"My Aunt Eileen" from my creative writing class 11/1/06

My Aunt Eileen, now in her late seventies, in her prime was a true Grace Kelly. If you were to put them side by side, you’d be hard put to tell which was whom. Uncle Dick was no slouch in the looks department either. A military man, with his brush cut hair and pressed khaki uniform, he evoked the confidence we carried from our successes in WWII. They were a snapshot of the fifties. They were from an era when communities were smaller and families went to church on Sunday morning without question, dressed up in their Sunday best. I remember the significance of dressing up for the occasion. It involved such womanly considerations as seasonally appropriate attire. God forbid you wore white shoes in winter, unheard of, and hats were de rigueur. I still remember being mortified in Macy’s when my mother asked a stranger if he didn’t think the hat on my head suited. Gloves, you had to have a white pair and a black pair and stockings still had seams; getting them straight was a torso twisting affair in the mirror. In those days, the Saturday night bath was the ritual that signaled the gravity of Sunday’s church appearance. All this could lead to some pretty high tension levels for some families and to this day, the residue of it surfaces when ever I have to get my family ready to go to a formal function. For that was what this was all about, formality. Formality as it created an appearance that was worn no differently than the selected attire.

So that is why I always enjoyed my aunt’s retelling of her favorite Sunday story. She has a great sense of humor and doesn’t shirk from laughing at herself, which makes her endearing. She loves recounting how the solemnity of the occasion was rarely reflected in the preparation. As she tells it, by the time they got into the car, she and Uncle Dick were arguing heatedly, while the children sat mute in the backseat. Does anyone remember that? I know I do, I can still hear the wilting exasperation in my mother’s voice as she said “Oh, Arthur” which was certain to be followed by “When are you going to…” or “How could you…” Blah, blah, blah which in a convoluted way taught us kids the power of a church service. For as Aunt Eileen recalls it, there was something deliciously dissembling about that moment when the car turned into the parking lot as all arguments ceased and faces were composed into equable expressions and the family disembarked to go pray.