Advice given involving future developments, the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ aspect of the guidance, is, quite obviously, a matter of chronological confession: Time Will Tell.

‘Bad’ advice, of course, is always a slave to this law, unless something sinister is secreting snarling, unless someone is out to get you by intentionally leading you down some pathway which he or she knows will result in your broken ankle. Most advisors, though, being family members or friends or professionals in their fields, wish only that your best foot go forward. That a broken ankle can yet be time-bombed from even these latter individuals is just one of those things that can make life such a migraine.

‘Good’ advice, on the other hand, isn’t quite as manacled to the saw. It can sometimes give a hint of itself through the advisor’s relative experience, or through some inescapable projection as obvious to the counselor as is the donkey’s tail to a pin-holding moppet who can see through his eye-cover. Now, I couldn’t give from any relative experience, save for my consanguinity; and the only thing resembling a donkey, though I didn’t know it at the time, was my jack-assed self, but I was pretty confident on delivering my two-cents-worth that my octogenarian aunt was the recipient of pretty solid suggestion.

Crossword puzzles had started to bore the hell out of her. She’d done literally thousands in her lifetime, and perhaps everyone eventually gets tired of the ‘downs’ of the life, gets tired of the ‘acrosses’ to bear. Perhaps, like the mathematician or the private investigator, a puzzler has but so many solvings in her. There was also the fact of her arthritic wrists and her failing eyesight. Such physical facts can be quite persuasive in putting down the pencil. That cross- wording was recommended in the article I’d read meant nothing to her.

The dilapidated wrists and eyes of my aunt, in fact, ruled out much of what was in the article I’d come by, a piece in some medical magazine on warding off Alzheimer’s disease, things like painting or reading or watching educational television. My aunt, you see, was convinced, that the ‘Big A’, as she referred to it, had started encroaching upon her mental faculties. The most normal memory loss, something anyone, even a completely healthy young person, might experience, she transmogrified into the negativity of proof positive that her brain was developing a mind of its own. She’d forget one item at the supermarket, and you’d think she’d left all of her grocery bags at the cash register, and left her purse, and left her damn car in the store’s parking lot!

Aunt Betty was, in fact, in remarkably good shape for a woman 86 years old. She wasn’t a pound, more or less, than she weighed at 25. Wrinkles and skin spots had been very tentative in their attack upon her. Her hair had of course grayed, but she had a full head of it. Had she opted to dye, she would have caused confusion in calendars and clocks. Most importantly, Aunt Betty remained as lucid, and probably more so, as most people you’d meet, though some would have disagreed with that assessment, given how she’d chosen to live her life following the demise of her spouse.

Uncle Jake, her husband, had died fifteen years earlier; and his devoted wife had taken the death, if not ostensibly hard, strangely. The two of them had been a gregarious duo, always out and about doing this and that. He’d exited on a heart attack of such puissance that he’d died instantaneously, going out with not much of a bang, the can of soda that he’d been drinking making but little aluminum noises as it had rolled about the front porch on which the two had been sitting, the container of course having escaped his suddenly lifeless hand.

As soon as uncle Jake had gone under, aunt Betty had undergone a personality change. She’d sold their home and moved into an apartment complex for seniors. She’d locked her doors on old friends, all of whom she’d shared mutually with her husband. Her reasoning for so dead bolting was that they only served to remind her of her coffined consort. This made some sense to me, but what didn’t was the fact that she’d made no new companionships, had actually rebuffed efforts toward her by others in the complex. She wanted, she said, to live as solitary a life as she possibly could, out of respect for her husband. I of course had suggested that the respect could be given matrimonially, by never marrying again. Having a friend or two wouldn’t have besmirch his memory one damn bit; in fact, he indubitably would have wanted her so outfitted, in old or new attire.

Aunt Betty, though, would hear nothing about it. An occasional family member and a dog had been as close as she’d gotten; and smallest and cruelest and most ironic of worlds, the mixed breed had dropped rather prematurely dead of its own heart’s surrender, a repeated means of egress that she had done some serious self-reprehending over, for a while even calling herself, without a lick of levity, ‘Cholesterol Carol’, meaning of course that she wasn’t part of any healthy diet for any entity’s heart.

