QOTD: "The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant - and let the air out of the tires." - Dorothy Parker
Reading: Barbara D'Amato, Hard Evidence
Listening to: the original cast recording of Wonderful Town!
Decluttering accomplishments: threw out a pair of old, uncomfortable, and crumbling shoes
My Uncle Ely passed away yesterday. He was actually a great-uncle by marriage and must have been well into his eighties (at least) so it was not completely surprising, though it was sudden. The weirdest thing is that Mom let me know via e-mail. This is one of those things that I still think the telephone is generally more suitable for.
While it has probably been about ten years since I last saw him, he and Aunt Bernice were the relatives we saw the oftenest when I was growing up. That was probably because they lived relatively close to us. They had a bungalow in Far Rockaway and we'd go to the beach there. I remember pitching pennies and playing skee-ball on the boardwalk and eating the most delicious knishes in the world from a place called Jerry's. (Which was a lot better than eating Bernice's cooking, but that's another story. Let's just say that you couldn't even reliably eat a container of yogurt at their house because odds were that the only flavor they had in the fridge was prune.)
Ely had a dental lab, which meant mostly that when we lost teeth as kids, he gave us little hinged boxes to keep them in. I can't recall whether we left the boxes for the tooth fairy along with the teeth, but I seem to think not since I remember using some of them for other purposes later on. The other significance of the dental lab was that he had several women working for him and bought them gifts of perfume for Christmas each year. My mother sold Avon, so he always ended up placing a large order with her.
I vaguely heard a story that implied that my father had persuaded Bernice to date Ely in the first place. She had objected to him initially, because he was bald. (To clarify the chronology, I should note that Bernice was the youngest of my grandmother's siblings. She used to claim she was the same age as Mom was and then add, "we're eighteen." Since I knew how old Mom was, it wasn't convincing. It wasn't until after Bernice died, that Ely found out how old she was - and it was more than 20 years older than Mom. That suggests that Bernice was well over 40 when she married, so it's less surprising that they never had children of their own.)
My brother and I were often left in Far Rockaway when my parents went away for a weekend. The upside of that was the boardwalk. And, despite the food issues, Bernice and Ely tried hard to spoil us. I don't think they ever really understood me, but that was a generational issue. For example, I badly wanted a chemistry set and they bought me a "make your own perfume kit" as a more suitably feminine alternative. There are a lot of odds and ends I remember about the bungalow, but the ones that stick out the most were a copy of a Degas ballerina picture that hung in the hall and the piano on which Bernice used to play the one piece she knew, "Little Fairy Waltz."
So far as I can tell, Bernice and Ely were well-suited to each other and had a happy marriage. They eventually became classic snowbirds, spending the winters in Florida and the summers in Far Rockaway. After she died (in the late 1980's), he remarried. Stella was from Toronto and they made that their summer home. So Ely sold the bungalow and we saw him less. I visited him and Stella in Florida in 1990 and that may have been the last time I saw him. I'm not sure, as I vaguely think he may have come over once or twice when I was visiting my mother. I remember sitting in the living room in Mom's house when he talked some about the hardships of his life before coming to America. I don't remember exactly when that was. I don't recall much of the story, but the gist of it had to do with being exiled to Siberia. I wish I'd listened better or asked again. Now there will always be gaps in his story.
Copyright 2002 Miriam H. Nadel