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.

I've often wondered....

About relatives.

Did God invent extended families to embarrass us?

The author is talking about Van Thieu Rudd, the cringe-inducing nephew of Kevin Rudd, but his observation pertains to many of us. How did these get into my family? How did I get there?

Forget the old world relatives with the heavy accents: they can't help it, they were born abroad, and not in some interesting place either. They came from some hellhole in the former Soviet Union--Minsk, Pinsk, who cares? The smartest thing they ever did was get on a boat and come here. That, and survive when they got here, of course.

It's the younger people I can't understand. My cousin Sam, for instance, who lived in his parents' house (they had moved out and given it to him) with a number of cats. Sam did not believe in altering animals; it wasn't natural. It was his theory that they deserved to have fun just like we did. This led to the cat census increasing exponentially after a while.

Sam had many degrees, including a PhD and a law degree. But the only job he liked was driving a taxi. Since Sam rarely worked, he was hard pressed to buy cat chow, let alone human food. But the cats survived and thrived. Sam, on the other hand, died.

My brother is another case in point. Why did he decide to wear a crash helmet when ever he got into the car? And what possessed him to buy, let alone wear, a shiny red track suit? This brother is short and stout and would we well advised not to wear anything red. Why did he decide that natural gas was played out and try to install an oil tank in my mother's backyard? (She wouldn't let him.) Why does he devote every waking hour to a crackpot scheme to harness sea solar power, whatever that is?

And why did he need to teach his eldest child and only son to memorize the bones in the foot at the age of four? If he wanted the kid to be a podiatrist, it didn't work.

Speaking of the aforementioned eldest son, why does he want to go live in Syria and perfect his Arabic? Well, he doesn't look Jewish. That's a blessing, I suppose.

Wanted: more amusing families

I have gotten lots of comments (well, three or four) from people who have enjoyed my posts about my family, asking for more. I'm sorry to say that I believe I have exhausted--for now--my family's amusing antics. The rest of their activities are pretty dreary. Most of them are from Ohio, you know.

So, until I remember more and better anecdotes about my family, I am going to have to borrow someone else's amusing family reminiscences. Does anyone have any amusing family anecdotes they could contribute to my blog? Just until someone in my family does something entertaining?

My uncle's theories of raising children

My uncle Doc was my favorite uncle because he liked to roughhouse. Kids love that. On Saturday nights when I stayed over my grandmother's house, he would bring over a jar of pickled herring and we would share it. But while he was fond of me, he totally disapproved of the way my parents were raising me. I was, said Uncle Doc, spoiled rotten.

His kids, he declared, would be so in awe of him that they would run and hide behind the piano when he came in the door. Need I add that he was a bachelor at the time?

Fast forward a few years, to the time when Uncle Doc and his wife's serene abode was invaded by three little but fast-moving barbarians. They fought with each other 24/7, chasing each other up and down the steps with murder in their eyes. They screamed, whined, and complained. They took each other's toys and did not share. Uncle Doc's solution to this problem was to yell at them. The more they continued their antics, the louder he yelled at them. Threats of death were made, but did nothing to reduce the tumult. At last my aunt would go to bed with a migraine headache and he would stomp off to his office, leaving them in possession of the wreck which the household had become.

At night the bedlam continued, as each of the girls considered it her sovereign right to sleep with the parents. After one or two of them had joined the parental bed, my aunt would get up and go to sleep in any bed which happened to be vacant. You never knew who was going to be in what bed in that household. I was only a few years older than the girls, but I found it impossible to sleep at their house with all the coming and going.

The girls turned out all right. They grew up, graduated from college, stayed out of jail, got married and in due course had children of their own. My oldest cousin raised her children like a Prussian drillmaster. They dusted, swept, put away their toys, and made their beds like little automatons. The only thing missing was the snappy salute. She confided in me that she could never have raised her children the way she was raised, it would have made her crazy.