Just One Look, That's All It Took

I suppose I am much like others during the Holiday Season. I find myself filled with joy as I embrace family and loved ones in a wonderful festive celebration of the birth our Savior, Jesus Christ. However, there will be moments of heart-tugging melancholy as thoughts and visions of Yesteryear flash through my head bringing back precious memories of family now gone from this journey. Those 'Christmas gatherings' at my grand-parents and later years at my parents shall always remain staples of who we were and what I am.

As a young boy, I recall the anticipation-excitement of my mother's sister, Aunt Kate coming home for the Christmas Holidays. Kate was my mother's elder by seven years and always hovered over her baby sister and her three sons. Kate herself was childless and widowed by her military husband who died young. Kate had left her East St. Louis home and discarded the 'down-home' Kentucky traits exhibited by her parents. She was a handsome well-shaped lady displaying the fashionable flare of that Washington D.C. career woman. Kate was a secretary to the United States Senator from Illinois, Senator Paul Douglas. Aunt Kate brought great Christmas gifts and lectures to young boys about proper dress and manicured finger nails.

Kate did not ask questions without pursuing the particulars in your answers. In Kate's later years (she lived to be 99) my wife and I assumed care of Kate. She could at times be a Jekyll & Hyde but a firm hand brought her Calmness.

I guess it was a year before Kate's death that Gerry and I took our youngest daughter, Pam and her children Caleb (a college student) and Erica (a high school student) to visit Kate at her Assisted Living Home in Belleville, Illinois. As always, with company, Kate was exuberant and giddy with delight. At one point she noticed Caleb's Eastern Illinois T-Shirt with words of admiration, which meant, can I have that T-Shirt? Pam sensed Kate's desires and gave Kate another Eastern Illinois T-Shirt. Kate was thrilled to the extent that she immediately took off her top exposing her 98-year old boobs (old women enjoy bra-less). Often, I still wonder if my grandkids, Caleb and Erica have flashbacks of that visionary trauma. She sure did like that T-Shirt! Precious memories....fly across the lonely years.