Mimi

by Harriet

My brothers and I grew up in poverty. Not only was there very little money for the necessities of life, there was no music, no laughter, no books, no art, no poetry, no warmth--just anger and grimness and punishment for all sorts of real and imagined transgressions.

What we did have, however, was our Aunt Emily--our Mimi--who lived right next door.

Emily Mary Tatum was born in the second year of the nineteenth century, the eldest child of an old-fashioned country doctor and his musician wife who would have six more children in the following twelve years. She was a quick, attractive child who loved books, learned to read at an early age, and became a brilliant student. She took a rigorous college preparatory course in high school, and consistently won prizes for her essays.

Unfortunately, she had five younger brothers. I say unfortunately because, being "only a girl," she was expected to go to work when she finished high school and help put her brothers through college. So she took a secretarial course and grudgingly went to work as a legal secretary in a small law firm, living at home with her parents and turning over most of her salary to them to help pay for those college educations which she so coveted. (Four of the five brothers finished college; my father was far more interested in sports and parties and girls than in studying, and never graduated.)

By the time my brothers and I came along, Mimi had bought a house and was supporting her elderly parents, both of whom had died of lingering illnesses by the time I was seven years old. I came to realize that Mimi had become a self-educated woman through the years, reading far into the night each night. Because she lived so close to us, we were exposed to her "oddities" on a daily basis. (Our mother and father thought she was crazy, and told us so regularly.) She belonged to the Arts and Letters club, and when my mother would allow it, took me along to her meetings. She and I attended many free piano and voice recitals given by students at the community college. She sang in the Community Chorus, and as soon as I was old enough, insisted that I join also. Even though she had no money to spare, she paid for me to take ballet lessons and ballroom dancing lessons and piano lessons. Her house was filled to overflowing with original art work, live plants, books and magazines, and her mother's piano, on which she insisted I practice my music lessons daily-a dreaded chore. She was an avid gardener, and taught me the Latin names of many plants, as well as the names of all the little wildflowers growing in her yard, those flowers my mother so derisively called weeds.

The greatest joy in my life was spending the night with her on Saturday nights. We would always cook special dishes for supper, and she would read aloud to me from books I did not understand, explaining certain words to me by having me find the root Latin or Greek word in one of her many text books. We would sit at the piano and pick out familiar tunes, and she would attempt to explain music theory to me. On Sunday morning, we would snuggle in her bed and she would read the funny papers to me and try to explain Pogo.

Mimi was a wealth of knowledge concerning her family and its history, and loved to tell long complicated stories at family gatherings. She was never allowed to finish them, because the rest of her siblings and their spouses thought she was just plain foolish and had no time to listen to her, and I secretly shared their sentiments. "Who cares," I would think. How I wish that I had listened more closely and recorded that family history! Now there is no one left to tell me.

After I went away to college, married and moved halfway across the country, we wrote long letters to each other. I began to notice a deterioration in the quality of her writing, but in my naiveté I thought she was just getting old. Instead, Mimi was developing Alzheimer's, a terrible disease that would ultimately cause her to be totally estranged from her family. She would die a lonely old woman, trapped in a world that only she understood.

I did not know as a child what a difference she was making in my life, and certainly did not always appreciate her efforts to enrich my life. Now I know that without her influence, I would be living today in that same impoverished atmosphere into which I was born.

Thank you, Mimi, for caring, and for sharing your life's passions with me.