In Memoriam

The cousin who keeps track of things called yesterday afternoon to tell us that my father's last surviving sister had died. She was the last of my aunts who was a blood relative. (I still have two aunts who are married to my two surviving uncles, one on each side of the family.) She would have been 96 this spring. Her name was Velma. I don't think anyone is being named Velma anymore. I remember quite a few characters named Velma in old movies and in books of the early to mid 20th century. Many of them were a bit on the wild side. My aunt Velma was a bit wild in her youth -- she might even have been considered a flapper. She enjoyed dancing and smoking and visiting speakeasies. By the time I knew her, she had settled down to respectable smokeless and alcohol-free middle age. She had acquired religion. When I worked for a while in the family print shop, she operated one of the folding machines. Quick and lively, she moved about the place singing hymns, only snatches of which I could catch over the racket of the machinery. For a while in the 1930's, she lived on Catalina and worked in the pottery there which made arty figurines and such for the tourist trade. The products of the Catalina Pottery have since become collectors items. Whenever I see a piece made at that time, I always think how my aunt Velma might have had a hand in making it. Individual artisans didn't sign their work there, but I like knowing that objects she made anonymously are out there, scattered about the world, valued by their owners.

Velma Marion
1908-2004

Delighter than Air

scottobear posted a picture of a blimp, and now I've got airship nostalgia. One of my earliest memories is of standing in my front yard and looking up to find the source of a faint hum and seeing the Goodyear blimp slowly floating over my neighborhood. It was very close, and seemed huge, though it was actually much smaller than the immense dirigibles I had missed by several years, having been born after they had all crashed or been dismantled. There is something delightful about a blimp. I suppose I might have been frightened by seeing such a huge object defying gravity above me, but my only reactions were wonder and joy. These were increased when, as the blimp passed no more than half a block away, I saw someone inside the small gondola waving at me. I waved back and shouted, and watched in amazement as the big silver ship drifted south in the afternoon sunlight until its stately progression took it from view behind the trees up the block, and the soft purring of its engines faded. I think this happened when I was four years old. I remember having a great sense of happiness knowing that there were such lovely things in the world. Over the following years, that feeling always returned whenever I saw a blimp. Maybe it's the contrast between the great, ungainly bulk of the thing and its unexpected buoyancy and grace of movement, but whatever the reason, a blimp always brings me delight, though the one time I have seen one in all the years since I moved to this isolated community, (and seen then only from the distance as it moved down the valley several miles away) the delight was mixed with a touch of melancholy nostalgia, as though I were seeing it not only across the spatial distance, but back through a temporal distance, somehow reflected from a vanished and irrecoverable world.