Tell me another story

I could tell you a thousand stories about her.

How we’d sit out on the back patio and drink Pepsi through straws from ice-filled glasses and watch the hummingbirds at her house in Los Gatos.

How back in 1945, she sat parked in her Chevy near the Golden Gate Bridge listening to Doris Day sing “Sentimental Journey” as the ship carrying her husband left for Japan.

I remember her talking about a neighbor she had in Campbell, Calif. She would tell me that he’d sooner climb a telephone pole and tell a lie when he could stand on the ground and tell the truth.

I can remember all of this; but she can’t.

I interviewed her for a journalism class I had in college. I heard about how frustrated her parents were with President Hoover and how the Great Depression affected them. She would tell me about the canneries in Almaden Valley and how she and her mother would dress to go into downtown San Jose to shop.

She told me a thousand times of how her family moved from Wisconsin to California in the 1920s. She told me what a gentle and good-natured man her father was and how sweet and kind her mother was.

Her potato salad will go down in history as quite possibly the best potato salad ever.

My favorite stories were the ones she would tell me about my grandmother, her older sister.

Maybe it’s because she was my grandmother’s sister that made her special to me. I don’t really know. But, through her there was a link to my past – someone who knew my family before I came along. Someone who could look at an old black and white photograph from some obscure family album and make it come to life.

I wish it were that simple now.

I wish I could show her a picture of one of the picnics we went on to Big Basin Park and have her eyes dance again with the light of remembrance and have her tell me all about who was in the photograph.

I wish the box of See’s Candy I left her this weekend would have allowed her to remember how much she loved milk chocolate covered almonds.

I wish so desperately that she would tell me just one more story about anything. It seems an enormous task to think that now I will have to remember for myself and for my son.

It’s like watching fire destroy something you love.

I have a tendency to romance the past, to cast it in sepia tone and blur the edges. I picture my aunt’s life as some fantastic Frank Capra movie with Doris Day singing in the background.

Gonna take a Sentimental Journey,
Gonna set my heart at ease.
Gonna make a Sentimental Journey,
to renew old memories.