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  • What We Have
  • Gaynell Gavin (bio)

In the year of that space basketball, Sputnik, one of the first two telephone numbers I learned to dial was that of my mother's sister, Ellen, who lived on Bluff Street. The other was that of my father's clothing store. Both numbers remained the same for more than forty years. I see the black rotary phone on which I learned to dial those numbers beside the large bed in my parents' room.

It is late spring 1996, when I visit my aunt Ellie. We do errands together within a few blocks' circumference—she has a spare key made at the key shop on Belle Street, I get a new watch band at Hudson's Jewelry on Piasa, we eat at a small downtown sandwich shop. As we step from the curb to my car, I notice how light her hand feels on my forearm.

Back in her living room, we sit on the floral print couch, looking at pictures of her seventy-fifth birthday party at the Knights of Columbus hall the previous autumn, when she says it, matter-of-factly, "I have to write down the names of people in these pictures so that when I'm gone Carrie will know who they are," and inside I flinch. Carrie is her five-year-old great-granddaughter.

Recently a friend said to me, "When I look at my mother and think that she will die someday, it almost takes my breath away. I can't believe it, and I don't know how I'll bear it."

Now my aunt's words almost take my breath away. People have, of course, been dying for a long time. But not my people. Not the people who raised me.

I pick up another album and look at Ellen's straightforward gaze from her ninth grade newspaper picture, the caption announcing that she has been chosen class prefect at Marquette High. I turn to another picture of her, at nineteen, and she leans over to observe, "Nary a line in that face."

On the next page is a 1961 brochure for Olin Vocational School, where Ellen trained to be a licensed practical nurse at the age of [End Page 77] thirty-nine. Her picture on the brochure cover could be that of a twenty-nine-year-old. Her hair was dark then, although now it has been white for years. "That's a beautiful picture of you."

"It is good," she agrees.

It has been ten years since Ellen sold the Bluff Street house and chose another brick street, Prospect; she bought a condo in a lovely, old yellow brick building within a mile of Bluff and kept the same phone number. Half a block down, her hill intersects State Street; across this intersection is Saints Peter and Paul Church, made from area limestone, and also known as Cathedral. There Ellen attends mass most mornings and plays bridge Thursday afternoons.

In the evening light, which is gentle, I walk up the hill where Prospect meets limestone bluff and curves down Summit Street, another hill, parallel to that broad diluvial cut of the Mississippi River, stretching before me. The cottony stuff of cottonwoods floats through the air and covers the bricks. Ellen has gone to a church supper, and I am on my way to dinner with her son, Alan, and his wife, Sherri, who live on Summit. Sherri fries catfish for us to eat on the side porch surrounded by trees, with a stretch of river through the green. As we sit down, I ask if she likes early retirement.

"I love it," she says, brushing wisps of reddish bangs from her forehead with the back of one hand. The evening is a little warm but pleasant. "I love the trips we've made to the Serengeti, and I love what I do close to home. Yesterday I rode my bike down the River Road; today I washed windows. People ask me if I get bored. Hell no, I'm not bored. I was bored at McDonnell-Douglas all those years. You know what I was as a secretary there? VP of SLJ, Vice President...

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