The dog’s death had been the coup de grace of any association thereafter for my aunt. She had in fact, following ‘Shady’s’ canine death, become so cold toward the aforementioned, infrequent family member, that, relatively speaking, she no longer visually existed, except for me, the reason being that I strikingly resembled a young uncle Jake, and she couldn’t muster the coldness to dissuade me from my rare visits. That I was singularly favored made me the isthmus between her and the rest of our clan. The family still loved and cared about her, for such had been the loving and caring woman she’d once been. I’d make a lot of phone calls and such to kin after visiting my aunt, to report on things and, more importantly, to give assurances that she was fine and well, in particular that her related fear of Alzheimer’s disease appeared to me to be wasted concern.

So it came to be that I issued what I thought to be ‘good’ advice, despite secretly believing the words needless.

The complex’s receptionist usually verified a visitor over the telephone, making contact with the resident in question to ascertain that the arrival was expected, or if not, welcomed. My arrival that Christmas Eve, like all of my arrivals, wasn’t in fact expected, although aunt Betty had probably had an inkling that I’d show up. I’d been doing so on Christmas Eve for a few years running. The receptionist, after I’d informed her that I’d made no appointment, tried to make the phone call, which got her, and me, nowhere. See, aunt Betty didn’t just talk a good ‘insular existence,’ she lived it. She had no phone through which the external world could get to her; no computer through which she could get to the external world. She had a television she hadn’t turned on in years. A radio was her sole concession to prohibiting the world from entering her life: 15 minutes each morning she listened to a local station’s news and weather, from 5:00AM to 5:15. Not being enslaved to clocks, she knew her fifteen minutes were up when the sports report came on.

The receptionist didn’t know two things: what-to-do and me. She said she didn’t really feel comfortable sending me up to the seventh floor apartment simply because I said I was related to the occupant, kind of eyeing the Christmas package I was holding as she spoke, as if maybe I had some weapon of aunt-destruction all papered and filleted. As she spoke she also blindly pressed an intercom button beneath the counter. In short time I realized that the button was utilized to summon security.

Now, where some other guy might have gotten alarmed or indignant, I simply re-lived the experience. This, of course, had happened before, many times. Only when the full-time, regular receptionist was at the desk and recognized me did my access to my aunt’s apartment flow smoothly. I didn’t know this new lady, and she didn’t know me; I did, however, know the guard: Kevin Locke. We shook hands and wished each other a Merry Christmas; and he then informed the receptionist, Jennifer, he called her, that I was good to go. Jennifer apologized profusely, it being the season of such courtesies, and directed me to the elevators, a location I knew well.

“Who is it?” aunt Betty called out, annoyed, after I’d knocked on her door. From previous visits, I knew she’d need an answer before she’d move from her recliner to let me in. This was a woman who wouldn’t waste one footstep when a curt, “go away”, would dissuade any consequent raps. For a visitor to get her to the door, nothing short of an emergency would suffice, unless of course you happened to resemble her late husband, as of course did I.

“It’s me, aunt Betty,” I called out as a neighbor of hers, an elderly man, quickly peeked out of his door at me. He wasn’t being necessarily nosy, I suppose; it was most likely that my reclusive aunt received so rarely that curiosity had stirred the old cat.

“Me?” aunt Betty replied mockingly in response to my sending a pronoun to do a man’s job. She knew, though, that it was I. As said earlier, she had to have had an inkling that I’d be coming; and she’d probably even recognized my voice. I mean, if you get but one Christmas visitor a year, he stands out in your mind. I could hear the sounds of the recliner as it facilitated her going vertical, could even hear her closing the photo album she’d no doubt been looking through. This time of year, uncle Jake was every bit alive to her as he’d been during his veritable laps around her heart.

“It’s Steve, aunt Betty; come to wish you a happy Christmas. Now open up, first, the door; and then that famous egg-nog of yours.” The awkwardness of infrequent visitation usually needs some levity, but she indeed made one hell of a batch of eggnog, and the thing had a Heaven of a kick. This, however, was no recognition on her part of the Yule Tide Season: she made the stuff year-round; and drank it year-round, in quantities that might have caused sirens of solicitude to sound, if only there’d been eyes to see the intake. My eyes, though not literally seeing, had had the misfortune of stumbling once on her storage bin in the complex’s basement section. There’d been quite a number of multi-bottled cartons of the beverage therein, piled floor-to-ceiling, leaving but a narrow space just inside the door, where the box of documents I’d be sent to retrieve sat incongruously. The cartons had been unmarked and unsealed, only flap-tucked. My curiosity at the uniformity and number of them had thus been easily, if troublingly, sated. When I’d later asked my aunt about this manifestation of her excessive concocting, she’d given me a look that had had my question mark running off for more quiescent inquiries. As I had never seen my aunt intoxicated, had never seen her drink abnormally; and as I’d felt a tad guilty about my cache-encroachment, I never brought up the subject again.

