Aunt Gerry

At the Chelsea Diner, the waiter who was for some reason pretending to be Italian, but was definitely a Spanish speaker, approached the table where I was getting ready to order my favourite meal of Greek salad and French fries and where I was seated with my mom and Aunt Gerry. He immediately started “fake” flirting with Aunt Gerry, or maybe all of us. And I mean fake like he was putting on the flirt charm, but didn’t really mean it – an act. A harmless, sort of sweet, and sort of strange act, but an act nonetheless - a kind of pandering. Aunt Gerry certainly loves flirting, but is not to be pandered to. 

First of all she returned and held eye contact.

Then, when he kept it up, becoming overly solicitous, pouring the sugar in her coffee for her, stirring it for her, calling her beautiful, saying he would do anything for her, she flirted right back without hesitation, smiling, charming him to exactly the same volume that he was turned to.

Finally, when he brought us our food, she turned it up.

“Well.” She said, “I think I’ve lost my appetite.”

“What?” he said, surprised

“You’re just so hot, I couldn’t possibly eat with you around,” she volleyed, causing him to blush from under his collar up to his hairline. 

He walked away flustered.

Aunt Gerry turned to me and my mom and said “And that, ladies, is how it is done.”

Lesson 13: smile, smile, smile; eye contact; make them blush.

This may very well be my favourite thing in the bag.

This is a list, separated by neighborhoods, of restaurants all over the city (and when I say the city, I mean ON MANHATTAN. Have we picked up on Aunt Gerry’s bias against the boroughs yet?). 

Aunt Gerry was a secretary and typist for a long time before she to school  to be a counsellor. She can often be found by the sunny empire state building window clicking the keys on her typewriter and getting organized. She keeps thorough lists of everything from to-dos to her now historical packing lists which she makes and keeps for every one of her many trips.

So, when she’s with a friend, after, say, seeing a film at the IFC, instead of standing around spouting restaurant names and then rejecting them because we always go there, Aunt Gerry is prepared with good suggestions from YEARS of going to restaurant week with her friends (hottest spot in town? Trust that Aunt Gerry has been there) and the phone numbers at her fingertips, ready to dial and make a reservation on her mobile phone – the decades talking to each other. She is less concerned with the food though, than she is with the ambience. 

Lesson 12: In the bag – be a little organized, only go to restaurants with good lighting.

Daily 2012 – “Don’t read that it has secrets in it,” Aunt Gerry said as she showed me the torn and taped cover of this unassuming “diary.”

Partly this blog is about how Aunt Gerry is a reminder for me of the fact that life is full, and wide and long if you’re lucky. I think people think that there is a certain age when you simply stop being yourself. Like you settle into a life you think you should (red flag word) settle into, and you stop hoping or loving  or dreaming or crushing. Like, if you haven’t gotten that all out of your system in your twenties, I guess you missed your Window Of Opportunity (WOO). 

There’s something inherently romantic that goes along with physically carrying around your own secret thoughts - like you are definitely the protagonist of your own story. For years, maybe even a decade, I carried around a letter that someone wrote to me. I transferred it from bag to bag along with my wallet, phone. It wasn’t from a lover really, or even someone who I kept in touch with very well, but there was something so important and rich about carrying around the intimate words, without anyone having any idea. The quiet writing on that page existed only for me and only in one place, with no digital record out in the ether. It was just a note: thoughts on me, not by me, a perception of myself from afar, a reminder of perspectives outside of my own. The letter was ambiguous in its intent, and it made me like being an adult. 

I can only speculate about what is in Aunt Gerry’s diary, which she carries around with her everyday –  memories? Hopes fears? Notes on secret loves and old flames? To do lists that include potential crushes?  

Lesson 11: In the Bag – our secret selves. 

Aunt Gerry needed a new travel bag. She was sick of schlepping her shoulder bag, and wanted something with wheels. So we went to the store, and she was of course prepared with the exact measurement parameters for carry-on luggage and a TAPE MEASURE.  What?

“You brought that with you?” I asked?

“I always carry a tape measure, don’t you?”

Oh. Of course I do (I don’t). I am the handy maker designer in this scenario, not my much older aunt, but, as ever, she knows things.

“Well what if you need to buy something for your home?”

Lesson 10: In the bag – always carry a tape measure for measuring what you might need.

When we got back to the apartment, I insisted that she empty her bag to see what other physical manifestations of life lessons she had lurking inside. All week: in the bag. 

Aunt Gerry got an iPad. Feeling like a technology hater? Don’t. 

Lesson 9 - Adapt, guys.

When New York is running at its best, you can catch a rhythm – getting on and off the subway with orchestrated timing, finding your line through the crowds like a pro-cyclist, the lightening speed with which they ring you up before you can even get your wallet out at the bodega.

“In Chicago, they really know how to walk on the sidewalk,” Aunt Gerry told me.

“Chicago is the worst, “ I said (come back, mjs!).

“Well, on their crowded street – that one, their Fifth Avenue equivalent, whatever it’s called, people really walk on the right side of the sidewalk. We should be better at that.”

