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If a thing interested my father, he became obsessed.  And so it was with Mr. Rubik's remarkable cube.  During a visit with my sister's family, back when The Cube was all the rage, my young niece happened to show him her cube.  He was hooked.

Although he was nearing sixty and legally blind, he was soon solving the cube as swiftly as the most enthusiastic teenager.  But even that wasn't enough.

My father saw many possibilities in the simple design, based on powers of three.  He began experimenting with four cubes.
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As the Cube craze subsided, boxes of cubes began to appear in thrift shops.  We scooped up just as many as we could find.  He expanded the patterns using 64 cubes.  My mother tells me that he wanted to create a pattern using 512 cubes, but regretfully, that wasn't to be.

Fred Holly passed away June 17, 1995 after losing his battle with lung cancer.  Yet right to the end, he received great enjoyment from the cube.  While visiting, a week or so before his death -- although he was extremely weak and could barely see -- he insisted on showing us the design (right).  You may notice that he couldn't quite align the cubes as he intended.  But I think the effort alone shows great determination, and his desire to spend every remaining moment embracing those things that gave him pleasure.
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Fred and Ava Lee Holly 

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Sarah Holly Mankowski is Fred Holly's middle daughter. Other Web activities include:

SarahMankowski.com

WordThunder , a resource site for online writers.

 

E-mail Sarah