My great aunt Effie

When I moved to Minnesota to go to law school, my grandma Joy wrote and asked me to spend some time with her baby sister, Effie. Effie Carlota. A dutiful granddaughter, I looked my great aunt Effie up soon after I arrived in town. Effie was lonely and burdened with a senile husband, Ray. She basically never saw anyone unless they came to her home because going out with Ray was difficult and he could not be left alone. She grocery shopped once a week, with Ray in tow and it was a considerable burden to go out with Ray. Once, for example, he had gone into a restroom, began banging on the stall walls and would not stop, would not leave the bathroom.  This behavior really embarrassed my great aunt.  Soon I was doing her grocery runs.

She seemed very happy to have a new grand niece to shower attention on. I was her only relative in the Twin Cities. I was not used to getting a lot of attention from relatives and I liked it. Effie soon was inviting me to come to her home every Wednesday for lunch. She always encouraged me to feel free to bring a friend from law school. She was very impressed that I went to law school and she was always impressed by any 'boys' I brought along with me. She was especially impressed with a friend named Gary because he always wore a jacket and tie. Effie thought law students should dress like lawyers and she could hardly bear it that I wore jeans to class. On several occasions, she took me shopping, with Uncle Ray in tenuous tether, to buy me business clothes. Then she expected me to wear them to our weekly lunches. And I did. It made her happy and I guess I was happy to make her happy.

The lunches were fantastic. Planning what she would prepare, shopping for it and then carefully preparing it was the highlight of her week. She steadily asked me to talk about what I liked to eat and then she would research recipes to please me.

No one had ever given me this kind of attention before. She made a very big fuss about my birthday each year. She always insisted I invite a friend. She always gave me really lovely presents. And how she fussed over the meals. Effie color-coordinated her tableware to match the food. For my first Effie birthday, I had said I liked avocados. She served avocados, of course, but what I remember most vividly was that she had bought new napkin rings to match the avocados. What I remember most is how happy it made her that I noticed the green napkin rings.

Effie was a tiny woman. And cute. She had what I believe was a lifetime habit of using her smallness and cuteness to, skillfully, charm and manipulate others. She'd scrunch herself up, using her most adorable tone and get whatever she wanted.

My chums in law school often teased me about my great aunt Effie. At first, they thought I had made her up. Her name and her weekly luncheon parties sounded too quaintly old-fashioned to be real. In fact, the only reason I ever brought any of the guys to lunch with Effie was to prove that she was real. My friend Gary really loved going to Effie's with me on Wednesdays. Looking back, I am wishing I could remember why it gave him such a kick. I could never get any other friends to go more than once.

My grandmother and my great aunt Effie experienced a revival in their relationship. They exchanged letters weekly, something they had not been doing before I moved to St. Paul. The main topic in these letters was Effie's weekly visit with me. Effie would write to Grandma and tell her what we had for lunch, what I wore, how the lemon bars turned out and what I had talked about. Then my grandmother wrote back to Effie, writing separately to me, and commented on what we had for lunch, what I wore, how her recipe for lemon bars differed from Effie's and whatever Effie had reported that I talked about. My grandmother would also write to me, telling me what Effie told her. A hive of love.

My grandmother died right after my spring break of my first year in law school. I went to visit her for that spring break, visiting her on my own, in South Dakota,  for the first time ever. All other visits had been a part of brawling family trips but one. Once, when I was about ten, my aunt and uncle drove me to South Dakota, I stayed back with grandma for six weeks and then my mom came, with my brothers, to bring me home in time for school.  During that first solo visit with my grandma, she announced that we were going to 'the Woolworth's' to buy her a pair of tennis shoes. I dutifully wrote to my mother about our trip to 'the Woodworth's' and reported that grandma had bought a pair of navy tennis shoes. My mom wrote back and chastised me for lying. Mom wrote "There is no way mymother would ever buy tennis shoes." Grandma usually wore tied black oxfords. What I had left out of my first letter to mom about those shoes, but included in my follow up and my mom still believed I was lying was that grandma had bunions and she thought the tennis shoes would be more comfortable on the bunions, her attempt to avoid surgery. She cut holes out of the sides of those navy tennis shoes.