It took aunt Betty a minute or two to get to the door, which I was hoping had to do with such normalcy as preening herself up a bit. It had been three months since I’d seen her, and I honestly didn’t know what changes she’d been through. A friend had recently told me that an elderly relative of hers had undergone an abrupt transformation, in only a matter of weeks; had gone from lucid and lively to scattered-brain and sluggish. That Alzheimer’s disease had been on my mind, however toothlessly, had no doubt aided my driblet of disquietude.

There was, however, nothing to concern myself with. She hadn’t changed a bit, the dear old eccentric. She looked just as she had the last time I saw her: a carnival’s age-guesser’s nightmare; as hardy as any octogenarian could possibly look; a December dressed in the smiles of September, in short, a marvel. I’m sure I had a look of incredulity suffusing my face. We mirror-people are always stopped in our tracks by one who has smashed the reflecting rules, by one who carelessly saunters through the shards with little visible damage.
From her side of the door, she gave me the look she always did when seeing me again after a period of absence, one which, frankly, made me uneasy; and one which provided the only access in my mind to the possibility that aunt Betty could indeed be experiencing some kind of mental disease: she was momentarily seeing her husband, and in so seeing, orb-exploding rhapsodically. Fortunately, the mistaken identity didn’t last very long in this case; her eyes quickly turned to the package I was carrying, and quickly turned a more normal condemning.

“What is that, Jeffrey?” she snapped, in a manner that made me tentative about answering, even though we both damn well knew that what I was toting was your basic Christmas present, or to more accurately ‘third-person’ it: her Christmas present.

“Your gift, aunt Betty,” I said, simpering, holding it out to her. There are few things more awkward than extending a generosity and having the extension hostilely bitten off. “Merry Christmas,” I affixed with a laugh that was as Ho-Ho-Ho-less as you can get.
The octogenarian took it curtly, without a word. “Come on in,” she said, as if ‘de rigueur’ mortis had set in, and let in.

“Your joy in seeing me never ceases to flatter me,” I said, trying to hold up my end of the seasonal chill. I actually was, as always, glad to see my relative, and to see her in fine physical form, however typically sour, however nettled her fettle. I had learned from experience, however, that my aunt was much more responsive to me if I was less than demonstratively delighted to see her.

Aunt Betty had moved to her kitchen, having thrown my present onto her dining table as she’d passed the small, two-chaired piece. She seemingly paid my tone of voice no mind whatsoever, but I knew that wasn’t true. The woman missed nothing, and would eventually make the fact apparent, I was sure.

For the time being, she was engaged in supplying me with a nice, frosty mug of her eggnog. She had one of those electrical shakers, and had gotten its large tumbler out the fridge, a tumbler that had already dressed for the job, its being full of her delicious drink. I took this to be proof that she’d been expecting me, which may have been porous proof: maybe she always had some of the chilled stuff ready to go. The same ‘maybe’ applied to the frosted mug she took from the freezer after she’d put the mixer into dance.
“I’m always glad to see you,” she then said, without the tone that usually accompanies the words. It sounded kind of cue-card-ish, but didn’t someone once say that ‘life’s a stage’?

Anyway, like I said, the woman made a knock out eggnog; and the prospect of shortly ingesting it began to overshadow anything else in my immediate existence.

“Take a seat, Jeffrey,” she said a moment or two later as she turned off the mixer. I moved to one of the chairs at the dining table, after she’d repeated herself. My lack of immediate compliance had to do with the fact that she was the only person who ever used the ‘rey’ of my given name. I was ‘Jeff’ to one and all, excluding her, and one’s ears get used to the monosyllabic address. Whatever, I seated myself and eagerly awaited my iced delivery.

“Here you go,” she said on said delivery. “Enjoy.”

“If I don’t enjoy it, we’ll have a scoop.”

She watched briefly as I raised the mug to my mouth, my face no doubt lit up in anticipation. A swallow or two, or three, later, I was wiping my lips with the napkin she’d supplied, wipes surrounding words of wonder. I think she enjoyed having her creation so whole-heartedly received. It meant something to her, which meant something to me. Having seen and heard, my aunt returned to the kitchen and began to clean up what little mess she’d made. She then joined me at the table.

“Aren’t you having one?” I asked, between more wipes and wonder-words.

“Just wasted one,” she answered. She wasn’t a woman who used slang to express herself, so I knew the verb she’d used she’d used literally.

