Cindy's Letter to Adam

Dear Adam,

I can’t believe I have to write you a letter so soon again. It seems like yesterday that I was sitting at my apartment writing a letter to you that was to be read at our wedding. I remember racking my brain trying to put into words how much I loved you and how much I was looking forward to a long life together. I now find myself in almost the exact situation.

Through our marriage we have had our arguments just like any married couple, however since I’m such a passive person you tended to win most of the arguments or I simply gave up. Anyone who knows your personality would understand why I gave up so easily. I know as we were driving into Lake Charles for Papie’s funeral you said “I hate this. I hate funerals. I don’t even want to have a funeral if I die.” Well, I hate to break it to you but it looks like I finally won one argument and get the final say. Although we had our arguments, we were very good at making compromises. If we had a little girl, you wanted to name her Charlie. I wasn’t to keen on that so we settled on naming our girl german shepard Charlie. I’m glad you were able to put the name to good use.

I know we talked so many times how it was so odd that we were such a perfect fit because we were so different. I will always remember your little sayings to me when I would look at you like you were crazy. You would tell me “You know I’m fun” or “Cindy, you knew what you were getting into when you married me.” I thought I knew what I was getting into with our marriage but it turned out to be a thousand times better than I ever imagined.

Adam, you had what Megan would call “the essence.” People were attracted to you and wanted to be around you. I never met one person that wasn’t drawn to your personality. I am so proud of everything you accomplished and I know you have no regrets. I know you would like me to share some things with the people you loved that you never got to say, so I’m going to do my best to remember the important ones:

To Alton: Adam would ask me when we first started dating what I thought of his family, especially you Mr. Alton. The reason being was he told me several times “When I get older I’m going to be just like my Dad. I’m going to be just as successful as he is.” I guess he wanted to make sure I was a good fit.

To Mrs. Gisele: Adam was so proud of you for raising three rambunctious boys and working full-time. He was so proud of all the awards you won in your profession as a counselor. He also never let me cook broccoli without your cheese sauce, which we had several arguments about. Another thing he would always mention was how you made all of his Halloween costumes by hand. I thought I should let you know about his plans for his costume this year. He wanted to dress as a blind man and bring Charlie as his Seeing Eye dog. He was going to get some crazy colored contacts and get a vest for Charlie. You were such a good mother to him and he planned to instill the same family values in our family as you did in yours.

To Jeremy: Adam loved you so much. You were not only his older brother but one of his best friends. He would always tell me how you would get so aggravated because when you were younger he would copy EVERYTHING you did. I think my favorite home video of you guys was at your birthday party at Petro Bowl. Adam had to be about two or three years old. On the video you can hear your mom say “Now Adam, it is Jeremy’s birthday so he gets to blow out the candles. If you blow out those candles, you don’t get to go bowling.” So, everyone starts singing Happy Birthday and when it comes to the pause before the last line of the song Adam yells out really quickly “happy birthday to you” and blows out the candle. For some odd reason, the next clip in the video shows Adam bowling, so he must have talked himself out of that one.

To Kelli: Adam always told me “I knew the first time Jeremy brought Kelli home he was going to marry her.” I know he was so proud of his two nieces and nephew.

To Jonathon: I know Adam always gave you such a hard time with all his competitiveness and sarcastic comments. When you first started dating Leslie, I had to tell him to back off of you a little or she wasn’t going to want to hang around us anymore. Jonathon, Adam was so proud of you for going through the Internal Auditing program and landing such an awesome job! I’m sure he is going to want you to have all of his frisbee golf equipment if we can find them.

Adam had too many friends to say something about each of you. I will do my best to connect with you all in some way. I don’t want anyone to feel left out but I did have some things that just have to be said to a few of you:

To Aaron Long: After we left New York in April, Adam said “If I could pick one friend from high-school to live in the same city as me it would be Aaron.”

To The Garcille family: Adam considered you all his second set of parents and brothers.

To Jason, Seth, John, Stephen, and Darren: Thank you for looking so tirelessly for my husband. I knew you did everything you could.

Lastly, to Adam again: Hubby, there will not be a day you are absent from my thoughts and not a morning that our Little Lucy doesn’t run up to the bed looking to cover your face with kisses.

"Make It Rain"

From Cindy

Rap 101
As most of you know, Adam was a big fan of rap music. It almost seemed that the more ridiculous the song the more Adam loved it. Eventually, Adam came to realize that I didn't know what the lyrics meant half of the time. Adam decided I needed to be educated in rap language, so anytime we were in the car he would quiz me on the different lyrics. For example, I learned that "make it rain" means throwing money at women and "suicide" refers to the way a car door opens. Unfortunately, these lessons are not helping me with the vocabulary section of the GRE but it was fun.

