Cooter
Created | Updated Mar 13, 2011
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven; a time to be born, and a time to die… – Ecclesiastes (Koholet) 3: 1-2
This winter has been a time of loss.
Last Saturday, I called my aunt in Memphis to catch up with her news and tell her about recent events. At 86 and in assisted living, she hadn't tried to attend the funeral of her late sister's husband, but she wanted to know everything, of course, and expressed her condolences. Elektra, a big fan of my aunt's, contributed to the hour-long conversation, which – as usual with my aunt – covered everything from soup to nuts. After we'd talked about relatives, remembered my grandmother's funeral, discussed the weather and early bird arrivals, Cooter shared some information she'd gleaned from the History Channel. She was like that – interested in everything. Before we rang off, I promised to call her again after her doctor's visit on Tuesday. I wasn't happy with her report of having fainted the day before.
On Monday morning, her sister called from Georgia. Cooter had been taken to hospital on Saturday evening, but the hospital had been unable to locate the family due to a mix-up in phone numbers. Surgery was planned, many calls made to the uncle who kept vigil at Critical Care. On Thursday evening, my aunt died of massive heart failure. They're taking her body back to Mississippi, to bury her near her mother and father.
From my work with the psychology folks, I have learned that the people you live with when you're young contribute to something called 'primary socialisation'. I think it is safe to say that my aunt Cooter contributed a lot to my primary socialization. When I was small, we lived in Memphis, a couple of miles from the home she shared with my grandmother, and we saw her almost every day.
Cooter wasn't her real name, of course. My maternal grandfather, whom I never met, was reputedly one of those Deep South fellows who went in for nicknames in a big way – a family tradition that gives me a sister named Bug and a nephew called Spider, and meant that nobody called my grandmother anything but 'Babe'. This legacy led me to respond to a phone call that began, 'Hello, Monkey?' with a polite request to wait, followed by my running to fetch my dignified little mother. A 'cooter', in case you don't know, is a turtle. Nothing about my energetic, intelligent, and independent aunt remotely resembled a turtle. Go figure.
My mother and her siblings grew up in a small town in what is called the Mississippi Delta, the northern part of that flat, hot, humid state, where the fourth-largest river system in the world regularly floods its banks, enriching the soil and giving Memphis that Egyptian association. Children of a night watchman, they lived through the Great Depression in a denial of poverty. Although they had no running water, my mother insisted they were not poor – they just had to be careful with what they had. This frugal lifestyle was part of my childhood, too. Everything was in its place, and woe betide the child who failed to return the scissors to their appointed drawer. The fifty-year survival of the first and only refrigerator of my mother's married life was a family legend. (It worked fine as long as my dad and I remembered to use the jury-rigged wire to hold up the door on the freezer section. When the wire inevitably broke – about once a year – my mother accused us of carelessness with property.)
My mother and Cooter believed in cheap fun – as teenagers, they learned songs from the radio, writing down alternate lines until they got the lyrics. As young adults, they worked for a major mail-order house, lived in a Memphis boardinghouse, and went to the 25-cent movies several times a week. They brought their own popcorn. They had a ball being young and free – I once saw a photo of them in bathing suits – my mother's was two-piece, no less. Then the war ended, and my mother got married. Cooter stayed on at the mail-order firm. After her father's death, she bought a house and sent for her mother
That little house on Salem Street held a lot of my early memories: my grandmother's coffee, thick enough almost to stand a spoon in, which I drank from the age of six. Learning to play Scrabble from Cooter, whose vocabulary was astounding. She'd graduated from a high school that was the shape and size of the Alamo, in a class of about 12. She'd learned Latin, shorthand, and typing there. The rest she learned by reading – and how she read. I borrowed her books and read her magazines. She was responsible for the fact that I tackled Shakespeare and Huckleberry Finn at ten. I was a bit puzzled by Somerset Maugham, but I plunged in regardless. She introduced me to Reader's Digest so that I could Increase My Word Power.
Cooter had a dry sense of humour. When my uncle installed the water taps backwards – the hot water came out of the one marked 'C' – Cooter mendaciously asserted that she had bought Spanish water taps. When we, her sister's strange preschoolers, happened upon my grandmother while she was cleaning her dentures, my grandmother worried that our tender psyches would be damaged by the sight of an elderly, toothless person. Cooter and my grandmother laughed their heads off when my mother reassured them that the discussion in the car had centred around how we could get 'neat teeth that you can take out, like Babe's'.
It was Christmas, and I was about six. For weeks, Cooter had kept two beautifully-wrapped packages on the dining-room table. Every time we came to visit, she informed us that these were 'special' presents for me and my sister Bug. But we shouldn't touch them, because they were fragile. As the time approached, we grew more and more excited. On Christmas Day, these highly-touted gifts were the first we opened.
My aunt, not a parent herself, was genuinely shocked when we burst into tears at unwrapping, respectively, an apple and an orange. My mother explained later that Cooter meant this as a joke, and was hurt by our response. We felt terrible. We'd let her down.
True friendship was restored the following year: my sister and I cooked up a 'revenge' involving a large box, lots of paper and ribbon, and a grapefruit. I think my aunt was so delighted, not because of the joke, but because we had found a way to show her that we forgave her for her ignorance of child psychology. I would have forgiven her anything. This was the woman who explained Perry Mason plots and horticulture to me, and was so sports-minded she watched golf on television.
We moved away from Memphis, grew up, saw one another less often. I'd call, write. Cooter was interested, always. After her mother died, she stayed on in her little house with the big, beautiful garden, tending the figs and the bachelor buttons, and mowing her lawn using an electric mower with a 110-volt cord that plugged into the house.
When she fainted and fell, burning her face on the floor furnace, she decided it was time to leave. She lived with her brother and his family for awhile, but independent as ever, soon moved into an assisted-living hotel, from which she regaled us with tales of 'old people, some of them really decrepit', and all of their amusing doings, such as the party they held for a departed friend's dog. She made the recreation staff sound like comic characters from a film about a cruise ship. We responded with laughter, household items, and shipments of potted plants and flowers. We knew she would miss her garden.
Cooter was a clever person, self-taught and wise. She was unfailingly kind, though she didn't suffer fools gladly. She was intensely private, and refused to learn to use a computer. I don't know what she would have said about my telling you all this – but I know she would have liked you. Born into a time and place that limited her opportunities, she never complained. She made the best of her situation, and shared what she knew and had. I will miss her company on this earth.
This winter has been a time of loss. Each death means one person fewer who remembers the same things we do. Each death means we are a little more alone. As I look out my window, I see the birds pecking for the seeds Elektra threw out. I reflect that spring is coming, and I think about my aunt's garden, and how she loved the birds, but put aluminium pie pans in the fig tree to scare them off. I can taste the preserves my grandmother made of those figs, preserves with lemons in.
I believe that where Cooter is now, spring will also be coming. She'll look out her window and see a robin. She'll go outside, bend down, and see the first jonquils peeping out, and smile.
I just wish I could call her and ask what she saw today.
