note: this was written for, and is dedicated to, the Taverner primitive, with the hopes that he enjoys it.poster-child for the Age of Aquarius. This was my first Thanksgiving without Auntie since 2004—the tradition started in 2005—the now-late aunt of the neighbor’s wife, and when I learned she died last summer, I thought I’d never miss her, but I guess I did.
It was a good Thanksgiving dinner anyway; the neighbor, the neighbor’s wife, their four children (twin 6-year-old girls, a 4-year-old boy, and a six-month-old boy), and the senior business partner who didn’t want to spend the day with his older brother and his family, who came out here last night to discuss some accounting chicanery with me, and to check on some horses for sale a couple of counties south.
The neighbor’s wife and the senior business partner discussed horses over the turkey, while the neighbor and I talked politics, the children sometimes interrupting us but leaving their other two elders alone.
But the event was missing something.
I last saw Auntie last Thanksgiving, when she showed up wearing some sort of plastic protective covering over her nose, or rather, over where part of her nose had been. It was odd, as if looking at someone wearing a big fake beak.
Many years ago Auntie had had her nose pierced, so as to wear some sort of really big metal ring in it, that gave her a distinctly porcine look. It’d been okay for some years, but then last year the hole got infected, and as treatment wasn’t given quickly enough, part of Auntie’s nose had to be chopped off.
The job however wasn’t complete by Thanksgiving; the hard-pressed taxpayers of Missouri insisting the real peril—gangrene or something—had been removed, and there wasn’t yet enough money in the treasury to afford her some cosmetic surgery, thus the beak.
At some point during that dinner, while I was sitting at the table, my elbows on it and my chin cupped in my hands, staring at her, Auntie became considerably discombobulated with both myself and the neighbor’s wife—her own niece, remember—saying we were “evil.â€
She got all shook up, and so the neighbor’s wife and I left, while the neighbor took care of Auntie. The neighbor was no relative of Auntie’s, but he got on okay with her, and his inherent decency compels him to be compassionate even with those who cannot possibly be any good for him.
I always suspected Auntie didn’t care for the neighbor’s wife, because she reminded Auntie of her late older sister, the neighbor’s wife’s mother. Her appearance, her mannerisms, her voice.
The neighbor’s wife saddled up a horse while I got into a truck, and we went out riding across the Sandhills. I myself have done this horse-riding thing in the past, but after losing my right elbow in January 1993, I was told not to, and so I haven’t.
It was a nice late-autumn afternoon, some light snow on the ground but not much, as I watched the neighbor’s wife ride across the meadows, looking very much like a young Elizabeth I, down to her reddish-blonde hair even, a cape billowing behind her.
When the sun was starting to go down, as it does early in the Sandhills in autumn, she left the horse to be picked up later, and the two of us rode to the big city, because she decided she needed to get some salad-dressing and crackers to complement meals the rest of that holiday weekend. When we returned, Auntie was sleeping, and so I never saw Auntie again.
* * * * * * * * * *
Auntie, born in 1951 in Kansas City, Missouri, was, as already mentioned, the younger sister of the neighbor’s wife’s mother, growing up in a suburban middle-class atmosphere that radiated nothing but concern and security and affection. The neighbor’s wife’s grandfather was a mailman or a milkman, or something like that.
However, sometime in the mid-1960s, when Auntie was 14, 15, years old, she got introduced to hippies and to drugs. The drugs did her in; she became recalcitrant, hostile, and even violent at times. Auntie made it through high school, but with an always-plummeting academic record.
By the late 1960s, Auntie was a full-blown hippie, and went away from home to join a commune out in Colorado. Apparently it was the usual typical hippiecommune, where the hippieguys sat around “philosophizing†while the hippiegirls did all the work, including serving as objects of sexual gratification for the hippieguys at will. And drugs, drugs, drugs.
Sometime by the time she was in her early 20s, Auntie was living on the streets of Denver, Colorado, getting by selling her body for drugs. She became a nuisance to the good and decent people of Denver, and was committed to an insane asylum where, deprived of drugs, she developed the most-curious habit of body-mutilation and decorating.
After some years of that, she was kicked out of Colorado into the lap of the long-suffering taxpayers of Missouri. She was in a “half-way†house for a while, and then committed to hard-core “institutionalization†after, through the magnanimity of Ronald Reagan, she began riding the social security disability gravy train, being “too depressed†to work for a living.
For the next three decades, Auntie was in-and-out of half-way houses, assisted living, institutions.
While her parents both lived, they were responsible for their daughter, but after her father died, her ancient mother and the neighbor’s wife’s mother, Auntie’s older sister, found Auntie a burden too large to bear, and she was signed over to the custody of the taxpayers of Missouri.
