March 16, 2010

My sister phones that our Aunt Daisy is dead. Daisy was the one of my father’s sisters whom we knew best. She would take the bus down from Cleveland to visit us. I remember her young, tanned, vital, and the first vivid example of what I recognized as full-bore female sexuality. She was not like the rest of her women in her family; the ones I knew were frigid and frowning and churchy. She was bouncy, gossipy, happy, full of talk about men and her work at the GE plant. She rode the bus. She saved me once from drowning in Lake Erie. She was like a big sister sometimes, sometimes like a movie star, a whiff about her of a wider world. She stole her own sister’s husband away, a drama of which I was ignorant at the time., though I knew there was a feud between her and Aunt Alice. When relatives began to die and we began to go to their funerals, she was my favorite among them, though I was sad to see her become a grown, married woman, standing in the kitchen with her hands folded in front of her like everybody else. I don’t know that she ever laid eyes on me as a grown man. In any case, farewell. You are probably better remembered than you imagined.