A woman named O'Brien has worked in the Samaritan Hospital gift shop for something like a quarter century.
Not the same O'Brien, but close.
Pat O'Brien, 65, started volunteering there 11 years ago. She did it because her mother said so. Mother Jane O'Brien told Pat she'd need something to do after retiring from 30 years of teaching, mostly fifth-graders at what was then Troy's School 12.
Jane O'Brien, now 89, would be in a position to know. She volunteered a total of 15 years at Samaritan in Troy, after a career of teaching at Hudson Valley Community College.
For a year, beginning in mid-2003, the O'Briens were volunteers together.
And the trend of daughter following in the mother's path doesn't stop there. Jane and Pat also both served as president of the Samaritan Hospital Auxiliary, a position Pat currently holds. Jane remains Pat's corresponding secretary, sending out reminders, get well messages and sympathy cards to people in the 100-member auxiliary.
The mother does the work now from her home at the Eddy Hawthorne Ridge in East Greenbush. She is in pain from a variety of "osis"es and "itis"es, as Pat put it, including arthritis, osteoporosis and spinal stenosis.
So when Pat isn't volunteering these days, she's spending more time with her mother, who needs her.
But it's hard to tell how much time that is. Pat volunteers a lot: A couple of days at the hospital, either in the gift shop or at the information desk. At the Cohoes Music Hall. Until recently, as a literacy volunteer. The auxiliary handles a multitude of fundraising and other activities that Pat helps coordinate, such as Valentine's Day tea to thank employees and the delivery of holiday poinsettias for hospital inpatients. And Pat also organizes blood drive there.
She does it all, well, because she listens to her mother — but also because her fellow volunteers are a kind of extended family. She was married at one time, but didn't have kids. (And yes, she changed her name back to O'Brien.) She doesn't have siblings.
But she is lifted by the friendships of her fellow volunteers. And she sees former students all the time, men and women who come up to the gift shop or the information desk at the hospital and say, "Hey, weren't you a schoolteacher?"
"I enjoy it," she said of her work. "I love all the people that I've met."
Whether she's like her mother in personality or temperament — outside of the work that they do — Pat couldn't say.
"I like to think that we're alike," the daughter said. "She's very generous."