“Wasted? I don’t see how such pleasurable utilization of the taste buds could ever be labeled a ‘waste’.”

She picked up my gift and began hefting it, as if its weight would clue her in on its wrapped secrets. However, there wasn’t any over-riding curiosity suffusing her face. “What I mean is, I’d forgotten that I’d just brushed my teeth. The lingering taste doesn’t blend very well with eggnog.” She had years ago adopted implants, and now considered them her biological own.

“Line me up a few jugs of this stuff, and I wouldn’t even think of brushing. Halitosis would be such an easy concession.” I emphasized the fact by emptying my glass. Aunt Betty laughed lifelessly at my humor; at my depletion, she put down her gift, took my mug and headed back to the little kitchen for a re-fill. I objected not. I did, though, pat a pocket of my sports jacket, to confirm that I’d indeed packed some breath mints. I suppose you could have said that this was some kind of subconscious or psychological rebuttal of the joking statement I’d just made. You could have said, but I wouldn’t have paid you any mind. Seriously, folks!

As concerns my aunt’s having just brushed, I just smiled to myself amberly. The woman, for as long as I could remember, was obsessive about so cleaning. It was said by some family members long-familiar with the issue, and I had no trouble believing these people, that my aunt had been known to brush as many as ten times a day! The story that made the rounds most assertively is that Betty, years ago at some back-yard bash, had started in hungrily on a rolled hamburger that a good number of ants had gotten to while it had sat unguarded on a picnic table, while my aunt had no doubt been gastronomically delayed. When at last whatever verbal niceties had been concluded, Betty had hit the burger hard. A mouth full of the perennial picnic crashers had grossed her out big time, scarred her psychologically. The excessive brushing had started that very afternoon, following a lot of expectorating. The implants hadn’t uprooted any old, or odd, habits.

Aunt Betty got another frozen mug from the freezer after she repeated her song and dance with the tumbler and mixer, though I’m sure the previous performance still had the creamy crowd properly shaken. I said nothing: watching a work of art in progress often overwhelms an onlooker, leaves one breathless, however superfluous the progression.

Having delivered the drink and once again dabbed up any minute mess she’d made in its preparation, my aunt re-seated herself.

“To your health,” I toasted as she so lowered herself.


“Damn!” she blurted out, and her bottom was off the chair as if it had been propelled by NASA. I could clearly tell she wasn’t reacting to my mugged wish for her well-being. She ran down a small corridor to her bedroom, and shortly returned waving a prepared envelope as if it had been a white flag of panicked surrender.

“What’s wrong, aunt Betty?” I asked in between coughs that her abrupt outburst, aided and abetted by a throat-full of eggnog, had engendered. The woman’s face was full of self-flagellation.

“I forgot to mail my damn health insurance check in,” she hurled angrily at me, as if my question had been as inane as the nose on her face, a proboscis peculiarly pinched up. She moved to a closet and began to struggle with a large, winter’s coat.

I jumped from my chair, fearful that the exertion the heavy coat was requiring, along with her demented dither, would lead to a heart attack. I took the envelope from her mouth, where she’d clamped it, to better arm herself for the closet-conflict. The hefty garment had no doubt given her resistance before.

“I’ll mail it,” I said to her indignant eyes. She hadn’t much cared for my extraction, I suppose. “Is the box still out front?”

Now seeing what my manual muscle had been about, she calmed a bit. “Yes, but you’ve got to hurry. There’s a pick-up in ten minutes.” This explained why she’d been repeatedly reading her wristwatch since emerging from the bedroom, which had been a little comical at first, when she’d been maniacally waving the remittance. Watch and envelope, you see, were both right-handed.

“Be right back,” I chirped. True to my word, I returned to her floor but minutes later. She was waiting anxiously for me from outside her opened door, hallwayed and harassed-looking.

“Did you get to the box?” she asked, in the tone of apprehension, which didn’t have anything to do with my actual depositing of the mail. She knew I was up to that simple task. No, what was concerning her was the scheduled pick-up. If the postal guy had already come, emptied and gone, she’d have a whole, hand-twisting, circadian crisis on her hands, a wringing crisis, of course. Fortunately, I’d caught the guy in time, right with his own hands in the cookie jar, so to speak, and given him my aunt’s crumb. When I so informed my relative of my fortuitous catching, she relaxed noticeably, evoking in me images of the sun suddenly breaking through lowering clouds. She led me back to the dining table and my eggnog, and seated herself with a heavy, ‘close call’ exhalation. One would have thought I’d heroically untied and rescued her from the train tracks just as the juggernaut had been about to sever ties itself.

