Charlotte Buchanan, Sara’s friend and the author of the 2014 memoir, Road Trip of Love: Tales of a Texas Jew Girl, telephoned Sara while researching her childhood, trying to reconcile the choices of her parents and grandparents, and confronting the symbolism of her dreams.

“This idea of self-fulfillment; to be able to dream your own dreams, is a relatively new concept beginning with your generation,” Sara told her.

Buchanan portrays Sara as “a vision of the graceful Jessica Tandy, with her aura of elegance. The woman, the artist, the accomplished dreamer… has illuminated the passages of my life ever since I met her at [age] twenty-four.”

Though thirty years her senior, Buchanan says Sara would leave her “breathless trying to keep up with her mind…I tried once to pen a description on her as my scout who has gone before me — the shining light. In her eighty-third year she wrote back to me, ‘I see myself as more of ‘The Center’ — forever expanding with no beginning and no ending. This Center is the comfortable place where I feel right at home — forever learning, widening, going both ways; right, left, always true to the center position with the ability to rise and fall when circumstance demands it.’”

 

Charlotte and Sara in Pocatello, Idaho studio, circa 1998.