Patricia Louise Reid

"If you're falling, dive" a mentor once told me. I knew exactly what they meant because of my mother. Patricia Reid - known to most as Patti - was born on October 23rd, 1940 in Denver, Colorado to Clara Allison and Horace George Beeler, though she was raised by Ed Ball, a Denver Fire Captain whom she would always call her true father just as he was the father to her two younger sisters, Susan and Kathy. At the age of sixteen, Mom was already a business owner, taking over the School of Dance Arts in Denver and running it for the next thirteen years after her teacher retired. I don't know how many High School girls were paying taxes in the mid-1950s, but I imagine Mom was one of the few. She wasn't one to flinch - at anything really, but especially when it came to dance. She dove, and dove again, as a lifelong dancer and teacher, performing with and leading the Silver Follies later in life and serving as a Board Leader for the State Street Ballet. Dance wasn't a hobby for Mom, it was a way of being alive, of connecting with others, playful and impassioned, vulnerable and joyful. As that same teenager, Mom dove again and, in defiance of her parents, eloped to Carrizozo, a small railroad town in Lincoln County, New Mexico, with Robert Reid - an affable and chubby kid with buckets of charm who had chased her attention in Sunday School. They were married on December 28th, 1958 in a small ceremony at Trinity Methodist Church, with just two witnesses and my father's father, the Reverend Homer Argall Reid - preacher and opera singer - presiding. Their near 65-year marriage would last their entire lives. My Mom always said, "you will know," but what it took me years to understand is that such knowing only comes from a certain generosity and quiet that allows you to actually see what's right in front of you. That teenage girl - first teaching dance in the basement, then using the money from the School of Dance Arts in Denver to support my father through college and medical school - became the center of gravity for our family, and remains so in our hearts and in our memories. Her love of cooking lives not just in recipes being passed down through generations, but in the act itself: Sunday dinners, gathering us together, where cooking was opening up a place to bring us together no matter how far we may be. As my father wrote in a 1986 homemade Valentine's Day card, "you are so integral to my life's hopes and dreams and the strength that I draw on when my resolve weakens or doubts creep in," and "our children have a mother that will love, support, defend, and counsel through thick and thin." Mom also said that the point of any relationship is to "make each other better," and she carried that belief into her lifelong civic service in her beloved home of Santa Barbara, California. She served as past president of the Santa Barbara County Medical Society Auxiliary; as fundraising chairwoman at Hospice of Santa Barbara; and volunteered with the Family Service Agency, Assistance League of Santa Barbara, Cottage Health System's Tiara Ball Committee, and served on the boards of the Rehabilitation Institute of Santa Barbara, CALM, and the Lobero Theater. I have an image in my mind of my teenage mother and father on a narrow two-lane road, the top down on my father's 1956 Ford Victoria, somewhere just outside Carrizozo on an unseasonably warm December evening in 1958 - newly married, with a horizon too big for their eyes in front of them, and yet somehow in the middle of everything they hoped and dared to make for themselves. It's not so much an image as it is a feeling: of having no idea of what you're doing being exactly what you need; that diving matters more than falling. And we - their four children, Bobby, Heather, Scott, and Rick, and their eight grandchildren - Angie, Cody, Jessica, Sage, James, Cyrus, Jasper, and Rhys - carry that improbable light into our own lives and families. We hope you will join us in that spirit to make each other better.

Patricia Louise Reid

October 23, 1940 - March 12, 2026