My aunts and yours

Readers of my book, "Nothing Much," have written me extensively about their aunts.  It seems my readers  have as many aunts as I do, maybe more, and these aunts have loomed large in their lives. The aunts in question are devoted to bridge (or canasta, or mah jong)and would walk over burning coals in their bare feet rather than miss their weekly game(s). They also wore large, imposing hats and loved to get together to gossip or dish the dirt.  But did any of these ladies plan to bring a card table and four chairs to the cemetery, to their mother's grave, in fact, so they could keep the old lady company while playing a comfortable game of bridge?  I didn't think so.

My aunt Liz--a love story

My Uncle Doc first saw his future wife at a party, and asked someone to introduce him to her; "I'd like to meet that tall blonde. Do you think she'd go out with me? Will she think I'm too old?" He was 31, she was 19. Obviously, the age difference was no barrier. They were married for almost 40 years.

I adored Liz when I first met her, when I was 5 or 6. Though not actually pretty, she had an aura of glamor about her. She was blonde, blue-eyed, beautifully dressed, and smiled a lot. She was feminine, smelled of perfume, and wore makeup. Neither my mother nor my grandmothers wore makeup, so I thought she was sophisticated as all get out. Adding to her aura of worldliness was the suspicion that she colored her hair. (She did.)

As a child, I was crazy about her, and she treated me almost like another daughter. I loved the way she decorated her house, with shepherdess figurines on glass shelves and lamps shaped like statues of princesses, with pink lampshades. She had a rose-colored satin bedspread, and lots of little pillows. She was the first person I ever knew who had toilet paper to match her bathroom fixtures, which I thought quite elegant. In our house, everything was quite utilitarian, and the toilet paper was whatever was on sale at Kroger's. I aspired to be just like Aunt Liz when I grew up.

My grandmother was a woman who thought very little of her children's choice of mates, Liz included. One of my cousins was also very disapproving. From something Liz said, I knew she was aware of this, but if she minded she didn't let it show. Another problem was Doc's medical practice. He spent long hours at his office and at the hospital, and if his patients called, he went. On many an evening she went out to dinner with him and returned with other friends because he had been called to the hospital for an emergency. She made friends, and a life, for herself, because he had very little time to give her.

I eventually stopped being a sweet adoring little girl and became an insufferable adolescent who scorned the empty materialism of Liz and her friends, women who were content to be wives and mothers, who played cards and golf, who decorated their homes in what I learned to call Jewish Renaissance style and had no true intellectual interests. Of course I still loved Liz and Doc, but I was able to look down patronizingly at their empty, vapid lifestyle.

In due course, Uncle Doc got sick. He was forced to abandon the practice of medicine. The police found him out driving around aimlessly and brought him home in a police car. That ended his driving career. I still visited them often, and sometimes he would make sense and then he wouldn't, quite. Gradually he became weaker and weaker.

Aunt Liz was the same as she had always been, though, always welcoming me and anyone else who dropped by with a smile. She was fortunate in that she was able to hire people to be with him at times, so she could have some semblance of a normal life. She could hardly have kept him at home if she hadn't had help, as he was totally unable even to walk toward the end. She told me later that she had gone to the nursing home to see about getting him admitted, but just couldn't do it. He died not long after. He had been sick for six years.

She is quite old now, walks with a walker, and no longer colors her hair. She speaks softly and tires easily. But she is still her smiling, gracious self. When I look back on my relationship with her, I realized that I seldom heard her say a mean or unkind thing. I didn't notice this quality when I was young, she made it seem quite easy.

Uncle Doc gave me a sage piece of advice when I was a teenager: "You should never marry unless you can better yourself. I married up. I improved myself." I thought this was really cute of him at the time, but didn't take him seriously. But now I see that he was absolutely right.

Summer comes to Columbus Ohio

When I lived in Ohio, I thought poets had made up all that stuff about Spring--poetic license, you know. We always went directly from Winter into red-hot Summer. Actually, Spring started this year on April 21, at 6:30 p.m., and by 7:20 it was all over. We were in the torrid zone.

Every flower possible springs out of the ground with a big shout and the sun bears down like in those movies about mad dogs and Englishmen.

When I lived on the east coast, I saw Spring in all its subtlety; first the hibiscus, then the forsythia, then a few tulips tentatively stuck their heads up. Vernal breezes blew, mornings were a little chilly, and you could wear a sweater in the evening. It made me understand what Will Shakespeare and the guys were going on about. Sweet. Subtle.

Columbus will always be familiar territory to me because it is in my bones. Beneath these freeways that zoom from one corner of the city to the other are the ghosts of the neighborhoods where I lived, played, and went to school. The ruined slum on the corner was once a corner grocery, and the rickety deserted movie house was once bustling with kids every Saturday, rain or shine. One of my aunts lived on this corner. Another was down this street, and my grandmother was about half a mile away. All gone now. My aunts were like boulders, landmarks which would always be there. Only one aunt remains, and she is frail and elderly.

How can I possibly live with absolutely no aunts? Cousins are a poor substitute.

My aunt Ellen loved the cemetery, particularly the spot where her mother was buried. It was a nice spot, shaded by a small tree. She once suggested setting up a card table and four chairs near the grave so the girls could play bridge while keeping their mother company. When that idea fell on hostile ears, she kept right on visiting, advising the cemetery staff on proper maintenance and upkeep, no doubt to their great advantage. Now she can spend quality time there, since she was buried there last December.