Riding Bikes

From Paul Thevenot

Back in the day, and still now, bike riding in Oak Park can be a bit risky. I remember at least a few times, we'd be riding bikes when a group of sketchy individuals would try to get our attention and begin chasing us, I believe to procure our bicycles. Of course, no big deal for Adam, catching him on a bike would have been impossible, even through college. I would have loved to get a sky cam view of these chases. Adam would be getting almost out of sight screaming at me to hurry up, while the hooligans were closing in. Luckily, we always escaped, after which Adam gave me pep talks and tips on faster riding.

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From Jonathan

This happened a couple times when Adam and I were riding. One time we got caught, and it was mostly my fault because I couldn't keep up. My bike was stolen but Adam's Mongoose wasn't. He let me take his bike back home to tell Mom and Dad while he walked. I was so pissed!

Conning Conn's

by Darren Fournerat

Most know that while Adam was working at Conn's some of his friends got some good deals. I was the beneficiary of a few and I know of a few other spectacular buys out there. I will speak of one inparticular. It was my freshman year in college and I needed a new computer; enter Conn's salesman of the century Adam Puckett. Through multiple phone calls to the corporate people (they had to grant the discounts) and talks to the manager by Adam, I had a new computer. Adam kept speaking to different people on the phone, each time explaining why he wanted a different discount approved. After working every angle possible, I had a new, top of the line computer for 35-40% under Conn's cost. Not 40% off, but nearly half of what Conn's paid for the computer. On top of that, we got 0% interest for a year. Adam seemed to relish the success of his schemes. And many schemes there were.

The Adam Puckett Alarm Clock

by Darren Fournerat

Adam used to ride is dirt bike over to my apartment and terrorize the neighborhood. On this particular day, my roommate was either sleeping late or taking a nap (the exact details escape me). Either way, Adam and I felt that the roommate shouldn't be wasting a good day and Adam took it upon himself to turn on his alarm clock. So Adam backed up his dirt bike to the window of my sleeping roommate and fired her up. He proceeded to rap it out multiple times in succession. If you know how loud Adams dirt bike was or any bigger two stroke bike is you can understand what the roommate was working with. Turns out it was a great alarm clock, only problem was the absence of a snooze button.

Camping

Darren Fournerat

I have many stories, but most of them are truly inappropriate. One, only borderline inappropriate, took place on a camping trip a few years back. The guys were sitting around the fire and Adam made the mistake of falling asleep in the camp chair. We took a few pictures to remind Adam why not to fall asleep first, if you can imagine. Adam awoke during the photo shoot much to his displease. We all had a good laugh at the pictures and Adam played it cool. But little did we know he had another photo shoot in mind. Sometime during the night he took the camera, erased the unfavorable pictures and took a few more of his own choosing. Later when we were breezing through the pictures of the trip, a few of the new pictures, to say the least, jumped out at you and were a bit disturbing. Adam was not to be outdone.

I'll leave it to imagination as to what all of the pictures were.

Alabama Sports Festival

Sent in by Jeremy Puckett

About 5 years ago when Adam was 21, I invited him to play in a soccer tournament in Alabama called the Alabama sports festival. This tournament basically consists of all the best mens league soccer teams in the state that come to play in a 3 day tournament. The team I had been playing with entered the tournament and at the last minute had a few people drop out so I decided to call and see if adam could play. He said yes but since he wasn’t an Alabama resident we had to do a little doctoring on his application form so he could play. My teammates weren’t initially over excited about him coming because they didn’t know his skill level. Their tune changed real quick after that first game. I think he had 2 goals and an assist and flat out dominated the other team. The referees at this tournament were extremely lax in their foul calling which was like adding gasoline to the fire adam had already set. After adam figured this out in the first game he adjusted his playing style to something in between soccer and rugby. There were more bodies tossed around in that game than any other game I have ever been a part of. The team we were playing was quite a bit younger than us and they really started gunning for adam by the second half. There was this one particular play in the game where adam had the ball and was dribbling across the field when he noticed this guy on the other team coming full steam at him from behind to take him out. I guess the guy didn’t realize that adam knew he was coming which was a critical mistake on his part. Adam left the ball, quickly turned around and dropped his shoulder just as the guy was going to body check him and it literally looked like the guy ran into a brick wall at full speed. After adam hit him he proceeded to give the guy a 1 second stare that said,”lesson learned”. The timing on adam’s part was impeccable and was one of the hardest hits I have ever seen on the soccer field. No foul was called and play went on but the coolest thing about it was that jonathan was video taping the whole thing. When we watched it on tv when we got home, you could hear everyone in the background saying, “ooohhhhh” right after the hit took place. I think the three of us rewound and played that clip at least 30 times. It was great.