“Is the payment overdue?” I asked, assuming of course that, if it wasn’t, it was damn close to being so.

She shocked me. “I have to mid-January,” she replied, turning a tad red in the cheeks.

“What?” I snapped, before calming myself down, before noticing the redness. “Aunt Betty, why were you all worked up when you have weeks yet to get it in?” I asked gently. I was concerned that her slight discoloration had to do with her immediately recent dither, with a rise in her blood pressure. She didn’t need anyone yelling at her at the moment. I was wrong, though, about any internal increase. The woman was simply embarrassed.

“I know,” she sort of whispered.

“I forgot,” she then said more animatedly, startling me, throwing her arms into the air as if in some gesture of forced admission. She noisily rose from the chair and moved to the kitchen, made herself a tooth-paste-mocking eggnog, didn’t bother to clean up anything, and returned to the table.

“It’s the ‘Big A’ encroaching on me,” she loudly lamented, after a healthy mouth-full of her drink. “I forget everything lately; or misthink things, like the due-date on that damn insurance bill. Don’t be surprise if you some time in the near future address me to no response: I won’t even know my own damn name! They’re going to put me in some home with a bunch of mentally impaired old people, to drool away my remaining years!” This scenario scared her no end, seriously scared her. She’d once even said that she’d kill herself before being so carted away.

“Oh, come on, aunt Betty,” I encouragingly dismissed. “Everybody messes up on dates. It doesn’t mean that any mental failure is encroaching.” I’d thrown out one of those laughs with my statement, to sort of underline how dismissing I was about her disquietude. Of course, it was one of those laughs that itself could be dismissed, for I’m sure that somewhere in its sound was my genuine concern. After all, the way she’d been acting about that letter had been stamped with lunacy. For her to have gotten so worked up over the missive meant that the contents therein had to have a serious significance to her; and anything of such importance should have mentally cemented such details as dates indelibly in her memory. My own memory galvanized me into action.

“I’ve got just the thing you need,” I joyfully threw out, pushing her gift back at her. “You need to exercise your mind, just like you do your body,” I hinted, advising. “You don’t do crosswords anymore, or read much nowadays; but it’s imperative that you get you cerebral calisthenics.”

She played with the thing a while, but not with as much indifference as before, for this was a woman who was indeed worried about her mental state. My words had allowed a ray of light into the darkness of her determined defeatism. A single stick of illumination being what it is, she began opening my gift with only a little enthusiasm.

As for my briefly touching on the fact that my relative bodily exercised, let me say this: my aunt Betty was a woman who did things obsessively; and I’m not talking teeth here. Her excessive, oral brushing was rooted in trauma, had a finger-point-able provenance. Crazy as it was, there was some logic to her sense that her mouth always needed cleansing. With the obsessiveness I’m talking about, the etiology isn’t clear, to her, or to anyone who has known her a long time. The psychological starting point, however, doesn’t matter any more. She has assimilated it into her being; it simply ‘is’.

She started exercising late in life, only about ten years ago, but she now did it as religiously as any rosary-toting votary, on a twice-daily basis. She had equipment set up seemingly haphazardly throughout her apartment. There was one of those walking machines, with the moving belt underfoot and the two, large diagonal poles to grab hold of. She once demonstrated the thing to me, going at it quite passionately. She looked like a skier making her way up-mountain to some starting point of descent. She had mats rolled up all over, awaiting their horizontal obligations. She used them for the 200 sit-ups she did each day, and for body-stretching. She had a rack on one of her main room’s walls which held bar-bells and dumb-bells. Some coiled contraption with handles hung with a nightgown from a hook on the inside door of her bathroom. Four of five pairs of tennis shoes had been stepped out of along the beaten path of the abode. Squeezable hand-grips sat on an end-table next to the recliner. The woman looked good for her age, as I suppose most physical fanatics do.

