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.
Your poems are like gypsies -- they know all sorts of wild things and they're especially gifted at telling you things you want to hear.