Half an hour later, as we were walking through midtown to Daffy’s, because they are closing, we were dodging the usual hoards of tourists et al around the theatres and through the convoluted semi-pedestrian walkways. On a narrow section of the sidewalk, there was a young woman, around 25, just standing, staring into the middle distance with her back towards us, very much in the way and forcing everyone else into the street and to scurry around her.  Aunt Gerry, walking ahead of me, put her left hand on the girl’s’ trim waist, patted her three times, and in a near intimate tone said: “you have simply got to move over, honey.” And she did, flustered, apologizing.

If the city’s got a mental telepathy, it is actually a collective memory, and that is how it works.

Lesson 8: you have simply got to move over, honey. Flow.

So, inevitably, Aunt Gerry found out about this blog. I hadn’t told her, unsure of her reaction. I asked her if she wanted to see it, and she, not surprisingly, but perhaps singularly, said, “Oh, no. Absolutely not.”

For many many years Aunt Gerry worked at The Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the world’s first and leading provider of HIV/AIDS prevention, care and advocacy.Gerry was a councilor for their hotline, and they are major partners for the upcoming Pride Parade and surrounding events.  One of her closest friends also worked there, perhaps still does, and showed up in a photo in the recent Chelsea Now, our local paper.  Now, know this - the ladies in our family are vain. We are many other, more laudable things as well, but we are unaplogetically, bordering on imperiously, vainglorious. For as long as I can remember Aunt Gerry has been a fierce editor of unflattering family photos, and has developed certain tricks (that I could really stand to practice) for taking a good picture.  Her friend’s photo in the paper was terribly unflattering. 

She cut the photo out and set it aside to show me, as she does with funny or interesting articles about gallery or theatre shows I should really see and new restaurants opening up in Brooklyn that she will never go to (whhhy would I go to Brooklyn?) so perhaps I should.  

“I’ve had a big realization,” she said to me, smoothing the photo out. “It doesn’t matter to me what the photo looks like, I love this picture because I love this person, and I love seeing her!”

It truly, as she says, gave her a lift to see her friend.

Seldom are we able to give ourselves the same leeway as we give the people we love, but maybe next time you are tearing yourself down or editing your own image, remember that even the most prideful of them all would be happy just to see your face. 

Lesson 7: It’s all about the love.

[photo credit: madduhuacuja.com]

We were out to dinner when someone in our party declared that they had recently begun taking anti-depressants.

“You know, I really resisted it. I felt so strange about taking medication, pills. I felt like I was altering myself,” our friend said.

“WHERE have you BEEN?” says Aunt Gerry. “I mean honestly, what rock have you been under that you are still working out this issue?” She went on incredulously. “If you can feel better, WHY wouldn’t you?”

If you can feel better, why wouldn’t you indeed. It wasn’t a discussion about chemicals, the benefits vs. the worries; our fears or our disappointments; our preoccupation with what it would mean to be One Of Those People who Takes Anti-Depressants. It was, go ahead, make yourself happy.

Sometimes, that’s the hardest part, even when we can see our way to getting there. Sometimes, I think we think that maybe we don’t deserve to feel good.  

Also, Aunt Gerry likes to show off her feet in really great sandals, because, duh, look at those ankles. Beautiful. Make yourself feel good. Lesson 6.

One of the things that I love the most about Aunt Gerry is how communicative she is about love. One night we went out to dinner in the neighborhood (Thai), and I wanted to pay the bill (duh), and we fought about it. She said no, I said yes, she insisted, I insisted. She won. And she won by putting her hand over mine and saying, “Shoham, I cherish you.” How often do you get to hear that in your life? How often do you say it? Who’s sitting next to you right now? Do you cherish them? Go ahead, put your hand on theirs.

Last night, after getting back from the gym, I was reading the paper, trying to keep up with Aunt Gerry as always, and we were chatting a little about our days. She came over to me and was like, “our time together has meant so much to me, it’s been like an awakening.” And I felt the exact same way. We talk about things that I don’t talk to most people about - loss, grief, love, happiness, anxiety, sex, politics, communism, imperialist tendencies, separation of church and state - everything; and she is from a generation that is associated with NOT talking about ANY of those things. Maybe it is the breadth and scope of her experience that enables these conversations, maybe I relate to her because at my young age, and her much older one, we have surprisingly been down similar roads.

She sometimes just turns to me and says, I’m so lucky, my life is so full and rich. And she’s right.

Lesson 5: hands on hands, cherish.

Aunt Gerry loves her living-room, and the light that floods it every morning. She calls it paradise and tries not to make any engagements that would disrupt her sunlit perusal of the paper and glimpsing the of the Empire State building through her 18th floor windows. I love that Aunt Gerry puts her feet up like that - her posture is always youthful, and shows that walking everywhere, everyday instead of driving is a really good idea. She also loves to dance. Walking and dancing. 

Every morning Aunt Gerry reads the Times front to back, seemingly always has. As she finishes, she passes the paper on to me, and I, of course don’t read it. Except on Sundays; Sundays we read the whole thing and it takes us the whole day. Sometimes we discuss, sometimes we just read quietly, and usually any plans I had made get cancelled in favor of our edification. And then, before you know it, it’s time for Downton Abby.

Lessons 2&3&4: Walk everywhere, say yes to dancing (especially with handsome men), and read the paper.