Exercising was just one manifestation of her obsessive nature, although it had lasted longer than most of her over-the-years compulsions. I could remember, back when her husband had been yet among us, a sudden desire on her part to learn the expertise of Italian cooking. The woman, for 3 or 4 months, had seemingly read every book ever written on the gastronomical subject; and when she’d been so eyeballed, it had been virtually impossible to penetrate her with words. When she hadn’t been reading, she’d been cooking. The smell of spices had dominated the nostrils of any visitor, and often the ears had encountered spice as well: for aunt Betty’s language could be highly and hotly seasoned when one of her endeavors at the stove hadn’t turned out as flavorfully as anticipated. Even uncle Jake, during these months, had found himself stove-tied: relegated to back-burner status. He hadn’t seemed to mind it too much, though. The reason for his tolerance, I afterwards found out, had been that his wife, just prior to her Italian passion, had been obsessed with some pop-philosophy espousing touchy-feely-ness. For weeks she’d been wrapped around him like a glued-on blanket, baring her soul with every breath that she’d taken, exhorting him to verbally do the same. Jake had loved his wife, but when she’d abruptly cut out the contiguity and begun cutting onions, the tears had been in both of their eyes, his tears of spatial relief.

That she could so suddenly and constantly veer, from one obsession to another, was probably the main reason uncle Jake had become so outgoing in his marital life. As long as he’d had his wife occupied, her compulsions had tended to keep their distance. I point out here, to explain why my gift-selection didn’t raise any red flags in me, that most of her compulsive activity was pretty much harmless, and not nearly as jealous of her time as had been the cited episode with Italian cooking, or with her touchy-feely mania. Some red flags, however, simply blend with the scenery, to only announce themselves in guilt-colored starkness during future retrospect.

“What is this?” aunt Betty asked on finally getting her gift unwrapped. She was holding a boxed collection of cassettes, picking at the cellophane.

“Just the thing you need to ward off the ‘Big A’; mental exercise,” I basically repeated myself. “You’re going to learn yourself a new language, and one that very few people on the planet speak.” That few people indeed talked the talk was fact. A couple hundred seriously back-wooded folks on some evolutionarily forgotten island were so tongued, along of course with an absorbed anthropologist or two; and however many people had bought and studied the cassettes. I doubt that many had so done. I’d stumbled onto them in some Curiosity Shop which itself seemed to have been pretty much forgotten. I hadn’t had to wrestle with anyone for the lone collection. The guy at the register had looked at my purchase as if he’d no idea how it had gotten into his establishment. All of this of course had led him to charge me a rather exorbitant cost, the language being so unheard…… of. When it comes to such evaluation, anthropologists and shop-owners kind of speak the same language, in this case………………….

“Lunanese,” she said tentatively, reading from the label of cassette #1.

“A very rare language,” I inculcated, trying to get her worked up about it. “Only some tribe on some remote island uses it. The entirety of it is on the ten tapes. You’ll be completely fluent in months; and in the process you’ll strengthen you mental faculties. There’ll be no eye-straining and little necessity to use your hands, other than working a button or two on your tape-player.” I was starting to feel like a real huckster, and one whose aggression isn’t really required, for here was a customer, aunt Betty, who needed little encouraging. I could see that she’d quickly gotten caught up in the self-feeding thought of ladling ‘Lunanese’. My advice concerning her need for brain-lubrication, however softly solicitously given, was being taken by her.

“Help yourself to some more eggnog,” she said absently, finishing her own drink and rising from the table, the boxed cassettes in her hand. She placed the tapes on the endtable next to the recliner, next to the handgrips; and then moved to a drawer of a sideboard and quickly rummaged out her small, handled radio/tape player. A set of insertable ear phones self-wrapped around it.

“Let yourself out, dear, whenever you’re ready,” she said, somewhat to me. I think she’d already gotten oblivious to her surroundings. She plopped onto the recliner, expertly worked the adjustable footrest, and kicked her feet up. She unwrapped and inserted the ear phones, unwrapped and inserted tape #1 into her player. She hit the ‘run’ button, closed her eyes and began listening away, a brow-wrinkling of concentration immediately soiling her smooth countenance. At least she hadn’t forgotten to keep her batteries fresh, for she hadn’t bothered with any wall outlets, and I could hear the whispered leftovers of the voice on the cassette that her ears weren’t gobbling up.

My mouth was hanging open. Things were just happening too absurdly. First off, she hadn’t cleaned up after herself, the fastidious freak: her empty mug of egg-nog was still sitting on the table, looking as puzzled as I. Secondly, she had told me furnish myself if I wanted any more of her sacred beverage, and such self-servicing had never been allowed me. This was a woman who had to have been a waitress in some previous life, or a criminal; such was her seeming sense of obligation to serve, or her seeming need to keep something out of the sight of a wandering visitor. Last but not least, or maybe it had been, had been her abrupt, impersonal manner of kicking me out of the door. As I said, aunt Betty was no fan of anyone’s prolonged visitation, but on my previous appearances she had always escorted me to the door, and given me a little kiss on the cheek as she’d subtly pushed me into the hallway.