At the funeral of her father (the neighbor’s wife’s grandfather), Auntie showed up under escort, saggingly obese, purple spiked hair, the nose-ring, clothes way too small for her, earrings made of Stanley screwdrivers, and made so much noise Auntie was never seen in public again.
The neighbor’s wife’s mother, Auntie’s older sister, died in 2001, and asked that the neighbor’s wife and her older brother, a financial success south of Kansas City, look after Auntie best they could. Auntie was, after all, family, and God compels one to be merciful to the unfortunate.
The neighbor’s wife was born in 1978, her brother a couple of years earlier, and neither had known Auntie when Auntie was sane. But both being people of sound Christian and Republican principle, they dutifully kept their promise to their mother, the neighbor’s wife having Auntie up here for Thanksgiving, and the neighbor’s wife’s brother having Auntie down there for Christmas every year.
* * * * * * * * * *
Now, it is not sporting to make fun of, to ridicule, to mock, human freaks…..but there’s an exception to every rule, and that exception applies here.
franksolich himself is a human freak, and knows whereof he speaks. It appears that because my mother innocently grabbed a certain bar of soap to wash her hands, the infant franksolich still inside her womb was greatly affected, coming into this world absent ears.
It is unsporting, an offense to God, to make fun of an ugly child or a crippled dwarf or a clumsy hunchback, because such people were not responsible for the ways they turned out, and it is possible such people are given to us by God so we may learn compassion, understanding, and wisdom.
It is however perfectly okay to make fun of people who self-uglify themselves, who voluntarily of their own free will make themselves into grotesque monsters and freaks.
franksolich does it all the time, and with an utterly clean conscience.
Back in autumn 2005, when invited to the neighbor’s house for Thanksgiving, I’d been warned of Auntie’s, uh, rather unusual appearance; it was “bad†enough that the children, as they came into this world, were sent to the neighbor’s parents’ home for Thanksgiving dinner, lest they be permanently scarred by the sight.
Auntie always came up here to the Sandhills via bus, being met at Sioux City by the neighbor. It was, quite understandably, a bus scheduled to arrive in the darkness of night, and the day after, depart in the darkness of night.
Being an incompetent person, Auntie was always accompanied by a social worker from Kansas City, a native of a small town in northwestern Iowa. A slight, frail, wimpish balding little guy in his 30s, and schooled very well in this socially-sensitive, respectful-of-diversity, claptrap. It was a win-win situation for him, getting to go home for the holiday, at the same time being paid to take care of Auntie.
I did not accompany the neighbor when he picked up Auntie for Thanksgiving 2005, but I did the following year, being somewhat more used to her appearance. The bus arrived about 1:00 a.m., and it freaked me out that the neighbor actually had to sign some sort of bill-of-lading, taking temporary possession of Auntie, promising the good and decent people of Missouri he’d take good care of her. And then the following night, about 3:00 a.m., the social worker having to give the neighbor a signed release from that pledge.
* * * * * * * * * *
Auntie, other than her physical appearance, startling and disgusting at the same time, was a tedious old bore, totally self-absorbed, not interested in anything other than her own self. Much of this of course was due to drugs; the illicit ones she took as a teenager and for a while afterwards, and the psychiatric ones she was taking for some decades later…..in addition to heart pills, kidney pills, bladder pills, blood-pressure pills, cholesterol pills, stomach pills, pain pills, general overall pills.
I forget which Thanksgiving it was, that I showed up, finding the neighbor’s wife at the kitchen table, carefully taking pills from at least two-score tan transparent plastic bottles with child-proof caps, carefully reading the instructions on each label, and plunking pills into their appropriate bins in a large transparent plastic box divided up into those bins. The bins were marked “8:00 a.m.,†“noon,†“4:00 p.m.,†“8:00 p.m.,†“midnight,†and somesuch.
Auntie was an insensate vegetable—an animated vegetable that could get around on its own, but a vegetable nonetheless, with no human feelings at all. And since she had gotten that way on her own free will, of her own volition, I felt no compunction at all about being rude to her. It’s not that she was born nuts, after all; she voluntarily became that way on her own.
Auntie would’ve been a primitive on Skins’s island, if she’d been more than just perfunctorily literate, as she monotonously spouted the usual primitive talking-points; she hated Republicans, she thought people who worked for a living were pigs, she loathed “breeders†who had children, she abominated America.
It was Thanksgiving 2008 I learned Auntie had actually voted for the Magic One; not only once, but twice. She vaguely described “a man†who came to the half-way house “with papers†the inmates signed, voting, after which each was given a “toy.†And then some days later all the inmates were collected into a bus and taken downtown, where they again signed some papers and voted, after which “a big black man†gave them some sort of “computer music thing,†which soon thereafter “broke.â€
About religion, Auntie was of two minds. She detested Christianity, but was infatuated with other, more esoteric systems, most of them from southern Asia. She could weigh on for more than an hour about this or that religion on the Indian peninsula, and how great they were.
