I have this aunt called Aunt Margaret. My given name is Margaret too. I am the third generation of Margaret Marys after my grandmother and aunt. There is not yet another Margaret Mary, but there is a Margaret Rose.
My mother used to say, “If your Aunt Margaret would fix herself up, she would still be pretty. She has a nice figure.”
At Christmas, a brother I haven’t seen since I got my haircut told me I reminded him of Aunt Margaret. I remembered my mom’s comment.
Aunt Margaret’s hair was dark and going about halfway toward gray or white, wirey and shoulder length (like mine now is). She had a long, slim torso (somewhat like my dad and me) and wore jeans that she sinched around her waist, often with checkered, button up tops.
Her car was a big boat of a car. She had three husbands. The last one left her for her former daughter-in-law, then divorced. It is said that she climbed a tree to spy on them. If the story is true, it happened when she is older than I am now.
She was a feisty Catholic woman of a breed that still exists even if you wouldn’t know by the way the Church goes around acting. Sometimes you wish women would claim their power. The Church would change, or it would pretty much quit functioning without them.
Anyway, I told my brother that what he said was probably true, and that I didn’t mind so much, (I could still be pretty!), but I hoped I wasn’t like my aunt in another way. Then I recounted a story recounted to me by my Aunt Dee, my Uncle Owen’s wife. She said Aunt Margaret and Dad had gone to visit them and dad was sitting out in the yard on a trunk her dad made her. As soon as Aunt Margaret was out of earshot, he slapped his cowboy hat on his knees, swore, and said, “All I wanted was to visit and get a sandwich at the bar in town.” Aunt Margaret had other plans for seeing bed-bound relations (not exactly relatives) and saying the rosary over them. She’d say, “Come on, Jim, we’ve got to get moving.”
Another time when Aunt Margaret visited from Missouri and set about scrubbing Dad’s kitchen floor on her hands and knees, my dad was fit to be tied. She was simply a whirlwind of “doing goodness.” It was very tiring for my dad to be around.
My dad was a good man. He was known to visit the sick all on his own. He took me along when I was little to scary and sour smelling places. I could remember women of that era saying the rosary around those beds. They had dry lips that never stopped moving.
I didn’t want to be like them either. There was just plain something unrestful about them.
I feel at times that I’m predisposed to both following in their footsteps and trying not to.
When people write me about A Course of Love, I really like it when they say something about kayaking, or having a shoe fetish, or going to jazz clubs. I want a beautiful woman to tell me she loves clothes and jewelry, or a guy who hunts to admit to owning a gun. I like stories about pets. I like to hear about the lousy economy and the ire it arouses. It cheers me up to hear a good complaint about the healthcare situation.
What those stories tell me is that saying the rosary hasn’t been replaced by pious readings or meditation, and that doing good or being spiritual hasn’t put people on a one-track route to annoying their siblings.
.jpg)