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Dear Aunt Eleanore,
It's close to midnight. I am sitting alone in the warmth of your kitchen, snacking on Utz Original Potato Chips, drinking a Pepsi Zero Sugar out of my favorite glass, the tiny tumbler with the gold rim above the white picket fence etching.
Few things have ever felt so sure in my right hand as these glasses and the baseballs you watched me spin at Pottsville Rotary Little League, never walking down the hill to the bleachers, always watching from above, leaning against your car parked on Mahantango Street.
I can see you now as I saw you then, the calm amidst the storm inside my 12-year-old heart.
Here in your kitchen, I'm 12 again, reliving those carbonation celebrations. They felt even better knowing that Mom and Dad didn't let Kraig and me drink soda at home, but we could live it up here.
Maybe with a root beer, or if we really wanted to go wild, a birch beer. Not even Yuengling's could brew a beverage that filling.
Any minute now, I expect to see you walk through that doorway and give me that look, your special look, the one that says it's past your bedtime but don't worry, I won't tell your Dad.
You'll pull up a chair, and we'll talk sports like we always did. We'll reminisce about Super Bowl III, or the 1971 Oklahoma-Nebraska game, the Game of the Century of its time. We watched both in your living room, you in your favorite chair, me on the floor, soaring or sinking on every snap.
When Johnny Unitas and the Colts proved no match for Joe Namath and his guarantee, then Johnny Rodgers ran back that punt for the Cornhuskers, I went full crying Jordan long before that meme, or any memes, existed. Don't ask me why a preteen Pennsylvania coal-country kid in Pottsville, visiting his favorite aunt in Minersville, cared so much about the buzz-cut Colts or OK Corral Oklahoma with its wild and wooly wishbone. I don't remember that. I will never forget this.
You were there. You were always there. For me and my younger brother, Kraig. For Bobby, your older brother, best buddy, my father, and his wife, Betty, my mother. For Aunt Dolores, your older sister. For my wife, Cindy, and our sons, Kaiser and Kanon. For your good neighbors in New Minersville and the poor souls at St. Stanislaus who needed a kind word or a hot meal.
Maybe your personal pierogies. When Kraig went through four or five surgeries in short order as an adult, you baked him a batch each time, carefully packing them in dry ice and shipping them to Alabama. All these years later, he calls those care packages chicken soup for the Polish soul.
I still call your home-made peanut rolls the best dang Christmas present a damn Yankee could get in the Heart of Dixie each December. That's not really what they're called, but I still can't spell the original name, and besides, this candy by any name would taste as sugary sweet. When I became a husband and father, I had to find a creative hiding place for at least some of those little nuggets before Cindy, Kaiser and Kanon sugar-rushed the fridge.
Speaking of which …
Your plain white refrigerator across from me is humming. Your simple analog clock above the kitchen sink mirror is ticking. Your nephew, the one you used to say has a way with words, has to say goodnight because he's reached the end of memory lane.
It's after midnight. I'm still sitting alone in my Aunt Eleanore's kitchen, but I am no longer 12 years old in my weary mind or my heavy heart. She is not going to walk through that doorway, now or ever again. It's the night before her funeral, and I am wrestling with the angels, asking the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to give me the words to ease our pain and speed her certain path to life ever after.
Maybe me and the Holy Trinity could achieve Solidarity, and they then would inspire me in Polish. She spoke it lightly because her parents, John and Anna, my grandparents, were fluent in it. She mastered two other languages as well, English with the telling brevity of Hemingway, sarcasm with the deadpan perfect timing of comedian Steven Wright.
If you know me, blame her.
If you see me slip a baseball into the casket, zip it. Just yesterday afternoon on a blindingly sunny and surprisingly balmy afternoon for my home town, I went back to the old ballpark and parked on the street above, as only she would do. I walked down the hill, through the open gate and empty first-base dugout, across the sweet green grass into the freshly lined batter's box.
I tossed one up and hit it out, a good 250 feet if you ask me, at least 450 if you could ask her. Actually went deep three times all told, and it took, oh, only about 21 swings. Call it another tribute to a more distant childhood hero, Roberto Clemente.
One big fly was for my little brother, my double-play partner in crime. He's the most sensitive man I know, and he found it hard to stop crying last weekend when the sad, inevitable news came.
Another hardball cleared the fence for our father, who at 89 is 2 years older than his now departed little sister. He's the strongest man I know, but the other day, he fought back tears as he said, "I just lost my best buddy of the last 87 years."
If those words from your own dad don't put something in your eye, your heart is blind.
The last ball traveled the farthest, no doubt climbing to meet its inspiration about 755 tape-measure, end-to-end rockets from here. The white pearl disappeared high into the trees for her. The most unselfish person I've ever known. The only person I've known for any length of time about whom I can say I don't have a single bad memory. A woman who served her Lord and her church, who never met a stranger and never walked away from a friend.
That light in the dark, that cheerful co-conspirator in this warm kitchen late at night, that was my Aunt Eleanore. She is my Aunt Eleanore. Forevermore.
