My aunt Martha

My aunt Martha died today. My sister called to tell me.

I wasn’t allowed, as a child, to call her “Aunt” Martha. She was in her early 20’s when I was born, and single, and she didn’t want it to sound like she was old to the Navy guys she went out with when she was at our house in Fort Pierce.

I was her first niece, and named for her (my first name is Martha) and although she always said “I’m not going to spoil my kids like your Mother spoils you”, she spoiled me more than my mother did. She would take me downtown to McCrory’s 5 & 10, and buy me little things from the dusty bins in the high counters. Once she bought me a miniature sewing machine for my doll house, and it was PLASTIC, long before everything was plastic. I still have it. The little drawers slide in and out. The “needle” goes up and down; the pedal can be moved back and forth. The lid comes up and the machine lifts up, just like an old-fashioned treadle machine—except they weren’t made of plastic.

When I was a freshman in college, my aunt, out of the clear blue sky, sent me a twenty dollar bill and a note that said I should buy myself “a little black dress”, because every girl needs one in the closet for unexpected invitations. I took the twenty dollars down to the fanciest dress store in Tallahassee on Monroe Street, and went through the sale rack and found a dress marked down to $19.99, still a lot of money in 1959. It was black velveteen, with a squared off dropped neckline and some shirring between there and the waist. It was mid-calf in length, but over the years I shortened it as the styles changed, and by the time I “outgrew” it, it had been to dozens of concerts, ballets, and performances of all kinds. It went to quite a few parties, too. For the longest time, it was my only “dress-up” dress. I still remember it, and the tiny me that fit into it.

On the other hand, it was my aunt Martha who tricked me into being a waitress, something I would never have done except under duress. She had invited me to come to Baltimore to stay with her the summer after my sophomore year in college. She was sure I could get a job as the accompanist for a community center summer dance program (which I had done before in my hometown). So I packed up all my winter clothes in my footlocker, left it in storage at the Scholarship House, and took a bus to Baltimore, Maryland. Which, in my ignorance, I was not aware was on the Other Side of Washington, DC from Tallahassee, and so when we pulled into the DC station, I was sure I had somehow gotten on the wrong bus. My geography’s a little better now. That’s the trip on which I was mistaken for a Freedom Rider, but that’s another story.

Anyhow, Martha met me a the bus station and broke the news that I was not going to be playing the piano that summer, BUT she had lined up a waitress job for me at a Howard Johnson’s in Towson, MD, right across the street from Towson State University. Oh, my. Talk about a green kid. They took me on, and trained me to be a waitress, and probably treated me with kid gloves, although it felt to me like I was in Dante’s third circle of Hell. I made it through most of the summer, until the summer school session was over, and all the school teachers who had come back to college for the summer left for their real homes, and quit eating lunch at Howard Johnson’s anymore. The job went from all-out frenzy but with good tips to so slow you could read the encyclopedia waiting for customers. That’s the first (and last) job I ever quit, as is, just didn’t go back one day. And boy did Martha make me pay for that. She fussed and fussed at me, worse than my mother would have. But she had been good to me, and I disappointed her.

She’s the one who, once I made enough money to have a cushion for the next school year, took me to Dr. Glasser (I’m not kidding) to get contact lenses which I’ve worn—that pair and all the succeeding pairs—for more than 45 years. Everyone back at school thought I had died my hair. But it was that I wasn’t wearing coke-bottle glasses for about the first time in my life.

Martha died exactly the way she didn’t want to—leaving this world by inches, shorter and shorter breaths over a period of many years. Her Uncle Olin, my grandmother’s brother, died of emphysema, and Martha went to see him once after he’d declined so much that he could hardly walk across a room. And she told me that she felt so sorry for Uncle Olin, she hoped she NEVER got like that. But she did, and it was hard on her because she was always the social one of the Hunter girls. The black sheep, really. The only one who became an alcoholic. One of two who smoked, but the one who didn’t quit until after her lungs gave out.

Martha always loved a bargain, and spent more time combing the newspaper for sales than for reading the news—although she and all the others in the family were always big newshounds. Over the years, she’s sent me many clippings from the newspaper that reminded her of something in my life. The most recent was a clipping about how Donald Trump was investing in hotels in Dubai, a place I had visited.

That era is coming to a close. Martha was in her late 80’s. Her younger sister is still alive, and three of my father’s sisters (two of them just barely), and then that whole generation of relatives will be gone. There were so many of them. But Martha will always stand out. Her laugh, her opinions, her adventures. I’ll miss her.