My Aunt Mamie died on Thanksgiving morning. She was 96. I wasn’t the best niece to her, and unlike my sisters, I rarely visited her in the nursing home. I also failed to make it to her funeral yesterday, so in an effort to do right by her for once in my life, I’m dedicating this post to her memory.

Although Aunt Mamie never had any of her own, she loved babies. Loved them, I say. If you merely showed her a photo of one, she’d immediately begin proclaiming her love to the pictured tyke and wouldn’t stop until she’d said, “God love your little heart,” and “I want to just eat you up,” a dozen or so times. But, oh man, if you showed her a real, live baby? And if you asked her to hold said real, live baby? Step back and watch the true love fest begin. Here’s Aunt Mamie with a four-week-old P.

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I’m generally an anxious, high-strung person, so the idea of getting a great massage has always appealed to me.  Unfortunately, I’m way too cheap to pay more than $20 for one, so it’s likely no coincidence that all my massage experiences have left me even more tense than I was before I went in.  My first massage was at the famed Hotel Gellert in Budapest.  It cost $3.50 and involved me being forced to first take a cold shower and to then soak buck naked in a steaming “thermal bath” with 20 buck naked, elderly Hungarian women.  When I was finally ushered to the massage room, I was placed, still buck naked, on a long metal table, where I was hosed down by one husky woman while a second scrubbed me with a bar of soap that smelled a lot like Lifeboy.

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Forgive the telegraphic nature of this post.  It’s 3:30 am and all four of us are wide awake.  P is in bed eating from a box of cereal proclaiming it to be the “bestest Chinese cereal in the world.”

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We don’t get a lot of snow here, so the last time P saw any was over a year ago in Boston.  She hated it.  In fact, she refused to let any part of her body, including her feet, make contact with it and she kept pleading with me to “bring back the grass.”  At some point in the last year, likely thanks to all her TV friends and their modeling of snow love, P decided to give the white stuff a second chance.

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I’ve always had a healthy respect for tornadoes and I understood at a young age that people took them very seriously.  I grew up in a tornado-prone part of the country and have a number of very vivid childhood memories related to tornadoes.  For instance, I remember  my paternal grandmother once standing in the middle of the living room waving her hands in the air as she spoke in tongues, presumably asking God to redirect the storm headed toward us.  I also remember the sound of the tornado siren in grammar school and how my teacher would lead us  into the hallway where we would crouch down facing the wall with our arms crossed over the tops of our heads as we sang songs about Jesus.  I suppose all this tornado-induced pleading with heaven quickly taught me to fear the long, single siren.

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