Some other things I love about my aunt include how she taught me to remember my social security number with a pneumonic device or how she always gets the name of every waitress or how she snorts when she laughs. She calls me honeybun and I call everyone else honeybun. I remember all the schemes I've been party to thanks to my aunt. Like the Christmas we all met up at The Mall of America. Or the holiday in San Diego. For whatever reason we arrived first, had one night of just us. We loafed on, I think, a mattress on the floor, gabbing our heads off. I didn't want it to end. I never want it to end. We stood looking out over the ocean with my cousin a few springs ago. She held out her hands to the sunset, okay now everything just...slow down, she said. I understood exactly what she meant. I too wanted the minute to be captured like a diorama I could live in.
It was so sweet she came to my college to see me as the lead in the musical. It couldn't have been an easy trek with my grandfather, but she did it, and we all ate ice cream together in the campus guest house. She helped me book plane tickets when I had a layover from my study abroad and she did my taxes for years. I was always eager to have her on my Pictionary team and thought it was adorable how she adopted Facebook earlier than most Boomers. She made a habit of sending me emoji hearts. My sister once asked her how often she used the website. She said, if you two post something there is a one-hundred percent chance I see it. She watched all the episodes of the TV show I worked on and even flew to LA to attend a taping with her lifelong bff. We went to a sound bath and a diner and had lunch on a Hollywood pool deck.
What a model of girlhood, to have not just one, but a pack of lifelong bffs. I spent a long weekend with her in a bungalow. I studied for finals at the table outside and we took a drive to a manmade lake. On our way home from dinner one night she started singing the Flintstones theme song. I can see it now, the way she bobs her head around when she's having fun. I'm told when she was a child she made a protest sign in support of the Black Panther movement. A couple years ago she made a joke to me about a disgraced celebrity. I said I didn't think it was funny, and instead of rolling her eyes she really sat with that then said, you know I never thought about it that way.
One time we lounged for hours in a coffee shop and she told me everything she was excited about in college. A thing she did decades after it might be traditional. She got her degree online, computing from the basement of her lovely nature-soaked home. She had dreams of ending welfare systems, and I take on these dreams as my own. She organized a women's march in her small neck of the literal woods and volunteers on behalf of animals. She's invested in the Native people surrounding her and often up for an adventure. She sent me a photo recently, she and her boyfriend snowmobiling. She sends me adorable photos of her granddaughter too. We don't see each other often, but we are in an important club together, as are all people who adore the same person.
When I was seven and afraid of her gruff husband she tried to explain Vietnam to me. When he passed away we visited her. I was making a pb and j and she gasped. She took the jar away, it was his last, it was his last. I recalled this years later and she laughed, sorry about that. But I wasn't sorry. I was glad to see someone going a bit nuts over something that seemed nuts-worthy. I've had a couple dreams about the man over the years, and I always let her know. Once their song was playing on the radio as I texted. It was playing in a gift shop last week. I thought of them.
It's cool she's always been up to crafty things. Like glassblowing or beading. A true artist, it's about the journey not the destination. Some other time she was staying in an Arizonan hotel. I drove my scooter over to have the continental breakfast with her. She made up a little English muffin with cream cheese and walnuts. She waxed on about the bad men who'd been in her life, and how she mommed through it. At one point she started crying. Why am I making myself sad? she suddenly asked. She also told me she'd really enjoyed the new Jackass movie, and, inspired by a recent watch, took a flying leap onto her own bed.
I still wish to do an improv show up there some summer. It might not ever happen, but I think about it every year. She said, oh I'd love that, mostly because I'd be cheesin' all over town about my niece. Everybody likes her, except the people who don't. She has wisdom about that too. How once a client was mean and rude and no matter what she couldn't win him. How to this day that ornery guy serves as a reminder that some people will just never dig us and that's fine.
Couldn't have been easy to watch her brother lose his mind and another lose his ties to the family. But she was beside them both when they passed from this earth. Just as she was with her father and mother. If I had to describe my aunt briefly I couldn't do justice, but I think the word "brave" would be in there.
I didn't much know her aunt R, but she made a point to tell me, that's who taught her "to aunt." So I guess I do know R, don't I? Just like most people who know me know my aunt--even if they don't know it.
Last I saw her was for an Italian lunch. There was surprise ham on my pizza and she was upset on my behalf. She looked at my puffy white coat and said in her next life she might dress a little fancier. We remembered how my college boyfriend's dad had been in an internment camp and didn't like to talk about it but did tell my aunt the first time they met, over breakfast. We laughed so much and I don't know what about. Something about vowing never to return to the Orlando airport then deciding she didn't actually care about it that much. There is an urgency when we're in person, like there's a full bottle of magic--only we may not have enough time to uncork and guzzle it all.
She told me she remembers trying to swim across the lake together. We didn't end up doing it, but I think it's really special we set out at all. I was little, but I recall splashing near her, the dock getting smaller and smaller behind us. And other times I feel like I'm on that dock, watching us go. The child and her aunt are the ones getting smaller and smaller.
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| fall 2023 |
