Aunt Ruthie

died today

Aunt Ruthie died today. Ninety eight or ninety nine.

She would be the first to say hers was a very good life.

She was the baby after Dolly, Sander, my mother Sara.

She got into Yale graduate school in biochemistry

from Grand Forks North Dakota moved to New Haven

with my grandmother and my mother. She and my mother,

more or less opposites (my mother chain smoked, tap danced,

once went on a blind date with Clark Gable - Ruthie was

ivory soap beautiful, did her laundry twice or three times every

single time, kept an immaculate house. My mother read book after book

on the couch until the springs wore out and then she

bought a new one. Ruthie loved her handsome husband

Dr. Bernie Greenberg, loved her three children (all geniuses

more or less) her grandchildren (ditto) and Chapel Hill,

North Carolina where she lived most of her life. She and my

mother were as close as two women from their time and circumstances

in their generation could be. They loved one another but to the best

of my knowledge, neither one of them ever said very much about

how they felt etc. When my father Mike died Ruthie came up from Chapel

Hill. She always wore blue because her eyes were blue.

She told my mother that she should always make nice meals for herself

every single day and use her good china all the time. My mother

was not big on advice, either giving or receiving. She used words

like bullshit pretty often though that was unusual, given her time

and circumstances. But she loved Ruthie very much, and when Ruthie

said that’s what Mike would want her to do, my mother just said OK.