
Bantams, captain's practice, figure skating, boys' and
girls' hockey, adult league.

"This is where my heart is," she says firmly.

The Vineyard ice skating rink is the result of a grass roots
movement that started in the 1970s and grew with family-style momentum
into one of the Island's most prominent recreation facilities.
Gayle and Bob Mone were founding participants in the 1980s when the
Martha's Vineyard Arena was still a Currier and Ives print, an
outdoor sheet of ice on 3.2 acres of land donated by the high school; a
place where a few men formed a hockey team, families bonded, and
toddlers like Jonathan and Ryan Mone, who went on to become varsity
hockey players, both wearing number 23, wobbled and giggled and learned
to glide.

"Those little kids would freeze their buns off," Dick
Barbini, the first president of youth hockey, says, laughing as he
recalls the times when stormy gusts would send snow blowing over the
three-foot walls which surrounded the rink, onto the backs of the
skaters' necks.

Dukes County sheriff, Michael McCormack, the president of MVA, says,
"We refer to hockey parents as The Family. It's a tremendous
sport as far as bonding goes, not only with the kids who play, but with
the parents who get involved."

After it happened - the unthinkable - a friend,
summoning a tender commiseration, told Gayle Mone she was like a
beautiful Ming vase that had been smashed, and that one by one the
people who loved her, members of the Island community, would each bring
back a piece so she could be mended. The cracks would always be there,
the friend said, it would never be quite the same, but the vase would
eventually be made whole.

Seventeen-year-old Ryan Mone, a smiling, golden child in a seemingly
charmed family, died in a car crash on New Year's morning in 1998.

Light and shadow take turns moving across Mrs. Mone's Dresden
face. "I'm stronger in the places where I was broken,"
she says.

And without flinching, his mother recounts the six-year-long passage
that began in grief, and this month, in bittersweet celebration, reached
what she acknowledges is a point of closure: the MVA dedicated its six
new locker rooms, a 4,400-square-foot addition, over $800,000 project
headed by Mrs. Mone and named in memory of her son, Ryan. The new arena
will have an open house Friday, Dec. 26 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4 to
6 p.m.

"For a long, long time it was whatever I could do to honor
him, and to continue with life. Your body clenches around hurt"
- she explains that she read that - "and if you can
jump into it, like almost hurt yourself again by going out in public,
then it dissipates. And that is what we did - just put ourselves
out there. My husband, more than me, gets his strength from being around
people. I had to become more outgoing - to make make more of an
effort."

As donations in memory of Ryan started coming in, $50,000 at first
count, the board of directors decided to create a fund to replace the
substandard, makeshift, plywood locker rooms. A committee was formed,
and in the spring of 2001, Mrs. Mone took over the helm.

In an emphatic gesture of support for the Mones as well as the
arena, Islanders came forward. In 1999, Alex Finkelstein, a classmate of
Jonathan Mone's, who remembers having to suit up in the lobby and
locker rooms with no plumbing, helped organize the first annual,
fund-raising, Ryan Mone Alumni Game. S. Robert and Tara Levine
contributed $350,000 to the fundraiser, later pledging over $100,000
more.

Through Mr. Mones' long, family friendship with filmmakers
Peter and Bob Farrelly (their film There's Something About Mary is
dedicated to Ryan), various celebrities became involved and contributed
items for auction at what became the annual Ice Savours fundraiser.

"We both believe in this and are obviously committed to
it," Mr. Mone says. "The point is, the real effort,
physically and mentally, was mostly made by Gayle with my support. I
can't give her enough credit. She always could do anything."

Sheriff McCormack, whose son Steven was Ryan's classmate and
hockey mate, describes Mrs. Mone's effort as "like walking
into an energy field. She gets you into the spirit of what we're
trying to do, and everybody just gives 110 per cent as she and Bob have
done. It's like giving to your own. The Mones are part of the
hockey family."