Wal Mart Rental Program

Sent in by Jeremy Puckett

I was a junior in college when I had to take a business calculus class and was required to purchase a graphing calculator. Being the poor college student I was, I didn’t want to shell out $120 for something that was going to turn into a desk ornament right after I was done with the class so I started looking for other options. As I was telling adam about my dilemma, he said, “why don’t you just rent one from Wal-mart”. I asked him what he was talking about cause I had never heard of this before. He said for me to just go to walmart and buy the calculator, carefully take it out the package being extra careful not to damage the original packaging, use it for the semester in your class, place it back in the original packaging and take it back to wal-mart for a full refund of the $120. at this point, im thinking to myself, “why haven’t I come up with this idea before now”. So I proceeded to go through with this plan and it worked perfectly. I later found out that adam did this with quite a few products that were only needed on a “temporary rental basis”.

"The Dunky"

Sent in by Jared Garber

I could probably spend the whole afternoon writing about the exciting, ridiculous, inappropriate, screamingly funny, or just plain good times I had with Adam, but that would take hours upon hours. I could relate how funny it was when he completely leveled someone on the soccer field, how hard he, Paul Thevenot and myself laughed while making that video for their Fine Arts class, how exciting it was to win two state soccer championships (although he had a whole hell of a lot more to do with it than I ever did), the goofy times hanging out, or the ridiculous drunken escapades. Instead I’ll just tell what I always thought was one of the most excessive, hilarious, and good times we shared. I wouldn’t really call it family friendly though, so be warned.

Let’s go back to some terrible assembly in high school. We had some sort of guest speaker and while I don’t remember what he was talking about, I do remember he had some sort of speech impediment. Looking back, making fun of him pronouncing donkey as “dunky” wasn’t very nice, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t think it was hilarious.

That Friday night Adam, Paul, and I went out to do what high school guys do on the weekends: get into trouble. Lord only knows what we did that night but on the way home Adam steered the Yota (that wonderful Toyota hatch back he had for so long) into a garbage can on the side of the road. Oh, you should have seen the refuse fly from that thing! Of course we thought it was the funniest thing ever, and then it happened. Adam christened the hitting of the trash can as a “dunky.”

From that moment on our desire for dunkies was insatiable. We spent the rest of the night driving around ramming trashcans, screaming “dunky” and laughing hysterically. Over, and over, and over, and over. Toward the end of the night Adam had his window down and one dunky tossed something through the window at him, as quickly as possible the pushed it back out. As it turns out this was the drivers side mirror that had been broken off. Let’s just say his dad wasn’t pleased about this and I have no idea how he talked his way out of that one.

In what now seems like very poor taste, this went on for several evenings, one of which eventually culminated with all three of us standing in the Barbe parking lot with a police office making us call our parents from his cell phone. Honestly there was more mischief that led to that encounter, but only after getting somewhat tired of the dunkies. I won’t go into detail about that in order to save all our integrity as well as innocence.

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I remember when all this happened. Adam told my Dad that the mirror just got knocked off by somebody who either drove by or while parked at St. Louis. I heard the real story though, haha. Thanks a lot Jared for sending it in.

Maury

Sent in by Cindy:

For Christmas last year, Adam surprised me with a trip to New York or basically said we could go. I was in charge of planning the whole trip, which was fine with me. Adam was so sweet and said we could do whatever I wanted which included a "Sex and the City" tour. Most of my interests related to going to talk shows. Once Adam heard that he immediately looked up on the internet to see where "Maury Povich Show" taped. Unfortunately for me, the show tapes in NYC. Adam was so excited he could barely stand it. I called Maury and they assured me that I just needed to call two weeks before our trip to get tickets. Adam, however, made me call and triple check this statement. We were at the show from 8am-3pm because Adam was insisted that we stay for two tapings which included "Out of Control Teens" and "Whose the Baby-Daddy." The funny part about it was that Adam was getting aggrivated with me because I wouldn't stand up and yell at the guests. He said "Cindy, we are never going to get on TV unless you step it up." Fortunately, for the second taping Adam sat next to a fan with the same enthusiasm as he and made it on the show. I remember on a Friday night about three weeks after our trip I was screening the tivo and saw Adam on the episode. He was out with friends and I called him to give him the good news. He was so happy that he made it on the show!

