Aunt Dorothy - RIP

[susandennis]

I was about 12 and my sister was 11 and my brother was 8 and we were home alone and the phone rang. My sister answered it because, well, she came out of the womb talking on the phone to friends and has never stopped so when the phone rang at our house, it was for her.

She got off the phone fairly quickly and came into the TV room all in a twitter.

"That was a woman who said she was our Aunt Dorothy. We don't have an Aunt Dorothy, do we?"

We did a quick breakdown of both sides of the family... We lived in North Carolina and all of the relatives in the US lived in Oklahoma or Texas and the rest in Germany. Our relatives were not the type to 'drop in' or even call without weeks and months of planning.

Daddy, one sister - Aunt Kay whom we knew loved and adored. Mom, one brother - killed in WWII long before we were born. Daddy's father, no relatives living in the United States. Daddy's mother, no relatives who would speak to her much less look us up. Mom's father, no relatives who knew how to use the phone or call long distance. (I know, a sad state of relations...)

But, that brought us to Mom's mother. Grandma had a pack of siblings. We knew this. BUT, the key was that they all had funny names. Persus, Mozelle, Erin (ok that one was only funny to us), Granville, Fritz - Grandma is Miriam. Not only was there no Dorothy but it was clear that Grandma's parents did not understand even the concept of a common name like Dorothy.

My sister, the drama queen, figured out immediately that this was a fortune hunter - someone after our money and no relation at all. I pointed out that we were not rich - at least not rich enough to get scammed by a fortune hunter.

My brother said that we should shut up because since we were never allowed to watch TV on a school night when Mom and Dad were home, we were interrupting his illegal activity.

The minute Mom and Dad got home (I think they were at some PTA thing), we landed on them...

Turns out that, indeed, I guess Great-Grandma Jones (my grandma's mom) ran out of interesting names and when her last baby was born, she named her Dorothy.

We had never heard about Dorothy because she was a REBEL! She had married a blind guy and square danced for a living! They traveled from town to town doing square dance exhibitions. The family was embarrassed by her shenanigans and she dropped off the family radar.

She ended up coming over the next evening with her husband and she was actually a bit of a nutter. I was fascinated. She was 8 years older than Mom and it was hard for me to get my brain around someone who was Grandma's sister, who looked to be Mom's age, who married someone who could not tell her if her slip was showing and who square danced for a living.

I don't think I ever saw here again. Over the years, the rest of the funkily-named tribe died out and Dorothy has been the sole survivor now for about the past 30 years. She died on Tuesday after a really long illness.