The good part was going to Diamond Bar with Garen to Ruth’s for a dye day. I had a lot of fun dyeing up some white beast top in three different reds, and some gorgeous UK Shetland in instant indigo. Also put some gray alpaca into an onion skins that was yielding a beautiful gold on other stuff; my alpaca looked green in the pot, and most of the color didn’t stay. It’ll need overdyeing. Pix later.
The sad part was that my Aunt Esther passed away this morning. She’d been diagnosed nearly a year ago with metastatic liver cancer; it’s a miracle she lasted this long. She’d have been 81 in February.
Esther wasn’t really my aunt. She was a close friend of my mother’s when I was growing up, although they’d grown apart the last twenty-five years or so. She lived in Flushing, Queens, a few minutes from our house in Jackson Heights, and she was over all the time. I remember her staying up with my parents until the wee hours the night JFK was so narrowly elected, in November 1960. Like them (and me), she was a lifelong Democrat. As long ago as that was, she was a very familiar figure in our household by then.
She was an extremely intelligent, cultivated woman, well-read and widely-traveled. She was a commercial artist, and worked for ad agencies, but was a painter in her spare time, and took me and my sister to museums when we were very young. She knew more than anyone else I ever knew about classical music and literature of all kinds. She knew both American and foreign movies inside out, she knew theatre, ballet, jazz. And she was self-taught at most of it.
She made very little money, but she always had a fairly new car, and she went on great vacations every few years. She went often to Mexico (I learned later that she had a ballerina girlfriend there). She loved the bullfights, of which she showed us slides once.
She went to college the same time I did, when she was in her late forties, and majored in art history. (She could have taught it, for cryin’ out loud.) It was only then that she came out as a lesbian, though not to my family. We (my sister and I and our friends) figured it out easily enough, when we were staying over her apartment while my parents were away, and her girlfriend stayed with her in her bedroom. But all I knew growing up was that Esther was always alone, and that was okay with her. She was independent, interesting, and enjoyed life, in stark contrast to the messages coming at me from every other direction to the effect that I simply must get married and have children, that I absolutely couldn’t survive if I didn’t.
About ten years ago, after not having been in contact with her for quite awhile, I looked her up in Florida, where I heard she’d retired, and found her living in the Tampa area. I gave her a call, and had a nice conversation with her. She was very happy to hear from me. When I moved out to L.A. from California, I went via Florida and visited her for a couple of days. She had decided that she would come out to me, and she was so worried about how I’d take it. She had no idea that I already knew! She was very relieved.
I stayed in touch with her via email on and off. It was by email that she announced to me, among others, that she had cancer last February.
When I was in New York over the summer, I went down to Tampa to visit with her for a day or so. She told me about how her mother, who was a ballerina from Austria (and who had been touring in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake), had been a countess by her first marriage, but the count was broke so she had to go back to dancing to support them, and he would sit in her dressing room drinking champagne while she was busting her butt onstage; so she dumped him, and married a waiter/aspiring actor from Amsterdam whose name was originally Mordecai but had become Maurice when he was working in Paris, and who, in his early twenties, and been a roommate of Rudolph Valentino’s in New York! She told me her father took her to Valentino’s funeral. She was very young, not yet two, but she faintly remembered it.
I feel awful now that I didn’t get my crap together to call her the last few days. My Mom said she sounded good; I thought she had a little longer. But at least I visited her in August; I’m so glad I did.
I don’t think I can really convey how important she was to me. I will miss her terribly. Bye, Aunt Es. Love you.
