The really sad thing is, it turns out Great Aunt Clara was the coolest relative I ever had, in her generation.   Only I didn't hear a single peep about her wild youth, until after she was dead.   Dark family secrets, don't you know.   Actually, not so dark, no more than light grey -- more of a light beige, really -- maybe just slightly off-white.   But in my tightly wound family (the Catholic-American side), so much that brings happiness was a secret.   Fate kinda fucked her over, then god fucked with her head.   So I really feel sorry for her.   And sorry for myself, that I didn't really know her, until she was dead.   How fucked up is that?

 

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| So what was the big mystery behind Aunt Clara?

 

Oh, that.   Lived with a man, out of wedlock.   Drank liquor in public, during prohibition.   Didn't go to church.   May have smoked cigarettes, for all I know.   That kinda thing.   I suppose she was kind of a flapper.   And she was my grandmother's older sister, setting such a naughty example.

 

Later, she married the guy.   They couldn't have kids.   He died young.   Then folks convinced her god was punishing her for their sins.   She started going to church.   Never married again.   (I'm thinking he was true love.  That seems to run in the family.)   She lived alone, working in sweatshops, like uneducated widows do in sexist economic systems.   Shoveled coal into her own furnace well into old age, because she was too poor to get a modern furnace.   By the time I met her, she was perpetually bent over, looked partly broken.

 

Oh, and she was nutty OCD.   She saved everything.   Old corks, dead light bulbs, all kinds of things.   In the latter days of my childhood, when they sold her old rowhouse to pay for the nursing home, we went to clean it out.   And it was a treasure drove of bizarre antiques, after decades of never throwing out anything that was inorganic.   Even then I recognized how amazing some of this stuff was -- and how freaky other bits were.

 

She also had these little plastic boxes, that pins came in (from the sweatshop).   She'd save pennies in them; each one held maybe 50 pennies.    As little kids, when we (rarely) went to visit her (out of duty), she'd give one box to each of us.   We'd dutifully say "thank you", but thought it was kinda weird.

 

Depressingly sweet.   In hindsight, I think she was incredibly lonely (living in the midst of a sizable metropolis).

 

But, as a kid, I just thought she was some boring old aunt.    I was a sheltered and self-absorbed little suburbanite, and poverty was something you read about in Dickens stories (which I never liked).   Even hearing about my father and mother's impoverished childhoods, I took middle class comforts as my birthright.   I was a pretty shallow little kid.

 

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