In Mourning

My computer crashed yesterday, the Japanese & American Wives are drumming their fingers in frustration because I missed the deadline for turning in 60 photo cards to help the other club members identify me, and there's a really annoying guy over on Kate's new blog simply begging to be slapped across the face but I just can't concentrate on much of anything until I post this.

Aunt Chris died the day before yesterday. She was our young aunt, a 12-year old junior bridesmaid at my parents' wedding and just 16 when I arrived on Planet Earth. Chris never let me touch her Perry Como and Elvis albums, but I loved her anyway.

Poor Chris was stuck with the not-so-plum assignment of tending a steadily growing brood of nephews and nieces every Saturday morning while Mom and Grandma played competive Scrabble and gossiped about grownup topics in the kitchen. There were significant attractions in that kitchen -- a parakeet, an enormous and mysterious pressure cooker, and a glass bottle of chocolate milk in the refrigerator -- but Chris usually managed to keep us distracted in the living room and backyard. She was just as afraid of my mother's wrath as I was. We chuckled about this mutual fear at a party when Chris was 45 and I was almost 30, but Chris' laughter had a nervous edge to it and she kept glancing over her shoulder to make sure her big sister was out of earshot.

Her name was Christine but we called her Chris (and sometimes Kickipoo because she hated that nickname and teasing is how my siblings and I expressed love). Her friends called her Teeny because that's what she was, amazingly petite, like her her mother and unlike her two big sisters. She was our measuring stick -- "He's taller than Aunt Chris and he's only nine years old!" -- and our first and best audience. When I was spending the night at Grandma's house, Chris rousted me out of bed and begged me to perform the Rawhide theme song for her friends. It was years, decades to be honest, before I realized my passionate rendition of "Head 'em up, move 'em out" with dramatic arm gestures and little dance moves was not my first stop on the road to Hollywood but simply a comic interlude for a gaggle of schnockered twentysomethings. One of the nice things about Aunt Chris is that she never disabused me of the notion that I might be the next Ethel Merman.


She was a blessing in my life. May she rest in peace with her parents and sisters.