As many of you know, our friendly neighborhood art framer, Pat Hidalgo, has been fighting cancer for the past 16 months. What started as Lung Cancer back in April 2021 has now become three stage 4 cancers: lung, liver, and spine.

I’ve known Pat since 2004. She operated Bartertown Framing, just next door to where I first lived in Old Oakland. The first gift that my wife Tiffany ever gave me was a piece of Chinese calligraphy beautifully framed by Pat. The first gift I gave Tiffany was a playful poem by e.e. cummings, which Pat artfully framed for us. Eighteen years later, both of those pieces are still hanging up in our home, along with a dozen other things that Pat has helped us with over the years.

But of course, that’s not why we love Pat. We love Pat because she is the most resilient human being we know. Every day for more than a decade, she would drive herself in that ratty, customized, blue sedan from Alameda to Downtown Oakland. She’d park in front of her store, pull the wheelchair out, set herself in the chair, lock up the car, open up the shop, and get to the day’s business. When she could no longer drive, she’d take a bus (which wasn’t always reliable), and wheel her way the final few blocks to the shop. You’d regularly find her there, working away, with the volume on her cheap radio turned up. Or just as likely, she’d be hanging out with Alfonso out front, smoking, talking shit about the government, or the endless war, or AC Transit. She’d watch life go on at Lafayette Square, make friends with the regular guys who were staying there, while keeping an eye on the folks who were more transient. She’d try to give life advice to the local kids, even the not so nice one who kept stealing from her. She loved her work. Had a great eye for color and material. Remembered and adored artists and culture. Respected individuals. Despised bureaucracy. Hated even more letting someone down. Fiercely loved underdogs.

We are raising money so that Pat can go out on her terms and have the kind of service that she would want: a simple cremation, a ceremony out at Muir Woods where her friends and family can spread her ashes around the woods, and nourish the trees that fed her imagination when she was a child growing up in Marin County. All the money we raise on this Go Fund Me will go towards the basic expenses of this service: transportation, cremation, and a simple and festive ceremony. Any remaining funds will go towards school and classroom supplies for local children in Oakland.

Thank you for your friendship to Pat, and for helping an amazing and resilient woman pass through this difficult phase of life. Call or send her a text in the next few weeks if you can, or leave her a note on her Facebook page at Bartertown Framing.