Requiem for a Golden Girl

She was a Malibu golden girl, the kind you see running along the beach, as natural as sunlight on the surf.

She had an outdoor look you can’t buy in a beauty parlor, and a tan you don’t get lying under lights.

Combine those traits with an ebullience that glows like the first day of spring and you have a woman whose appearance turns heads.

That was Tracy Clarke, a golden girl par excellence . . . but she was more than that. Taking care of everybody’s grandma was her speciality, and she did it well.

That’s what struck me about her.

She should have been modeling bikinis or posing as a poster girl for milk, not tending to the needs of the aged. You don’t bury her kind of beauty beneath the woes of people who can hardly walk.

I realize that’s stereotyping. Looks don’t determine compassion anymore than age determines value.

But when I met Tracy a year and a half ago, I had to wonder: What in the hell is a woman who looks like she stepped out of a dream doing distributing food to old people?

When I asked her that she laughed and said, “Why not?”

I wrote about her then and I can still hear the laughter as I write about her today. But the context is different. The laughter has been stilled.

Tracy Clarke, age 26, was killed last Sunday.

It was on one of those mornings you sometimes get along the ocean, where God paints glory in the sky and strews diamonds on the waves.

Tracy was bicycling with three others along Pacific Coast Highway, getting ready for an Iron Man Contest in British Columbia.

The car came out of nowhere, a kid behind the wheel, and it picked the Golden Girl out of the line of riders and tossed her 80 feet through the air.

She was probably dead by the time she hit the ground and lay there like a broken doll.

The car dragged her bike a mile before it stopped. The driver, a 20-year-old named Danilo Herrera, was charged with manslaughter and driving under the influence.

Tracy’s death has stunned Malibu.

She was the kind of person everyone seemed to know. Hundreds have telephoned their sorrow to her mother, her husband and her grandparents.

A lot of those calls came from a retirement village in Thousand Oaks where Tracy worked as an activities director, and from an Agoura Hills senior center where she taught elderly people to swim.

In between, she worked as a lifeguard at the ocean, one of the few able to pass the rigorous tests to save lives in a surf that can pound with thundering force along the curving shoreline.

She ran, bicycled or swam every morning of her life, and she looked it.

“Tracy was always busy,” her grandmother said. “She loved people so.”

But why old people?

Her mother answered: “She never really said why. Someone created the interest and she pursued it.”

She holds no animosity toward the young man who caused her daughter’s death.

“I know what damage alcohol can do. Tracy’s father died of it. My heart goes out to that boy. He’ll have to spend the rest of his life knowing he killed someone.”

I met Tracy as she was distributing cheese to needy old people at an Agoura Hills country club. Columnists feed on situations like that.

Poor people in a community where the average household income is $50,000 a year? Food distribution at a country club?

And then there was the dichotomy of Tracy and the old people, a golden girl caring about the silver-haired.

“It isn’t really the kind of food they ought to be having,” Tracy said to me as we stood in the sunlight. She was wearing a pink skirt, white blouse and sandals. She looked Malibu.

For a moment, I thought she might say they ought to be giving the people sushi or Cajun chicken wings, but that wasn’t it at all.

“Cheese is high in salt and fat,” she said, frowning with concern. “They deserve a healthier food.”

I learned something that day. You don’t have to be homely and come from a ghetto to care about others. You don’t have to have lived a life of poverty to be concerned with the impoverished.

Tracy was a person whose compassion reached beyond the lines of age, economics and cosmetic beauty.

Giving was intrinsic to her nature, and many are the poorer for her death.

More than 22,000 men, women and children died last year in the United States in alcohol-related traffic accidents.

Tracy’s mother wants her daughter’s legacy to be an awareness of that fact. Even in death the Golden Girl of Malibu will continue to serve the people she loved. And that’s about as beautiful as anyone ever gets.