What To Do About Aunt Dot

The second part of the trip to attend my College Reunion was to see about Aunt Dot.
Aunt Dot is becoming a sad case.
For sure, a fundamental fact of life is that we can never imagine the future.

Aunt Dot lived with us when I was a very little girl. WW ll was raging and seemed as if everything we needed was either limited or unavailable. Housing was unavailable as was cars, sugar, bananas and I can't remember what else. We all were aware of "the War effort." As I said, Aunt Dot lived in our big house on the hill with my family. I was about 5 years old when she moved in.

Aunt Dot was young, blond and very beautiful and single. She was outgoing and fun. I remember these times so well. It was a scary time in the world and what I knew about that War came by overhearing the adults talk among themselves after I was in bed. I had nightmares as I didn't know geography and didn't know where the bombing was happening. Another part was the sadness of the war that I felt through Aunt Dot's friendships.

Now she is 90 years old. I has to be very sad to become alone and have no children. We cousins came together on this trip to decide what to do about Aunt Dot. She is in need of everything to be done for her, yet she sits in her recliner as proud as ever, trying to be in charge of her live as major problems exist..

Today, I see her in the ashes of what she used to be. Age has a way of robbing beauty but now the love we have for her. Aunt Dot was a big influence on my life as she was very outgoing and fun-loving.

I can see her dancing the Charleston and Boogie Woogie in our living room as the Swing Music played. A little girl which was me, dances with her. She was the light of my young life.

I remember that she received letters from one of her boyfriends who was stationed in Germany where the harsh war was underway. Children don't have to be told directly, they pick up what is going on about there. I noticed she didn't rush to meet the postman anymore and she didn't sit at the table writing letters anymore. After a few weeks of being sad, she apparently decided to get on with her life.
Her social life picked up.

She had only those guys who were unfit for duty call on her. Everyone else was drafter and was gone.

She and I would sit in the porch swing where she told me secrets. She told me that the man she would marry would be someone who would come home from the war. (She was right.)

At that point, she only went out with men who took her dancing and bought her dinner. Nothing serious. She was very beautiful and had her pick. She had nice dresses and a fur coat which she bought herself. She soon caught the eye of a very important man who always wore suits with ties, highly polished shoes and drove a bigger car than anyone. He would come for her often and she really fell for him. The problem was that each neighborhood was allowed one phone to share and it wasn't in our house.

The only telephone in the entire neighborhood was at a neighbor's house. The reason the neighbor was selected to have the one phone allowed per neighborhood was that she had a son serving in the Navy and was in the Pacific.
For this reason, Aunt Dot never knew when her beaus would be coming over.

In those days, there were no blow dryers, or curling irons for quick hair fixes and for that matter, no clothes dryers as well. Many times Aunt Dots friends would call on her unexpectedly and have to wait for her to dress. At times she had to run to wash her hair and scurry to the kitchen to hold her head in the oven door to dry it as quickly as possible. Her caller waiting patiently in our living room. There were no TV's so they sat quietly. I would stay with Aunt Dot to see her work magic as when she walked out, she was a beauty queen well worth the wait.

To be cont...