PATCHOGUE, N.Y. — More than a dozen years ago, 10-year-old Sidonie Fery scrawled a message on a piece of notebook paper, sealed it up in a green plastic bottle and tossed it into the ocean.
The note contained a line from the movie “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” that reflected the girl’s personal philosophy: “Be excellent to yourself, dude!”
That bottle was swept away and forgotten. The girl grew up, went away to school and died in an accident at age 18.
It took Hurricane Sandy to churn up the bottle. A worker cleaning up the beaches in the Long Island village of Patch- ogue just before Thanksgiving spotted the bottle amid piles of garbage that had washed ashore.
“I was just sobbing when I heard they had found it,” Mimi Fery, the girl’s mother, said. “These are very, very kind people.”
This weekend, Fery will return to the seaside village about 60 miles east of Manhattan where she will attend a ceremony where a small plaque will be dedicated as a remembrance to Sidonie.
