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m u s i c. m i s c h i e f. a r t. |
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My Aunt Kattie. She was nuts and unintentionally funny. Those are the people you miss the most.
I still miss my Aunt Kattie. She died 15 years ago at an age I won't disclose because she herself guarded it so passionately her entire life. I thought we shouldn’t even put her date of birth on her tombstone, but my dad said we must, although we did agree not to reveal her Christian name--Catherine Mary. In fact, we didn't even know that her name was Catherine Mary until she died and we discovered it on her birth certificate. We thought her name was Kathleen because she always signed birthday cards "Aunt Kathy." But no one ever called her Kathy, so it's hard to gauge which name she really liked best. To us, she was always just Kattie, and as far as anyone reading this essay is concerned, her real name was Kathleen and she arrived on this planet on a date that will never leave my lips.
No doubt, Aunt Kattie felt free to call herself whatever she pleased as my grandmother, an Irish immigrant, routinely gave her offspring alternate names. My father, Robert, the baby, was called Bobby, easily enough. And Helen was Helen, James was Jimmy and Agnes was Aggie. But Margaret was Sissy, John was Sonny, Edwin was Buzzy and Anna May was Ceil. The star of the family, though, at least to me, was Kattie, my godmother, and she gave herself three additional names to prove it.
She also gave herself permission to be the vainest woman alive. A glamour girl who came of age in the 1940s, her hair was always teased, coiffed and sprayed, her make-up was always perfect, and she was always smartly accessorized with only the very best in costume jewelry. To her, rhinestones may as well have been diamonds. Glamour was the thing, not how much you paid for it. She never seemed fazed that her fur-collar coat was 20 years old, nor that her huge Jackie O sunglasses came from Rite Aid. She never apologized, either, for her affinity for dresses. Not once during her lifetime did she wear slacks, shorts or a bathing suit, nor did she once sit in the sun, hence her gorgeous skin.
Even as she laid in the coffin, my grieving aunts couldn't stand to see her look anything less than perfect. During one sober, non tear-filled moment, as we all stood coffin-side, my Aunt Helen realized--in a bolt of genius--that Kattie was missing her blue eye shadow and sprung into action to correct the problem. We had to admit that she did a fine job of making Kattie look like Kattie again, and I wonder to this day if Kattie’s vanity reached beyond the grave and inspired the correction.
I actually learned a lot about vanity’s value from Aunt Kattie, in particular its life-affirming qualities. On the last night of her life, as she laid in bed, barely able to talk or move, my cousin Pat had to gingerly tell my doctor-hating aunt that an ambulance had been called to take her to the hospital. Upon hearing that company was coming, she miraculously sat upright and declared, "Ceil--get my make-up." Vanity proved a far greater resuscitator than any machine.
Aunt Kattie also taught me that there's no piece of junk that can't be fixed by a can of gold spray-paint. Over the years, everything in her house was at one time or other spray-painted gold, baby blue or pink (hence my dad's selection of a pink tombstone for her grave). She also had an affinity for ball fringe, which graced everything from lamps to Italian figurines sporting ball-fringe headbands.
It's those kinds of things you miss most about a person, of course, after he or she is gone. Her ditziness was legendary, and we'd laugh at her all the time, particularly when she'd call to report something she'd just heard on her 50-channel police radio that let her know what every crook was up to in a 20-mile radius. We often wrote her off as just kooky, until she called one day to tell us that a break-and-entry had just been reported in the house next to ours. Imagine the robbers' surprise to see us all standing on our front porch as they ran out of the house with a television set.
I still miss her terribly and think of her often. When she was alive, I would often fantasize about having enough money one day to buy an apartment building on my street that I could pack her and all of my aunts into. I always believed that it would really happen, until she died of course. I then realized that not all dreams come true, and that many of them die with the people they're attached to. I still love my aunts, but we all feel Kattie's glaring absence.
These days, I most often feel it when I go into Starbuck's. Kattie died before there was a Starbuck's on every corner, and I always think about how much she would have loved the coffee. She always made her own daily blast-off brew, which only a good amount of half-and-half could tame. For this and so many other reasons, I wish she could have lived just a little longer, but at least I was able to get some of her prized possessions when we cleared her house. When she died, the rest of the family took the expensive stuff, but I took the spray-painted junk . . . and the ball fringe.
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