Grant

From Catherine Gregory

Beau and I were talking about Adam the other night and I was commenting on how sweet and affectionate he always was. I remember when I had Grant, Adam had come into town and came over to see me and the baby by himself, which I thought was so sweet...Grant was like 3 weeks old. Beau was at work. He came in, was holding Grant and talking about stuff. He then said "so, what's he eat?" (like maybe I'd say, "well, he's really into steak right now) which I thought was a funny male question concerning a newborn. Anyway, I said "well, pretty much just breastmilk". (I am cracking up right now thinking about his expression.) He got so nervous, fumbled over words, tried to change the subject, was obviously very uncomfortable. I busted out laughing which I guess made him feel a bit at ease about it. Good times.

Detention

When I was in 2^nd grade, I got detention because I said that my teacher (who was a nun) was a “bitch” and a friend ratted me out. I was pretty upset and after school, Adam and I had to wait for our ride home with all the other kids. I told him what I did and he thought it was awesome and told all his friends. I was in tears as all of his friends came up to me to give me high fives and tell me how cool I am. I was probably one of the first kids in my grade to get a detention. Mom didn’t have the same reaction when I told her. It would have been pretty funny if her reaction was a high five.

Engagement

I have so many good memories about Adam but the one I would like to share is about our engagement. I'm sure as most of you know Adam and I dated a while before we were married (4 1/2 years). I was very ready to get engaged once I was in my internship for dietetics since I would be able to get a job after this. After Christmas of '03, Adam and I went to New Orleans to celebrate our 4 year anniversary of dating. He told me that we would go to a nice restaurant in New Orleans and then meet up with some of his co-workers at a hotel bar. We had a great dinner at Royal Street Cafe and then we went to meet his co-workers at Hotel St. Marie or so I thought. Adam told me to wait in the lobby. Little did I know that his co-workers were not there and he was checking us into the hotel. He came and got me and told me we were going to meet his friends in their hotel room. He knocked on the door and of course no one answered. He then pulled out a room key and said he got the room for us. Then Adam got on one knee and told me how much he loved me and wanted to marry me. The ring was perfect, simple but very pretty. He did an excellent job picking it out! I am so lucky to have found him and be married to him even if it was only for 3 years.

Kneeboarding down Bank Street in Lake Charles

When I was in about 7th or 8th grade and he was a junior or senior, Adam had this crazy idea that he wanted to kneeboard down Bank Street near St. Louis when it is flooded. If any of you are familiar with this area, you know that it floods very easily. So I think this was during a tropical depression or something and we grab the kneeboard and rope, and head to the area. He wants me to drive his truck, and I had hardly any experience driving anything before that time, so I was pretty nervous.

Bank Street was perfect, because the sides of the street flooded probably at least a foot deep, but the middle wasn't so bad, so I could drive at a decent speed. So we hook the rope up to the back of the truck, and I start pulling him. I was so freaking nervous. He was doing 360s on the street and stuff. I guess he never anticipated falling because that could have been pretty nasty. Somebody was putting out their garbage at the time and saw us and was like "What the hell??!!" So we made a few passes in the deep area, and all of a sudden I see a police car about 3 blocks ahead of us, coming toward us. So I'm thinking to myself, "Great, I'll never be able to get a license when I turn 16." So I stop the car immediately and Adam runs up onto the grass with his board. All of a sudden, when the cop is about 1 block away, he turns and goes down a side street. I'm just like "!!!!!!" and Adam throws the board back in the truck and I get in the passenger seat and let him drive. So about one minute later, I see the same cop car coming toward us and it makes a u-turn and flips on his lights. So now I'm upset, but at least I'm not driving, haha. So he pulls us over and talks to Adam. Apparently the person putting out their trash that saw us called the police. Adam tells him that we were just having a little fun. So the officer asks Adam for his license, and oh crap, he doesn't have it. He forgot it at home, so the cop gives him a ticket for driving without a license, haha. The cop had to follow us to Jared Garber's house so he could get a ride to our house to get his license. And yeah, he never told my parents.

What's funny is that this scratched up the bottom of our best kneeboard quite a bit. My dad noticed this later and asked about it, and I think he made up some story about it flying out of the boat while pulling it (which might have actually happened also). We always had a good laugh about it.

Post memories and stories about Adam here

Hi, I've started this blog so that we can all share our memories and stories of Adam, so that we remember him and everything that was so great about him. I am going to try and post a bunch of stuff that I can remember, because I don't ever want to forget these memories. And I'm sure there are several stories that myself and others haven't heard, so please share them.