The World According To Anne Arky

When I was on Solaris’ blog and mentioned my father’s brother (commonly known throughout the family as Uncle Asshole, as dubbed by yours truly) on the occasion of his divorcing his first wife (herein known as Aunt Anne, because that’s how we knew her), I came to the realization that today is the 15th anniversary of her death, so I have decided to blog about her, but before I started this, I first went and found the CD that Nozmoking made up for me that contained (among many other wonderful things) Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days”. I don’t know that it was necessarily her favorite song, but I do know that she was quite fond of it when it was a top 40 hit in 1968/1969, and I always associate that song with her. From the minute I started playing it, of course, I started weeping like a bathtub overflowing (so long as I’m going to quote Henry Higgins, I might as well do it up right, since Eliza Doolittle Day is coming up soon).

So, folks, sit back and let me tell you about this woman of fine distinction and breeding who had the misfortune of falling in love with one of the biggest bastards ever to grace the entire universe and marrying into a family where grace and culture were quite wasted. We were just plain, unpretentious folks, despite my grandmother’s (Aunt Anne’s mother-in-law) aspirations to high society, and for the most part, none of us gave a damn about culture and the finer things. We weren’t and aren’t quite The Darlings and Ernest T. Bass from the Andy Griffith Show, mind you, but neither were we the Carringtons of Falcon Crest, a life and family to which Aunt Anne would have been greatly better suited. She struggled to fit in, but no way was her well-modulated, sing-songy finishing-school delivery of such edicts as “Now, dear, sit sweet” (on the occasion of finding me sprawled across the couch at Granny’s with my feet on the coffee table) going to fall anywhere but on deaf ears, although I must confess to having gotten great gales of laughter out of it for many years since. She carried on that way for years when she was married to Uncle Asshole, and even then, in my childhood, I thought of them jointly as Superbastard and the Queen Bitch. She couldn’t even cuss right – my mother still talks about almost falling out of her chair when Aunt Anne came out once with, “Well, hell dammit!” She got some of the words right, just not in the usual order. I don’t know if she ever did learn to cuss right. If we couldn’t teach her, nobody could. (Remedial Swearing students line up to the left, single file. Advanced Invectives and College Prep Cussing students fall in to the right.)

Despite the title of this blog, I will gloss over most of the family in-fighting that went on, but suffice it to say that as she and Uncle Asshole moved closer and closer to further and further, she was taken down a peg or six and became painfully more human with every peg down she went. Because Granny was dying at this time, we had more contact with Aunt Anne than we might otherwise have had – I for one had been avoiding her for years, as had most of us – and because of having more up-close-and-personal dealings with each other, she began get to know us and to see that we weren’t the black-sheep miscreants she had long been led to believe (jointly by Granny and Uncle Asshole, who were operating under their own agenda that is part of what I’m glossing over), but rather some decent people who just had some things happen to us (you know, like life) and a family PR agent worse than Hitler and Manson rolled into one. So after they got divorced, we got custody of Aunt Anne – nobody wanted custody of Uncle Asshole. Ya gotta love it!

Uncle Asshole and Aunt Anne had five kids, and because Granny introduced me to the joys of calendar at an early age, I knew Aunt Anne’s kids' birthdays better than she did herself, not to mention those of the rest of the family. The first time she should have picked up on this was when I was 16 and Aunt Anne called Granny’s house one day while working on a genealogy query and told me to ask Granny when Uncle Asshole’s birthday was. I told her the date and month, and she said, “No, I mean the year, too.” Without any hesitation, I told her he was born in 1926. She urged me to double-check with Granny, who had to think a lot harder about it than I did to come up with…ta da...1926. Go figure. Many years later, she was talking about her third son and his birthday – you know, January 24th. No, Aunt Anne, says Anne Arky – HIS birthday is January 26th. She insisted that it was the 24th and said, “I should know – I’m his mother!” To which I countered with, “Well, I should know – I’m his cousin.” No, it didn’t make a bit of sense, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice. Some months later, she told me she called that son on the 24th of January to wish him happy birthday, as she did every year, and he was obviously going to let it go at that, until she said, “You know, that Anne Arky is truly one of you all, isn’t she?” He said, “What do you mean, Mom?” “I told her that your birthday was on the 24th of January, and she just insisted it was the 26th. Can you imagine?” He replied, “Well, Mom, I have two things to say about that – first, call me back day after tomorrow; second, never argue dates with Anne Arky – you’ll never win.” I still don’t know how he found out about my calendaric prowess, but it obviously made an impression on him, even before this. After this, she just gave in and called me every so often to find out who had a birthday coming up, especially when it might have been one of her kids.

After we all became “friends”, Aunt Anne responded vibrantly to my teasing her about her ultra-culturedness, and one day she was talking about a recipe to my mother. She was going on in her finishing-school voice, talking about introducing one ingredient to another, and then marrying them in the skillet, and I quipped, “Wow – it sounds like Julia Child meets Dolly Levy.” Another time, she was talking about a disagreement she’d had with Uncle Asshole after their divorce (they continued to live in the same teensy town, and he married her ex-best friend, thus making Son #3’s best friend from first grade all the way through high school suddenly Son #3’s step-uncle). As she went into detail, she said they hadn’t been able to agree on anything, so they had reached a stalemate, to which I replied, “So to speak.” She loved it, and we loved that she loved it.

Granny taught Aunt Anne and my mother how not to be a mother-in-law, and as a result, both have daughters-in-law (now ex-daughters-in-law) who love(d) them dearly. Aunt Anne’s first daughter-in-law wanted nothing more in the world than to be like Aunt Anne, and strove diligently to achieve that, which was only fitting, because the heir to the throne was (and to a great extent remains) just like his father. Not surprisingly, they ended up divorced a few years ago, but not before having Aunt Anne live with them for the last two years of her life after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The daughter-in-law took better care of her than her own children probably would have, and they loved each other dearly. She grieved as much as any of us when Aunt Anne died, and probably more than most of us.

The two bits of culture that I can thank Aunt Anne for are going to the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and introducing me to that most wonderful of drinks, the White Russian. She came to visit us in DC after I moved back in with my folks, and she wanted to go to a service at the National Cathedral, so we did. With respect to white Russians, I, unlike most of my family, was never much of a drinker and am still not, and I didn’t even start drinking until I was in my mid-twenties, despite being allowed to do so when I was fourteen if I so chose. I haven’t had a drink in over fifteen years, not for any particular reason, just because, but when I have drunk, I have always been fond of sweet drinks, and I could drink white Russians by the gallons. Aunt Anne introduced me to Kahlua and white Russians, and on the day she died, I went out and had one as a toast to her.

The day after Aunt Anne died, I went to a flea market, a typical Sunday afternoon thing for me to do at that time, and I went to one particular booth that I knew sold old 45s. I was on a mission – find “Those Were the Days” and buy it in honor of Aunt Anne. I told the guy I was going to look through his collection and what I was looking for and why, so you can imagine the shock of both of us when I lifted a stack to start looking through them, and the first one I came to when I turned the stack over was…you guessed it…”Those Were the Days”. I almost went through the floor upon that, and to top it off, the guy was so nice, he just gave it to me for free. I was blown away. I’m going to play it one more time tonight (I’ve played it three times since I started writing this), and close by saying I still miss her something awful. So here’s raising a glass or two to you, Dolly!

Labels: Family