Transcript
Hi, I'm Dan Slone.
Welcome to Dan's Tiki Bar, and welcome to another installment of Bits & Peaces. Last time I was telling the story of Charles as in Alice and Charles.
They came as a pair. This time I'd like to tell you a little bit about my Aunt Alice. Alice, when I was growing up, I thought she was the richest person, certainly in my world, but maybe in the world. She always gave me these incredible Christmas presents.
What I didn't know then but later figured out was it had nothing to do with her wealth. She was modestly well off by the standards of the time. She'd been a registered nurse. She’d done Home Health. She ended up going to work for Magnavox in their factory, but it had a lot to do with my being the first of the next generation of kids, nieces and nephews that came along.
But all her life, she would give me great presents. She was always in a good mood and that was despite the fact that every time that you saw Alice she had some new calamity, some new horrible health condition, and these weren't imagined. This wasn't psychosomatic of some sort. It was truly that she was one of the unluckiest people in the world. She went out only once. She wasn't a big outside person as she got older. She went out and as she told it, “I went out one time this year, and I was bitten by a tick and I got Lyme's disease,” and she did. She got Lyme’s disease. She was always a sliver of a person, one of these people you're afraid to hug because you might hurt her.
She always worked hard, but she wasn't big on cooking or cleaning the house and Charles treated her like a princess. He drove her wherever she needed to go. He looked after her however she needed. She was the centerpiece of his life. When Charles died and I went to the funeral, afterwards we were talking and Alice said that, in fact, she'd never learned to drive so we might as well sell the car because she couldn't drive it, and I said well you could learn to drive now. She said no because of some untreated cholesterol issues. She’d developed what’s called pinhole vision, and she was legally blind. Pinhole vision means that your eyesight is constricted to this little tiny area of your eye like you're looking through a pinhole. And she could do something like watch her favorite baseball games. That had been something she and Charles loved to do was watch baseball, but she couldn't read and she couldn't drive with this this condition.
And one of the things she also couldn't do apparently was clean the house. One time, I came to visit her and she said, “You know Dan, could you take a broom back into the back bedroom? When I walk along I can't see anything, but I feel some cobwebs brushing against my face.” And I went back there. It was like a scene from a horror movie. There were cobwebs hanging down everywhere. I expected to find a dead body in there someplace. So you can't really imagine how she would get by herself. I mean this is like the hardest version of a shut-in you can imagine. But in fact she thrived.
I'd come to visit her. Alice wasn't a person who needed a lot. I’d come to visit her, and I’d take her out to a restaurant because I was coming once a quarter or so. I’d try and take her out someplace nice, and she appreciated that. I'd take her to one of the nicer places in town. But when I finally thought to let her pick the place, she'd pick Ryan's steakhouse and I thought, "is she doing this because she doesn't want me to spend much money on it?" And I think that was part of it, but part of it was she just enjoyed all the choices. She enjoyed going around and getting a little bit of this and a little bit of that. She'd load up a tray with essentially her weight in a tray and eat it all, and say she wasn't going to eat again for a week after that.
The question was how is she getting to the grocery stores. And I asked her, and she said that she had all of these friends and a different group of friends would take her to the grocery store every time she needed to go to the grocery store. They’d just invite her along as they went and they’d take her to the grocery store. They’d take her to the doctor. They’d take her wherever she needed to go. And any holiday that family hadn't invited her to spend with them, she had friends that invited her to their holidays with their families. Alice had all of these amazing friends and when I say amazing friends, it's one thing to just have friends who, you have a death in the family or something, they'll step in they'll bring you casseroles. They'll help you for a little while. These folks helped her for years. Alice lived a long time after Charles was gone and all that time, she thrived. She was one of the happiest people I knew. She just basically lived life and lived it no matter what life threw at her.
As she got older, she decided she wanted to date again. But just like Effie who'd raised her always hid her age from whatever man she was dating and they’d always thought that she was a lot younger than she was, Alice wanted to hide her age, and she really wanted to hide the fact that she was blind. She wasn't ashamed of it or anything, but it just made her feel awkward, and so she didn't want them to know she was blind. She had her friends take her to all of these different restaurants in town, and she'd study the menus with them. They'd read her what was on there and she’d try something and decide what she liked, and then when these gentlemen would come and invite her out to dinner, she'd sometimes let them choose. Sometimes she'd pick which restaurant they were going to, and she’d go and she’d hold a menu front of her and she’d tell him what she liked on that menu, and that's what they'd order and most of them were none the wiser. She did say she lived in fear that somebody was going to change their menu and that she’d ask for something that wasn't even there to be asked for but she enjoyed doing that. She actually thought it was pretty funny as well.
She lived to 83. She was a very happy person, enjoyed the life that she and Charles had made together and continued to enjoy life all the way through the end. She was buried in the military cemetery with Charles - his name on one side, her name on the other - one entity together just the way they’d lived their very joyful life. My Aunt Alice taught me the wealth of friendship. Something the money itself cannot buy. It can buy service. You can be kept care of, but I don't think you can have enough money to replicate the sort of experiences she had. She and Charles were both wealthy people, wealthy in a way that is almost impossible to replicate with money.
I hope you enjoyed that story. I hope you come back next time to listen to some more. I look forward to seeing you in the future.
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You take care, bye!
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