It was fun when my mom arrived and saw that grandma really had bought herself a pair of tennis shoes.  I had some hope that my mother might apologize for having called me a liar but my mom was never one to acknowledge any imperfection.

On my law school spring break visit, my grandmother was in the hospital. Grandma still insisted on planning meals for me, handing me her wallet and directing me to restaurants, even telling me what to order. She got several of her friends to have me over for dinner and, based on what she had learned in Effie's letters, she would tell them what to prepare for me. She explained to her friends that she was asking them to stand in for her as my grandma and she apologized for having the audacity to tell them what to fix but I was her dear granddaughter and she was sure they understood.

Nobody had ever treated me with so much careful attention.  She also insisted I use her car. And when I would spend time with her in the hospital, she had me carefully account for everything I spent in Mitchell, S.D. that week. She wanted to be sure I was using her money, not my own.

One evening, at the hospital, I suggested we call Effie. We did, of course. For the rest of her life (Effie lived another twenty years), Effie often reminded me that it was because of me that she got to talk to her sister Joy that last time.

During my spring break visit with my grandmother, I called my mom and told her that I believed Grandma was about to die. My mother sneered at me, telling me my instincts were useless. Grandma had just turned eighty. When I first arrived at the hospital, Grandma said to me "You know, Tree, I turned eighty this week. Eighty is enough for me. Joe is waiting for me and I am ready to see him. Eighty is enough for me." As she said 'Eighty is enough for me", I felt her life force leaving her, her soul flying towards her Joe, my grandpa.  I felt like she was staying alive just long enough for our visit. She died the day after I left. Then my mom was angry, telling me I should have been more forceful when I had suggested she come see her mother before she died.

So. I had initially paid attention to Effie grudgingly. But in one and one half semesters of law school, she and I had woven real family ties around each other. It was hard to lose my grandma but I had my newly-discovered, newly-beloved, great-aunt Effie.

It was a win win.

I had lunch with Effie every single Wednesday of my law school years. When I graduated, I started having Sunday dinner with her. I kept this up for a long time but it grew difficult. I got married and my husband Frank was not charmed by my old-fashioned, fussy aunt. He figured she had never had kids and she had some money socked away so he was willing to show up and eat her free meals but he didn't like to listen to her talk about picking out her china with Ray or listen to her tell us about all the squirrels that had enjoyed the walnuts in her back yard over the years. Gradually, Frank and I stopped going. Frank made fun of me for taking pleasure in Effie's oft-repeated little stories. I began to feel like a fool because I loved to hear Effie tell me the same stories over and over. I can remember thinking she was still in love with Ray and she told stories about her life with him so she could feel her love for him. It was an honor to be shown her private love for her husband. Effie also told a lot of stories about my Grandpa Joe. Effie for some reason, had really adored my Grandpa Joe, married to Joy, Effie's eldest sister and my maternal grandma. How it had fascinated me to learn someone thought my Grandpa Joe was gregarious and funny. He was stern, harsh, irritable and demanded silence from us kids most of the time.  All us kids thought of Grandpa as an old sourpuss but Effie thought he had been one of the funniest and most fun men she had ever met. Naturally, her stories about a funny grandpa I had never seen were interesting to me. Effie knew a Joe Crowley I had never even glimpsed. Frank said there was something wrong with me if I thought they were interesting.

And then Frank and I moved to Omaha.

I hated Omaha, not as much as I came to hate Frank, but as soon as the marriage was over, I returned to Minnesota. By then I had my daughter Rosie. Uncle Ray was living in a nursing home. Effie spent all her waking hours at Ray's bedside. Her life was lonelier than ever. She spent all her days with her unconscious husband.

