"Aunt Bea"

I'm now well past the age my Aunt Bea was when I considered her "older."

It was the late sixties and I was fifteen. Aunt Bea was fifty-ish, but Mayberry was not her town. MY Aunt Bea was not pleasantly frumpy or plump. She was beautiful in her own way--attractive, energetic and even somewhat cool. She and I worked side-by-side in the family restaurant her sister and their husbands had established in Placentia, California.

From this setting my work ethic was born. A tad on the shy side, I learned that if you can't blow customers away with wit and charm, you CAN draw them like flames to a moth with good food and service.

The Beatles, Santana, and the Chicago Transit Authority were all musical players in this environment--a surprise to me and at the insistence of Aunt Bea.

"Music for people my age is too dull," she declared, as she prompted me to set the radio dial. "We need music with a beat for people to enjoy their food with and for us to move along to."

Aunt Bea especially like the rhythms of the first-time around Carlos Santana. His music is perfect, she said, for our Mexican restaurant. She considered his brand of Latino-influenced rock a much more natural fit than the Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli tunes she also enjoyed.

Observing Aunt Bea's energetic and fun persona fooled me into regarding her as more youthful than she was, though in this day and age each decade in general seems about "ten years younger" than it used to be. To my sixteen years, fifty-some seemed at the time grandma-ish, for sure.

Aunt Bea was my dad's older sister, and the years don't lie. Whenever she tugged at her elastic-waist slacks, she did herself in. To the untrained eye, she was slender and fashionable enough, but when she yanked on that elastic, her front was foiled.

The trouble with elastic-waist pants, she pointed out, is that they fool you into thinking you're not carrying an extra ten pounds of weight. With subterfuge like that, ten pounds can turn into fifteen, fifteen into twenty, and then smocks become the rule.

These days I know too well what Aunt Bea meant. For the longest time I refused to own anything elastic-waisted, and I still would rather wear gut-wrenching, tourniquet-duty waists than fall victim to the belief that I can afford to gain even one more pound. But sweats and p.j. bottoms are pretty darn comfortable around the house, and shamefaced, I concede they have pretty much become the rule for me at home.

But like Aunt Bea, I'm fighting the good fight. I live in Wisconsin now, and winters present a struggle for me that Aunt Bea didn't know. But she had other struggles in other ways the likes I know for myself I could never overcome. Struggles so hard a niece who loves her as I do will not speak of them widely, in a blog post that can't possibly pay proper tribute to her private travails.

Somehow, to look at Aunt Bea you would not know this. She recently told me how once, in the keeping of a routine doctor's appointment (at well into her nineties) she was in the room with a nurse who begged to be excused because, she said to my aunt, "I need a minute to round up your forms; these here have you mixed up with someone ninety-five years old! I'll be right back."

Aunt Bea stopped her with, "No, that's me. I'm that old."

The nurse did not bother to hide her disbelief or even play it up with falsity. She simply paused, and left the room anyway. When she returned, she had with her other professionals from the office, gawking at my aunt from the doorway. The nurse did not hesitate to say, "See?!! Does this woman look 95 years old TO YOU??!!"

And no, they didn't think so! To their inquiry about the secret of her youth, Aunt Bea only said that she had lived troubles beyond their imagination, but that faith and prayer, exercising, eating right, and that her own mother lived to be 100, seemed to be reasons why.

Aunt Bea loved telling that story, even if she tempered it with, "I never felt like such a FREAK in my life."

I've never so much as once ran a marathon, as Aunt Bea did, almost into her eighties. My kinship with her is about family history and about the music--love for the sort that seems "too young" for us, but in fact, keeps us feeling young.

As fate would have it I also had my own restaurant in my forties until my mid-fifties. Whenever I set the radio there, I thought of my Aunt Bea. I would surf the dial to find music that "popped" with liveliness, and sometimes (when I was alone, before turning the "open" sign around) I would even run over to it and PLAY IT LOUD.

When Carlos Santana was enjoying quite the comeback with the hit recording "Smooth," a collaboration with Rob Thomas, I wondered if Aunt Bea was aware of it, and if she ever recalled our days at the family restaurant. She would have been as tickled as I was to see him enjoy another vibrant round of success; a "using it" and not "losing it."

These days my cooking and serving skills are pretty much reserved for my family and a few friends--but I still love to do my work with the dial set to music that helps me "move along." Some of that music is so lively it defies you to not run over to the radio and "PLAY IT LOUD."

At my age, I'm embarrassed to admit I do that now and again--but then I tell myself, "Aunt Bea probably did. It probably is a reason she forgot to mention, that day in the doctor's office."

Aunt Bea is just this side of 100 years old now! Her younger sister, Nina, is devoted to her and committed to maintaining their lifelong closeness. Both have told me that an original copy of my tribute to "Aunt Bea" is something she hopes will be read at her memorial service, "when the time comes."

I am but a speck in the family sphere now, having lived afar from Aunt Bea for many decades, my story with her miniscule. But just knowing she said that once, is honor enough for me.

Update: Rest in peace, beloved Bea.

Note: 1st photo shows Bea on the right, Nina on the left. 2nd photo is Nina on the left, me center, Aunt Bea on the right.