Tuesday, August 26, 2008
I chat with her about as often as I do with anyone. I ask her questions. I even argue with her. She explains things to me, forces me to think about subjects I know little about. Every time I have a conversation with her she teaches me something.
She's my favorite aunt, no question about it. And one of my favorite personalities in all the world. But I have only the vaguest memories of her. She died when I was a small child.
No, I don't hold seances or channel her spirit.
But I do read her books. My dad inherited them after she passed away...I guess no one else wanted a bunch of old paperbacks...and I have been reading them for as long as I can remember.
The books are, for the most part, not ones I would have bought. Lots of politics and political philosophy. Lots of European history. Government. Economics. That sort of stuff.
My aunt was no mere passive reader. She was a margin writer. She commented on passages that struck her. And she underlined, starred, drew exclamation points and question marks. She wrote-in the definitions of unfamiliar words. The end pages of her books are covered with commentaries, summing-up thoughts, assertions.
Once in a while she tucked in a letter she meant to mail later, but somehow never did. I discover these gems and read them with an eager curiosity, peering into a vanished life that I am more familiar with in some ways than any of my friends' lives.
Here's a letter I found slipped into a
book about the Spanish Civil War. It was written in 1976. It's on very
cheap, newsprint-like lined paper, written with a ball-point pen, red
ink. I have no idea who the people named are or more than vaguely what
the subject matter is--Hi, Carlos,
Don't know where you are or when I can mail this but thinking of you. Reading Homage to Catalonia. From that as a taking off point got into some pretty hairy arguments Saturday.
What is a Trotskyist--what I think it is--(communism to succeed must be international)--then why was calling the POUM Trotskyist like a dirty word when they were called that by the communists (PSUC)?
Shirley's finance is a JackASS. He likes to argue but refuses to back up anything he says except with a 'trust me' or 'take my word for it.' Thinks he's a big something as he's an E-4 in NSI--air force intelligence I think-- I got fed up with some of his asinine statements, said 'Who the hell do you think you're kidding--don't think you've ever read a book--a newspaper or even seen a news program.' Blew my KOOL!
Sometimes I get so damn frustrated at how stubborn & stupid people are. He brought up something about the Mayaguase (Sp?) & was hoo-raying our govt. So I asked a question & asked him to give a yes or no answer & he kept saying he was answering but never did--he back-tracked to Hitler somehow. Felt like yanking his hair out!
Ye GODS! We argued from 8:30 to 12:30 & got nowhere.
It ends as if she intended to write more later, tucked the letter inside her book...and forgot about it.
I so love her spirit, her intensity of feeling, her passion. I can't imagine arguing politics for four hours, but I so totally get her frustration with ignorant, stupid people.
I wonder so much about her life. Whenever I have asked those who might know, I have gotten only vague replies. I used to think that was deliberate, but now I believe it is more likely because they don't know. What I do know is that she left home before she graduated from high school. That she had a stillborn child while she was in high school (or could it have been an abortion?--an unmentionable thing in those days). That she was married twice--the first, to a hold-up man who ended up in prison, being annulled; the second to someone everyone agrees was a bum and it didn't last. That she lived in Europe for some time, then in San Francisco and was in some way part of the beat/hippy scene. That she became a commercial artist.
Then she got cancer and died.
I have only the vaguest personal memories of her, and those may be confused with photos I have seen of her. In those she looks gaunt and strained, but seems to be always forcing a smile, being cheerful with a kind of look that says "Oh, don't mind me. I'm okay, really."
She always has a cigarette in her hand or is sitting next to an ashtray full of stubbed-out cigs.
She wears a pleated skirt, turtleneck, knee-high boots and a beret, her hair cut about three inches below her ears. In photos taken outside, she often has on a leather car coat and dark sunglasses.
She looks beautiful, like a young Catherine Hepburn, but a young, ill Catherine Hepburn.
I see echoes of myself in her. I am passionate about the things I care about. Someone recently pointed out to me that I don't suffer fools gladly. I hadn't thought about it, but I guess it's true. Just like my aunt!
I think about all the hours, the endless, tedious, frightening...doomed days she must have spent in hospitals--oh, do I know all about that!--and when I find in one of her books shakily underlined the passage, "It is sound instinct that warns people to keep out of hospitals...Even now doctors can be found whose motives are questionable. Anyone who has had much illness, or who has listened to medical students talking, will know what I mean...."; well, I feel such an affinity for her, such a longing to somehow say to her, "Oh, I know! I know!" I want to touch her hand, look into her eyes and say, "You and I--"
But she's been dead for 20 years. Twenty years. Technically, that is. Because for me, she is as alive as anyone else in my life; at least in a certain way. I know what she thinks--thought--about so many things. Her thoughts are still there in her books, written down fresh as they came to her, and when I come across them, reading the exact same book, it's as if she speaks to me, pointing something out, directing my thought where it might not have gone. Nobody else does that with me. Nobody reads what I am reading as I read it, commenting to me about it as I go along. It's a very intimate experience. Very real. Very much in the present.
So...how can she not be? How can she no longer exist? How can she have been consigned to oblivion before I even knew how to read? I refuse to acknowledge that.
I refuse.
