Aunt Sis

Aunt Sis

At first, she was a real turnoff to me. She did two things that were a cardinal sin to my young, proud self-she insisted on paying for everything and she had no problem passing judgment on my and Marilyn's (and later, our children's) mistakes, peccadilloes and wrongdoings. Even worse, she would gift us with money and tell us how to spend it.

Aunt Sis, as she is known by most of her kin, was the second of seven children (six daughters and one son) of an industrious and successful Alabama farmer. He was a genius as well in machinery, blacksmithing, cotton ginning and country merchandising. Appropriately enough, he was named after Benjamin Franklin. The family ancestry was Scottish, Caldwell (from "coldwold," Gaelic for witch hazel or divining rod). Witch hazel was also a Bavarian symbol of a schoolmaster. Sis taught school from the time she was seventeen until she retired as a principal of an elementary school in the 'sixties. After her husband died and she retired, she moved to a Methodist retirement home in Birmingham, where she has lived for the last 27 years.

Aunt Sis is 98 years old, a "Steel Magnolia" of the first water.

She is totally a child of both the Depression and turn-of-the-century South. Money and responsibility, duty and character are the warp and woof of her existence. She was both ironhanded and loving as a teacher and principal, and respected totally in her profession by teachers and students. Her husband Joe was six years older than her, but of that same generation that left the farm for the city. He was a mechanic for a cast iron pipe factory most of his working life, but he did come from a farm background, and did work in a grocery during the Depression. He was a doting and indulgent father to Marilyn. The word "no" was barely in his vocabulary, both with Marilyn and his wife. He died in 1965, a few years after Marilyn and I married.

Both Joe and Sis were savers and penny-pinchers. During the war and on up through the rest of his life, continuing on during her life to the present they bought savings bonds out of each paycheck. When the bonds matured, they rolled them over into new bonds. Totally conservative in terms of the stock market rates of the 'seventies, 'eighties and 'nineties, but surprisingly good in today's low interest and falling stock prices.

Marilyn was adopted at the age of seven, in 1947. She came from a Kentucky hills background, daughter of alcoholic parents. She was given up for adoption when her mother was at death's door with jaundice, although her mother later recovered. In later years, Marilyn contacted her biological mother, but never kept up the relationship. Her only brother died in a car accident. Her older sister still lives in Indiana.

It took me many years and a lot of hardship to figure out Aunt Sis. I can say with complete assurance that she has always been there for my family, and for me. Her support has consisted primarily of gifts of money and unsought advice, but it was always good advice, even when I resented it. She has paid for the education of my children and provided for all of our eventual deaths with cemetery plots. She may have been emotionally distant, but she has bridged that distance faithfully the only way she knew how. She has my complete respect, admiration and, at last, love. She is one of a very select group of people that are the same front to back and top to bottom. She is a walking definition of integrity.

Last month, she lost her youngest and last living sister. A week later she lost Marilyn. The week after that she lost her best friend of fifty years. Through it all, she has soldiered on and done her duty as she saw it and as best she was able. And that is who I went to Birmingham to visit this last week.