My Great Aunt Julie Dove Algate knew how to live. On her seventieth birthday, she showed up to her party in a miniskirt and sang and drank and danced on the table. At family reunions, she always made up games to amuse the children. She showed us honey-flavored sweet clover that we could eat and sour grass that we could chew. She taught us how to whistle with nut shells and do all sorts of things that would annoy our parents. One year she and her sister brought newspapers for everyone to make pirate hats. Another year, they cut panty-hose legs apart, put water balloons in the feet, and pulled the top ends over their heads to have a very strange-looking water fight.
At the 2005 reunion, Aunt Julie looked unusually frail, and her usual ability to tell long stories and family histories failed her. She asked my dad over and over how his father was doing, her younger brother, who had been dead fifteen years. Her daughters said she had her good days and bad days, and the good days were coming less and less often.
But when Aunt Julie and her daughters arrived at the 2006 reunion by Lake Lansing, her round blue eyes sparkled and squinted with her old spirit of mischief. Relatives of all ages dropped their horseshoes, hot dogs, soccer balls, and grill tongs to “pile on” Aunt Julie.
Her daughters, already grandmothers themselves with gray hair and sun-toughened skin, shuffled around her on their callused feet with perfect pedicures, arranging her in a chair beside her brother, Great Uncle Bob. They interrupted their mother’s conversation every few minutes to quarrel in their husky smokers’ voices about going to take a pee-pee. Aunt Julie said, “I have more important things to do than pee-pee,” and shooed them away with a lit cigarette. She talked for hours with Uncle Bob about past generations of our family who had emigrated from Northern Europe and the British Isles and worked in Abraham Lincoln’s house and died on the Battleship Maine.
Nearby Aunt Julie’s granddaughter Corinne held her great-granddaughter, and everyone remarked that they were both as beautiful as Aunt Julie’s daughters and Aunt Julie herself had been in their time.
Mr. G and I had been married quietly by a justice of the peace over a year ago, but my mother introduced Mr. G to Aunt Julie as my fiancée. Aunt Julie winked at me and said, “You’re going to have beautiful babies.”
I told her “Thank you!” and leaned close to her chair. “Actually,” I said, “we’re already married by law. We’re just having our wedding this spring.”
“Oh, you are married!” she exclaimed.
“Yeah…” I smiled and nodded toward my mother, who was busy with Corinne’s baby. “We can’t tell her family, though, because they’re very Catholic and they’d get all upset about it. You know, not being married in the Church.”
Aunt Julie reached out and grabbed my hands, looked into my eyes, and said, “You do what makes you happy and don’t ever listen to what anyone else says. Let me tell you about me and my Beloved Bud. Do you remember Bud? Bald guy, big paunch?”
I laughed and said, “I met him once, when I was really little. You lived on a lake, right?”
“Oh, I still do! I still live in that very same house.” She straightened up proudly. “Now let me first say, I never regretted my first marriage. I have five beautiful, beautiful children from that marriage, and they have made my life wonderful. I have nothing to regret. But it was not a good marriage.
“My children were everything to me. Everything! After my first marriage I dated once or twice, but I never even let my children see the men I dated. They would have to meet me at the restaurant, or drive up in front of the house, and I’d go out to them. I just didn’t want my children to be involved in that. And so I really didn’t go out much. There was one man, a very nice man I was seeing for, oh…three years. I was out dancing with him one night, and I was thinking, gosh, I would rather be back at home with my kids. Why am I doing this? And so I cut it off. That poor man, he wouldn’t believe it wasn’t something he had done, but I just didn’t see the point. I’d rather be with my kids! So I had to break it off. And I decided I just didn’t want to date after that, and I stopped trying.
“Well, shortly after that I had a real emotional blow. I was working to support my kids, and my boss gave me a letter at work. It said, ‘I know you’re a single mother trying hard to make ends meet. My wife doesn’t like to visit me in Houghton Lake, and I could use more female companionship.’ Can you believe it, he was asking me to sell my body to him. At that moment I realized how the community saw me, a divorced single mother, and I couldn’t help crying.