I guess I could have been angry and made my anger known, but the thing was, I kind of melted when I again looked over at her. The sweet eccentric was happy in her newly found world, if an obsessive personality gluing to the newest object of her obsession can be labeled with such a benign word. Whatever, she was sitting in her own abode, with no old crazies running around and no drool dropping from her chin; and showing no suicidal signs. The ‘Big A’ would have to pick on someone else, someone its own, surrendering size. I gathered myself up and exited, locking the door behind me.

It was over three months before I saw her again, around Easter; and ‘Lunanese’ had wrought incredible change. How ironic that my tapes, intended to fend off the ‘Big A’, had, ostensibly at least, brought it on. What a piece of advice I’d two-cents-ed.

I was told at the reception desk of her apartment complex that 3 or 4 weeks earlier my aunt Betty had been found delirious, talking out of her head. A maintenance guy had so found, his having come to her domicile to adjust her thermostat from its winter setting. I was directed to the guy, who told me, as gently as he could, what he’d come across.

He’d knocked on her door and gotten no answer, tried the knob. It had turned without resistance. He’d immediately seen her. She was lying in her recliner, completely nude, save for a pair of bedroom slippers. There were bath towels packed under her, stretching from mid-back to knees. The towels were sodden, and the stench emanating from them spoke indubitably of urine. Empty bottles were strewn all around the recliner. He said my aunt wouldn’t respond to his concerned address. She just sat there, ear-phoned to a tape player sitting on the end table next to the chair. Her eyes were closed and her white-stained lips, though virtually sealed, were moving slightly, as if in whispering conversation. The stain suffusing her mouth had source-kinship with the soiling that dappled her entire frontal body. It, of course, had been eggnog. She had no doubt been sloppily drinking straight from the bottles.

When the maintenance man, feeling helpless at her lack of response to him, had cautiously removed her ear phones, her eyes had jumped open, as had her mouth, fully. She’d begun hurling invectives at him, along with some weak punches. The guy was completely certain of the punches; he had felt them. As for the condemnations, he hadn’t been totally sure. She’d been speaking words that he’d never heard before. I knew that she’d been speaking old ‘Lunanese’. My stomach turned over.

By this time, the apartment building’s manager had come over. She escorted me into her office, sending the maintenance guy off on some urgent requirement in 408. She closed the door behind us, in fact bolted it locked. She offered me a seat, which I accepted; a coffee from her credenza-riding machine, which I refused. She made herself one and then sat down at her desk, looking strangely relieved, in a harassed kind of way.

“We’ve been trying to find a relative of Betty’s for some time,” she said, accusation, apology, suffering and woe all mingled up in her voice. “Her to-be-notified relative on the application form she filled out when she moved in, a daughter, Margaret, can not be contacted.” There was no daughter, I knew; though there was a woman named Margaret, my aunt’s hair dresser. A name had had to be supplied; my aunt had gotten ‘Madge’ to lie, had somehow gotten the lie through the review process. All this deception, no doubt, had had to do with my aunt’s wanting to sever all ties to her Jake-filled past. The post-Jakean woman had wanted complete isolation, and had wanted it with a maniacal seriousness. That I had gotten through this craziness owed itself to my faint knowledge of Margaret, from picking my aunt up years ago from the salon when Jake had had some car trouble and I’d just happened to be nearby. Goaded by the family after Betty had disappeared, I’d importuned Margaret for information until she’d contacted my aunt and gotten permission to direct me. Consequently, I’d been sworn to silence concerning the actual whereabouts of my relative in exchange for visitation allowances every three months or so, visits to assuage any familial concerns about her.

“Where is my aunt now?” I inquired weakly, confused by what I’d been hearing, and yet believing I knew what aural pathway awaited.

The manager hesitated, very reluctant. I had asked my question with every expectation of hearing that sweet aunt Betty was now in some nursing home, having taken her most recent obsession way to far. I figured she’d gotten tongue-tied in a maniacal way, had somehow gotten kind of aphasic, as far as good, old English was concerned. She was talking ‘Lunanese’ exclusively and people thought she’d gone senile, had incurred Alzheimer’s. My figuring so, I know, sounds really far-fetched, but………you had to know my aunt Betty.

The manager didn’t take that auricular path, though; she headed down one that was a cul de sac. From this dead end, there was no turning back. This was more than a mere closed passageway: this was the end of the road.