The neighbor and the neighbor’s wife were, and are, ignorant of eastern religions, but since there’s some treatises on the subject here, by Sir Christmas Humphreys from the first half of the last century, it was assumed this was an area of expertise for me, and so I was the one burdened “listening†to her about it.
Actually, I found out that Auntie knew more about Buddhism than Pedro Picasso, the “Atman†primitive on Skins’s island, but that isn’t saying much.
* * * * * * * * * *
On the other hand, Auntie was very hostile to God, and any mention of God would set her off, causing her to wail and convulse and moan.
Now, all people with mental problems, or petrified brain-cells, have certain “hot buttons†that decent and civilized people don’t push, for fear of a disturbance, and so franksolich, being a nice guy, one of the nicest guys one can ever hope to meet, doesn’t do that either, pushing any “hot buttons.â€
With one exception.
I dunno why mention of God bothers some people so much. God Is, and there isn’t a damned thing one can do about it, so one might as well accept, adapt, and move on. God hasn’t ever done anybody any harm, and so there’s no reason to get all bent out of shape about God.
If God is a “hot button†with anyone—sane or loony—I jab that button vigorously and often.
There’s no reason for anybody to dislike God.
The first Thanksgiving, in 2005, the neighbor offered Grace before we all ate, and Auntie threw a tantrum.
The next Thanksgiving, I offered to say Grace.
I told the neighbor I’d say it in medieval Latin, which surely wouldn’t upset Auntie, who would have no idea, no idea at all, that I was mentioning God.
As some here know, I’d finally gotten around to taking intensive speech-therapy when I was 20, 21, years old, a junior and senior in college. I hadn’t had it when I was growing up, because the parents had responsibilities other than just me, responsibilities which included a frail younger brother.
Since I was already grown, and time was so short, I underwent intensive speech therapy, three afternoons a week, one evening a week, and at least three or four hours a day of “practice.†As I cannot hear my own voice, this took coaching and disciplined practice. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, speech therapy.
To this day, I still have a
repertoire of memorized words and phrases that I could probably repeat without interruption for at least half or three-quarters of an hour—passages specifically selected to give me intelligible speech. Much of it was from the 1611
King James Bible (not later versions; the real original one), the 1542 Anglican
Book of Common Prayer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the ditties of Gilbert & Sullivan, poems of poets whose names I no longer remember but whose poems I do, and various phrases in foreign languages, such as German, French, Spanish, Yiddish, and Latin.
It’s something I’ll have to do the rest of my life, so I don’t backslide into earlier unintelligible patterns of speech.
It of course paid off; no one since I was 21 years old has ever had to ask me to repeat something, as each single word is precisely pronounced and crystal clear, even though I tend to speak with a low voice.
It had the unanticipated effect of giving me the “Tudor accent,†an accent as used in England circa 1485-1603, but only speech therapists and professional linguists can notice it; for average ordinary people, while a bit slow-moving on conversation, I’m great at delivering prayers and eulogies.
So on Thanksgiving Day 2006, at the neighbor’s, I delivered Grace, in medieval Latin, from one of the speech-practice exercises I’ve repeated almost every day of my life.
It had been explained to Auntie that I would be saying something in a “foreign language†which she wouldn’t understand, and so shouldn’t worry about.
After which I said a simple short “Grace,†the climatic phrases from an ancient Roman Catholic prayer for the exorcism of demons.
It was most peculiar; by her startled and terrorized reaction, Auntie must’ve understood what I’d said.
It was weird, really weird, Auntie’s reaction.
It took quite a while to sedate her down.
After that, I decided I wouldn’t say Grace in front of Auntie any more.
Auntie was always hostile to me all the Thanksgivings following, but the impact must’ve worn off somewhat, because she didn’t become as physical as she had when she’d heard it. Upset, but not earth-shakingly so, at my appearance.
Instead, upon seeing her when going over for Thanksgiving, I merely muttered a
Deus tibi benedicas, which would give her a fit, but only a small one, and controllable.
* * * * * * * * * *
Last Thanksgiving, the Thanksgiving of 2010, it was sadly apparent Auntie was in serious decline; disregarding the plastic protuberance on her face, she was fatter than ever, dropsical, and possessive of a somewhat-fetid body odor. She was using two of those aluminum upper-arm-clenching crutches, her Christmas-tree-ornament-like earrings bobbling from her extended earlobes.
The poster-child for the Age of Aquarius, Auntie; the legacy of the hippies.
However, I have no doubt that come November 2012, she’ll be voting for the Magic One down in Kansas City, two times if she can get away with it.