“A coworker saw and comforted me. Then she went and called her friend Bud because she said a friend ‘needed a strong shoulder to cry on.’ Well, I was humiliated by that, too. Bud had been asking about me, but I never took him seriously. He came by, though, and he was comforting. We went out for a beer and pool. I didn’t drink then, but it was cheap date. After that we just drove around, talking for hours. I’d been with another man three years and only spent a few hours with Bud, but we both felt on that evening that we could spend the rest of our lives with the other.
“We began dating seriously, and I even let Bud meet my children. He proposed marriage many times, and I always said no. It was hard enough on my kids with the way we were treated in our small town, what the neighbors thought of me. I couldn’t go into a church and get married again.
“Then—and I will always remember this, to the day I die.” Aunt Julie fixed me with a sharp blue look. “One spring, on April 14th, he presented me with a diamond ring. Right then and there we committed to each other before God and each other, the only ones who mattered.
“Bud moved into my house after that. Let me tell you, the neighbors didn’t get any nicer. And Bud’s sisters hated me. They all treated me and my family terribly, but we said to hell with them. My life was changed. I didn’t care anymore what they all thought of me.”
I smiled, thinking of Aunt Julie’s hard partying, silly games, and raucous humor. It was hard to imagine her as a shy young 1950s mother, crushed by shame and social stigma.
“Unfortunately, Bud had some health problems, and the doctors wouldn’t acknowledge me as family or anyone significant. One day Bud had to have emergency heart surgery, and I took him to the hospital with his sisters. The doctor asked if I was family, and Bud’s sisters said, ‘No, she’s just a friend.’ The doctor turned his back to me and told Bud’s sisters that Bud would need veins taken out of his leg and implanted in his heart. I asked the doctor, ‘Can you use someone else’s veins?’ Then the doctor turned and looked at me and understood the situation. From then on he dealt primarily with me.
“But Bud’s health problems continued, and his family and the community continued to be nasty. Seven years after he had moved in with me, I went into the garage where he was working. I was crying, and I asked him to do please do something for me. He said, ‘Anything,’ and I asked, ‘Will you marry me?’ He said, ‘Finally!’ I proposed going to the courthouse, but Bud insisted on taking me to a church. We didn’t have a proper wedding. I never remembered which day it was that we got legally married, but THIS”—she held up her left hand with its sparking diamond—“THIS is the day we committed, and this is April 14th.
Aunt Julie laid her hands down on her thin knees and looked down at the ring. “Two years later, Bud died of cancer.” She looked up at me again. “I had nine years with my Beloved Bud, and I only wish that everyone could be as happy as we were. I had such joy in my life with him.” Her eyes swept the picnic tables and landed on my husband. “Don’t you let anyone tell you how to love him,” she said, and she took my hands again. “You love each other the way that you want to, because it’s about YOU and HIM.”
I told Aunt Julie about how he and I had eloped at the Mason courthouse on a random Thursday. We had called our friend Esperanza at the last minute, who called in sick to work and brought her Uncle Juan and Aunt Maria Elena along as witnesses. Afterward, we had tacos at Pablo’s Panaderia and had a glass of wine in our apartment.
I talked with Aunt Julie for awhile and discovered that when Bud was on his deathbed, my dad had found out that Bud had lived in the house next door to ours before we moved in. He had built the garage and written his name in the cement, Bud Algate. Until he was dying we had never known much about him or that he had lived in our city.
Aunt Julie died at her home on the lake last month. At her funeral, a family member read a poem that she had written about her Beloved Bud. She asked, “When will the sadness end? When will the pain stop?” Aunt Julie never stopped missing him, but she lived without regrets, full of love and wisdom and good humor. Her stories and spirit live on in her children, grandchildren, great nieces and nephews, and great-grandchildren.
I didn’t get to attend Aunt Julie’s funeral, but I put a youthful picture of her on my Day of the Dead altar. On November 1st my family will come over to celebrate her memory along with other loved ones we have lost. My dad will bring a snapshot of Aunt Julie with pantyhose on her head, swinging a water balloon. We’ll set out some beer and a shot of Hot Damn and invite her hard-partying, fiercely loving spirit into our home for a night of remembrance.
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