My daughter was two years old when I moved back to Minnesota. She and I began to visit Effie in Ray's nursing home every Sunday. It was sometimes very weird for poor little Rosie to go to that nursing home. A nursing home, we learned, is full of lonely old people who don't get enough visitors. And many of these lonely old people adore children. In no time, everyone came to expect Rosie's Sunday appearance and want to snatch a little bit of her attention. One little two-year-old cannot fill the lonely hearts of a dozen old people. Walking down the hallway to Ray's room, sometimes the hall was lined with people in wheel chairs, all with outstretched arms, reaching for Rosie's attention. I used to think it must have been extremely odd, surreal, for little Rosie.  I gradually concluded that the old people, their hands outstretched hoping the delightful child passing by would interact with them must have appeared like ghouls preying on little Rosie.  There was no easy solution. I was determined to visit Effie every Sunday and the only way we could see her was to go to the nursing home. I talked a lot to Rosie, while she was two, then three, then four, about respecting our elders. I told her stories about my Grandma and how I had loved her and how I was paying my respects to my grandma by showing up in Effie's life.  Eventually, Rosie and I simply steeled ourselves to ignore all the lonely old people, rush down the hall and give our attention to Effie, who always sat at Ray's bedside.

Effie, of course, adored Rosie. She always had some odd little treat for her. The treats were odd because they were all gleaned from Ray's meal trays. Cartons of cranberry juice or pineapple cups.

Effie lived near the nursing home and she walked to and fro. When I realized that she was making virtually all of her meals from Ray's meal trays, I began to cajole her to let me take her grocery shopping. Soon, we ended each Sunday visit by a trip to a grocery store and then driving Effie home and fixing her a real dinner, probably the only real meal she ate all week.

This weekly ritual, which we kept up for almost four years, until Ray died, was not suffused with much light or joy. It was dutiful. I always had a sense of duty about it but my sense of duty was not just to Effie and my grandma. I also felt that I was instilling something valuable in my daughter. I felt like I was giving her a meaningful gift by sharing our lives with people who were at the end of theirs. I remember wishing, just inside myself, never voicing it to anyone, that I was doing the right thing by concretely showing my daughter how to love old people.  I believed I was modeling respect and care for one's elders to my daughter. Ha! She lived in Chicago for years while my mother, her grandmother, was still alive and never once sought my mom out. And she has rejected me for many years.

Ray died while Rosie was visiting her dad for Christmas in Omaha. I asked Frank to keep Rosie for an extra week so I could give Effie my full attention for the funeral. It was during this visit that Frank molested Rosie. Later, when I found out what had happened, I beat myself up a lot for having asked him to keep her that extra week. Maybe it wouldn't have happened if he had sent her home when originally planned. Ouch, this memory still whips me.

After Ray died, Rosie and I continued to visit Effie weekly. We would go out to lunch, then go for a walk and then go to the grocery store. Effie lived near Como Park. She and Uncle Ray walked all the way around Como Lake every day of the married lives until Ray could go no longer. She liked to walk around the lake and adore Rosie. She also liked to walk through the Como Park Zoo and the Como Park Conservatory.

We went to the conservatory a lot in winter, the zoo year around for it has many indoor cages and, once in a blue moon, we went to the little amusement park. Then we'd do a grocery shop for Effie's weekly groceries. 

Once Ray was gone, Effie, Katie and I would take a long walk, to the Como Park Zoo, the Como Park Conservatory or around Como Park Lake. And then we'd have lunch in the Byerly's grocery store cafe and then grocery shop.

At some point in those outings, Effie would stop remembering who we were or how she knew us. Over lunch, she took to asking us questions that she believed were subtle. She might have said "Tell me again how we met." Every week, I would tell her the same answer, that her sister Joy had been my grandmother and that's how we knew one another. Sometimes she'd have to ask if what I said meant we were relatives and I would patiently restate, every Sunday, that she was my grand aunt and I was her grand niece.

Effie would go on asking questions. Who were my parents? My mother was her niece. Did I