Aunt Betty had died a day or two earlier! She’d killed herself, hung herself!

By the time I’d finished with the complex’s manager, and talked to a resident or two, and once again conversed with the maintenance man who’d found her down on her ‘Lunanese’ in obsessive, religious fervor, I pretty much knew all that had happened.

After I’d left, that infamous day when I’d given her the cassettes, advised her to occupy her mind, she’d gotten all wrapped up in what she’d just unwrapped. The next morning, she’d gotten her entire supply of egg-nog out of her storage bin. A neighbor had seen her coming and going repeatedly with her little hand-truck, three cartons per when stacked. To add salt to my guilt-wound, I’d gotten the hand-truck for her some years ago, per her request. However strange her desire to so possess, I’d run out and gotten it for her without question, even though I’d yet to discover her basement cache. My aunt, after all, was my aunt.
Anyway, Betty, had no doubt gone deeper and deeper into her obsession, to the point that she’d had little time for such things as toilet necessity, at least, liquid necessity. Fortunately, my aunt had continued to use the commode when her bowels had announced themselves, unless the people I’d talked to had been trying to sugar-coat the shit that had gone down. My guess, though, and the maintenance man had added concrete to my conjecture, was that my relative had stopped eating as the crazed obsession had itself devoured her. Putting out requires taking in, and the guy had told me that Betty had emaciated to the point that he’d been able to see her blood coursing through her body. The dwindling eggnog had kept her occasionally urinating, and the towels under her had kept the urination more or less in its place. My aunt had had a lot of towels in her linen closet, a lot; and a lot had been used: Quite a few of the egg-nog boxes were stuffed and stinking with the cotton soldiers who had ‘wasted’ their lives. Inappropriate pun aside, you do the math: Betty had spent 90 days or so on her recliner, cassettes playing and ear-phones in, towels and cartons of eggnog her only contact with the world beyond the tapes; and I guess an occasional trip to empty her bowels. Sleep had most likely been but an intermittent thing. She’d been found filthy as hell, and the stench emanating from her body had combined with the effluvium of urine to create an odor that had had the maintenance man holding his nose as he’d cell-phoned the complex’s manager and reported the need for an ambulance.

“We’ve got a deep-end,” he’d blurted out, meaning of course that my aunt had gone off the ‘deep-end’, vernacular for a resident who had come mentally unglued. He’d had a bit of a problem at first communicating his panicky message, for my aunt’s ‘Lunanese’ had been drowning him out. At last he’d gotten his words across, and indeed an ambulance had shortly thereafter arrived, its attendants strapping Betty to a gurney and wheeling her off into a sunset anything but beautiful. She’d be diagnosed with acute Alzheimer’s. She’d never revert to the English language, to tell them how off base they were.

At the nursing home where she’d been taken, I talked to an administrator or two. There was paper work I had to take care of; also some releases from liabilities, which I signed freely, as their hands had been tied by the lack of information they had concerning my relative.

My aunt had been cremated, as death waits for no one, much like decomposition.

I was given the address and directions to a cinerarium where aunt Betty’s ashes were jarred on some shelf. I had them earthed with uncle Jake, as she no doubt would have wished.

As for her other posthumous wishes, there was a will in a security box that had been among her belongings. Everything had been taken to some public storage place, which was being magnanimously paid for by the apartment complex, out of the remaining months on my aunt’s lease that had been paid in advance. In the will, my aunt had left everything to some Church, all monies, all property. As far as I knew, she hadn’t set foot in a church in a very long time. It was a mysterious beneficence, but I guess we should all exit leaving some mystery behind; though she’d had enough incomprehensible sides to cover quite a few departures.

Before leaving the nursing home, I’d talked to the young woman who had found my sweet aunt Betty no longer among the volitionally living. What I wanted to know from her she seemed reluctant to tell me. I guess it was kind of a strange request on my part; but something morbid within me had to be satisfied.

Betty had never wanted to end up in a nursing home, and I’d consigned her thereto. She’d loathed the idea of being surrounded by senility, and I’d dropped her right into the middle of senescence. She’d wanted so desperately to ward of Alzheimer’s, and I’d given it to her, contagious fool that I am. She’d promised suicide before submitting to such approaching scenarios, and I’d diluted her determination. Thank God she’d found the whiskey of willpower to counteract me in the end, however upset I was that Easter.

“Yes, there was drool running down her chin when I found her,” the nurse answered at last, puzzled over why I’d want to know such a thing.

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