Goodbye Auntie Mame

I've often felt that I was born at the wrong time. I can (and usually do) sing along to the music of Frank Sinatra and Glenn Miller, but couldn't even name one song by Brittney Spears or Jennifer Lopez.

I was born too late to know Rosemary in her heyday. I'm at the tail end of a large family with several generations mixed in, so we tend to confuse the specifics of who's related and who's not. I think Rosemary was my father's cousin (or maybe her husband Chuck was, I don't know).

My extended family holds two reunions per year- - one in the summer and one just after Thanksgiving. They've done this for years and we have the black-and-white home movies to prove it. Rosemary and Chuck used to entertain at the winter reunion. No, they weren't professionals, but they were good. He played a grand piano and she, a statuesque blond, sang showtunes from atop the piano.

She was the only woman I've ever known who smoked a cigarette at the end of a long holder and she did it with style. Okay, she did everything with style, but maybe that was just my view as an impressionable grade schooler.

I used to imagine the wonderfully exotic life they lived. Traveling all over the world, dining at amazing restaurants, meeting important people from all walks of life. Actually, I don't know if any of this ever happened because I was too young to know anything about them except that they were family.

Rosemary loved sports. Actually, she had asked her kids to tell her what channel the game was on just the night before the heart attack hit. She was putting on her makeup, blotting her lipstick the way classy women of a certain ago do.

And then she was gone.

It's such a small part of my childhood from so many years ago, but for some reason, I know I'll miss her.