Creative Memoirs Wednesday, September 12, 2-4 p.m., Calvert Library
I’m unsure exactly how we left it last time, but one theme we did consider was on memorable aunts in our lives. So here are some pieces to inspire, or reaffirm. But another theme we considered was Ghosts We Have Known—and in some cases we have a memoir that would fit both. Respond in prose or poetry.
Ann B. Knox
Aunt From the Country
The wedding was perfect: heirloom
dress, the groom somber with joy.
Later, an aunt from the country grew
bawdy and danced with a waiter until
the band packed up. She’d driven home
singing to herself, recalling music,
her body’s sway, young men leaping,
lofting a blue garter. His hand
had been hard, sweaty, and he’d
held her eyes even as young girls
twisted around them. She remembered
ceremony and the falling away of ceremony,
how, without gloves, she’d felt flesh
and for a moment hunger hollowed
her belly like the suck before
a wave that drains mudflats,
exposing a hull slick with weed,
a shimmer of fish flailing the surface.
On the porch the next day she smelled
dry rot she’d not noticed before,
like a barn abandoned or hay
too long unturned. With a J-bar
she pulled the weathered plank,
it lifted with a cry carrying
rosettes of puncture wounds.
She stood, arms crossed hugging
herself. The plank gleamed, wind
sharpened carrying the smell of salt.
It was a fine wedding, good to dance,
good the waiter’s small curved smile.
From The Dark Edge, Pudding House Publications,
copyright 2004 by Ann B. Knox.
==
Nikki Giovanni
My grandmother made me think I was the best thing since sliced bread. I had to do book reports for her. My grandmother made me think I was smart, and then I had an aunt who also made me feel smart. What would we do without our aunts and grandmothers?
Nikki Giovanni, quoted in USA Today
==
Donald Shomettee –Aunt Katy
Mary Catherine, oldest of 14 children whom she helped to raise, was born in Texas. Her father was a cowboy, a railroad telegrapher, and a general neer-do-well who was kicked out of the state as a scab. Her mother was the lastborn of a German immigrant who arrived aboard the E. F. Gabin, one teacher among 500 farmers. He founded a German school and town. They ended up in Washington DC.
A stunning tall blonde, in World War One she volunteered as a nurse in a Kentucky hospital. She tended Frederick Gooch, who had joined the British Expeditionary Force as an aerial photographer. Shot down over Ypes, suffering from mustard gas, he landed in her care.
They fell in love, married, headed west in 1918, an era when to drive across the country was rare, and panned gold in the Sierra Mountains. A beautiful woman in a man’s world, she washed for the men in the camp— stress for Freddy. He had been emasculated by shrapnel in the war, so they never had children, but Aunt Katy would raise my brother, just as our grandmother raised me when our mother became paralyzed.
Running out of money, they drove farther west to Hollywood. Freddy worked in the infant film industry, she worked as a cigarette girl, and both got bit parts. She wore a Theda Bera outfit, semi-nude with serpents circling her breasts--before censorship in the cinema.
They returned to Washington before World War Two, and all the brothers joined the service.
Under the name Mary Gooch, Aunt Katy started to write short stories and articles for an uncle who was a publisher in Texas. She struck gold with a series of soft-cover books selling for 25 cents, now $100 on eBay. She transformed her siblings into fiction. Heavy on the sex for that day, she wrote her bad books rapidly and they were published rapidly. Returning to Hollywood in the 1950s to try to sell film scripts—in vain--she ghosted for the TV star of Gunsmoke, James Arness.
They returned east, Uncle Freddy died of lung cancer, and Aunt Katy became self-sufficient through both fiction and painting. A true American primitive, she gave me my first sketchpad, got me into painting and writing, and was the only relative who seemed to care for me. Herself a colorist unafraid of a palette, on her death bed at 95 she was upset because she was being taken away just when she had started drawing in pencil and ink. She remained gorgeous to her dying day.
Donald Shomette, copyright 2007, from a family history in progress.
==
Vlassios Tigkarakis – Aunt Kati
Thia Ekaterini, or Kati, was my most important aunt, my father’s sister. Her brother, then 30, asked her to arrange an evening with a certain classmate of hers. Kati, a cheerful teacher who loved to play with children, introduced her beautiful olive-skinned classmate with almond eyes. And that is how my father met my mother.
Aunt Kati’s mother dominated: self-made, independent, with strong ideas for the post-war years in Greece. One of the few women to find her own job, she taught at the prestigious Athenian school, then decided to take her two children away from their father and raise them on her own—something unthinkable. So when Kati fell pregnant by a handsome young man named Thanassis (the word athanasia means immortality), her mother was adamant that they should marry. This led to a happy wedding and an unhappy marriage. Their son Constantinos would later become the only thing bringing them together occasionally, and he came to believe that he must.
One sultry night, 21 July 1990, Constantinos and six other 16-year-old friends were walking to one of their country houses from a local dance club 60 kilometers from Athens. A speeding car lost control and plowed through the boys. Constantinos was among those killed. Both Kati and Thanassis were devastated, Thanassis even more so because his son had become his reason for existence—so much so that in the subsequent trial, when the driver of that car requested that he be merely fined, Thanasissis pulled out a gun in the courtroom, killed both the driver’s lawyers, severely wound the driver and several judges, then turned the gun on himself. So Aunt Kati was devastated to have lost the two most significant men in her life.
She finally got back on her feet, married Vangelis, but always wore a gold heart with the painting of Constantinos….
Copyright 2007 by Vlassios Tigkarakis, from a memoir in progress
==
Elisavietta Ritchie
Thanksgiving With Great Aunt Eugenya
Her mostly blind eyes could still see
bright colors, and my salad gleamed:
red peppers, yellow squashes, green beans.
She lifted the silver serving spoon
over the gold-rimmed plate,
inspected it closely, recalled
a bullet she had extracted
from the gangrenous leg
of a soldier in a hospital tent.
The doctor killed, she learned
to amputate on the battlefield.
Not quite dinner conversation but
she was a nurse, World War One.
Well-born young ladies signed up,
no eligible men left in Petersburg.
No man in my house, and because
I was unsure where to begin,
Great Aunt Eugenya carved the turkey.
Her fingers were skilled in the Braille
of bones, and understood flesh.
The glistening skin stayed intact.
Hungry for history and science,
my daughter and I asked questions.
My aunt described fighting, famine…
After the Revolution
the Bolsheviks put her to work
in a prison camp. As a nurse
she could sign out the sick
to hospital: there they’d get better
rations, a chance to escape.
Finally she too fled, to Estonia,
Germany. Another war…
Then the Red Army advanced…
She reached England, America.
Through years as a nurse
she kept her tin army cup.
Born in a safer land and time,
I carry the burden of not
suffering war first-hand.
Best I can do is hear out, absorb
others’ lives, try to nurture them.
My daughter became a doctor,
also learned war firsthand--
Cyprus, Korea, Somalia --
C-rations on Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, we don’t recite grace but
in silence thank God for turkey,
colorful vegetables, this interim peace.
[published in The Ledge, 2000 and in Awaiting Permission to Land, Cherry Grove Series, copyright 2006 Elisavietta Ritchie]
