My Aunt Babs

Her given name was Katherine. She referred to herself as Karen. In our family, she was always, for some reason, "Babs". Never married, Aunt Babs served in the Coast Guard in WW II, and for decades worked as a school teacher. She was a dedicated tea drinker who filled her small apartment with books, tea cups and various "little things". She was tall, thin and spoke with a sort of lilting East Coast patrician inflection. Babs was regally unpretentious, if there can be such a thing. She died last week in Baltimore at the age of 90, pretty much the last of the Mohicans of my parents generation.

A few years ago, she sent me a copy of a 50-page memoir she had written about her very early years. She titled it "Born In The Jazz Age". It's marvelous. In her honor, here's the opening paragraph:
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I arrived in 1922 to find a rather large family already settled into its marching positions. Two burgeoning Flappers at the top led the parade in red, unblotted lipstick and cloche hats tilted over their spit curls. (They spent a lot of time looking into mirrors, adjusting those tilts.) Innumerable brothers, known to the neighborhood as the Jacobsen Clan, filled out the middle -- all tall (or going to be tall), all good-looking, and all called Jake. When the telephone rang and a voice asked, "Is Jake there?", you had to go through a roll call of their more elegant-sounding family names, which Mother preferred, to find the right one, and then the voice would say, "Yeah, Bryce DuVal-whatever, that one." On this rather crowded ladder, I was at the bottom. "A very sickly child," said Mother. "We had a hard time getting you to talk." It was the same year King Tut's tomb was found and his mummified body taken to Cairo, and though we had little else in common, it was always a comfort to know that His Majesty the Pharaoh and I shared a profound silence at the new world opening before us.