Mrs. Mone's clear voice has a slightly musical quality to it
as she describes a son who always smiled, "even under his [hockey]
mask." But for all the even pacing and direct gaze, something
flutters just under her smooth surface.

"When Ryan died, we could have blamed things. We could have
blamed places. We could have blamed people - ourselves certainly,
you always want to do that, too. But we were just so grateful to have
had Ryan for 17 years, to live in this most beautiful place, to have the
most wonderful friends, a wonderful community that our children could
grow up in and get to the top of anything they wanted to do."

Mrs. Mone was working as assistant to principal Ed Jerome at the
Edgartown School. "I went back to school a week after Ryan died,
because the thought that I might not want to get up and out there made
me just jump into it. It was so important to me that, after we lost
Ryan, I didn't want Jonathan to lose anything more. I didn't
want him to lose us. We were vital people who had whole lives."

Bob Mone of Mone, Lawrence & Carlin Insurance Agency, Inc., is
one of eight children, the son of the late William Mone, a Massachusetts
Superior Court Judge, who'd spent summers on the Vineyard. He met
Mrs. Mone, a college student from North Carolina, in 1972 in an Oak
Bluffs bar on her first day of work as a waitress. "Love at first
sight." She smiles a fragile smile. They married six months after
the summer's end and moved to the Vineyard.

Mr. Mone worked as a fish broker. Mrs. Mone worked for a bank, then
for their friend, the late attorney Ed Coogan, the Edgartown School and,
for the past two years, as assistant to author David McCullough, who
attests, "I can tell you that she likes things done right."

The arena family completed their circle. Islanders donated their
time and skills to the locker room project: Dick Barbini donated the
engineering designs, Dale McClure donated his machinery and labor, past
president and board member, architect Sam Sherman did the architectural
design, former board president Brion McGroarty helped with the planning.
Mr. Mone notes, "You go back in time and it's the Hinckleys
and Cottles, Jimmy Gibson and the White Brothers - plumbers and
electricians who donated their time and equipment."

Mr. Sherman describes it as, "a community within a
community." and arena manager Kurt Mundt adds, "Everybody in
the community should feel good about the rink, because they have
ownership in it."

And there it is: six locker rooms with showers, bathrooms, benches,
a mounted television, music system, cubbies, storage space for uniforms
and helmets.

Mrs. Mone adds, "It's not just the facility, it's
not the material things, it's what's inside it. So even
though when there was nothing in there, the boys were what's
important. I mean they gathered together cold and wet and smelly and it
was the camaraderie and they were fine with that."

"It's been said that when you have such a loss you
can't keep in the same direction," Mrs. Mone says.
"You need to do something different. Because things are not the
same and they'll never be the same."

She refers to her son, Jonathan, who was admitted to law school,
but, with the Farrellys' encouragement, took another direction and
is working in Los Angeles as an associate producer. His movie, Miracle,
about the 1980 Olympic hockey team, is scheduled for release in
February.

And as for herself, she says, "Actually, what ended up
happening, I think it was harder to stay really close to some of our
closest friends, because it had changed."

Mrs. Mone pauses to look at a display of hockey sticks from the high
school's varsity teams mounted on the arena wall just off the
lobby. Each stick has been signed by all the members of the team.
Standing still, she peers closer at the team signatures from the
1995-1996 season. The name Ryan Mone is among the felt tip autographs.
"I didn't even know that was there," she says softly.
"I didn't know that was there."

Number 23 is permanently retired.

This is a hard time of year for the Mones. Mrs. Mone admits that.
"But you have to keep their spirit with you," she says,
"and Ryan is such a good spirit. We wanted to keep him in
people's minds. We need to keep him present. And he is
present."

She sits at one of the metal tables in the lobby. "Having this
rink, you can actually see something being accomplished from this, and
then you can see the kids and the adults and the people enjoying it.
That is a sense of closure. And it's good because then it frees me
to be able to move on."