Anni

It was after Anni died that I had the epiphany that we love our friends for their faults as much as their virtues.

Anni was a beautiful young woman, tall with long blonde hair. She played women’s rugby, and baseball, and I know she did construction work, among other things. She was a member of the Women’s Choir in the early 80s, and a close friend of my singing partner Velvet.

One night she came to choir rehearsal on crutches. She had started a new job at UPS and her very first day her leg was injured, and she was rushed off to the ER. We all wanted to know what happened, and we sat around the long table in the kitchen of the Blue Heron, and she told us. She had us all collapsing with laughter as she told her story.

One day I ran into her in the women’s bathroom on the ferry to Fauntleroy, and she started talking about her oily skin. How it was annoying now, but she knew that as she got older it would keep her younger looking and wrinkle free.

Sigh. We shall never know if she was right about that.

She was a terrible driver. She gave me a ride to rehearsal once and scared the living carp out of me. She was reckless, and drove too fast.

One time when I was driving up to town on Cove Road, I saw her van come out of the side road without stopping at the stop sign and hurl into Cove Road traffic without a pause.

I remember how my stomach dropped when I saw that. Geez, Anni, you took a big chance there. There were cars coming. You know, the laws of physics won’t be suspended merely because of your strong will. Not that I ever said any of that to her.

One afternoon in September 1987, the trio, Women, Women and Song (Libbie Anthony, Velvet Neifert, and me), was rehearsing at the Blue Heron for a concert we were going to do the following weekend. Suddenly we heard multiple sirens. Something big was happening. We paused, curious, but realized we did not know where they were going and there was nothing we could do about it. We continued rehearsing.

Later we would hear about what caused the big ruckus.

Anni was driving her van home from a construction site. She had a load of lumber in the back of her van.

She came around the right-angle corner where 87^th Avenue turns into Cemetery Road, and the story I heard was that she was leaning over doing something on the floor of the van, not watching the road. Her van ran into the 118 bus that was coming from the opposite direction, head on, hitting the corner of the front of the bus exactly where the steering column of Anni’s van was.

On impact she was thrown forward into her steering wheel and the crumpling front of the van, and the lumber in the back of her van came flying forward and hit her in the back and head.

She was trapped inside the van.

It took a half hour or forty-five minutes for the responders to cut the van open and get Anni out of the wreck and into an ambulance that took her to Harborview in Seattle.

She lingered for 30 days. In the end, sepsis took over her body, and she died.

Her husband, from whom she was separated but not divorced, received medical bills that added up to $750,000. That was in 1987. The equivalent today would be almost $2,200,000. Somehow, he managed to pay it off, with a lot of help. At least I think he did.

Anni is buried in the Vashon Cemetery. Her husband, also a construction worker, built a concrete border around her grave. He put things he associated with her in the concrete: a baseball bat because she played baseball, some tools because she worked in construction, and a huge, long spike, which, he told me, represented the way she could really stick it to you.

He told me the story of the time when they were still living together that he brought home a bag of chips. She had forbidden such junk food in their house, and she took the bag out into the driveway, put it down by the van, and ran back and forth over the bag several times to make her point that she would not tolerate such things in her house.

Did I mention that Anni was a strongly opinionated person?

In the months and years that followed, I would sometimes visit her grave, and even tried to plant some flowers there, which did not take. Grave tending is apparently an art of its own.

Gradually, as my life went on, I forgot to visit her grave, and I seldom thought of her, until this morning when I was thinking about some of the people whom I have known in this life, and how most of them could be incredibly annoying at times.

I remembered my Anni epiphany: we do not love people only because they are nice or sweet to us. We love them for their faults, too. When someone annoys you, if you love them, that annoyance carves them deeper into your heart. It might seem crazy or irrational, but I believe it’s true.

Nowadays we have become aware of neurodivergence, of people having ADHD, or being autistic, or “on the spectrum,” but in the mid-80s that knowledge was only beginning to surface into public awareness.

Neurodivergent people often are blind to social cues, and for that and other reasons they can be annoying to other people.

So can neurotypical people.

Okay, let’s face it: human beings can be annoying, and if you get close to almost anyone, you will at some point feel annoyed by them. It is good to hold onto your humility and remember that you are annoying, too.

I know that one of the ways my ADHD is annoying to others is that I am always late. I cannot think of anyone who has found that endearing. Maybe after I’m dead.

If they had been able to get Anni out of the wreck sooner, she might have had a chance to survive. After she died, the Fire Department got a “jaws of life” device to quickly get people out of wrecked cars.

I will not say that the acquisition of the jaws of life meant that she did not die in vain, because she did. She was a lousy driver,
she made a fatal mistake, and she died, and it was not fair.

Darn it, Anni. You should be getting old with the rest of us. You and your wrinkle free skin.

My Beautiful Cousin Nancy

 My Beautiful Cousin Nancy 

"To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig."
My mother used to say this as we were coming home from shopping in the big city of Watsonville.

Watsonville was about 20,000 people in the 1950s, which was big enough for a little farming and food processing town, not to mention the brothels, which I probably shouldn't mention, but they were a big part of the town's economy back in the day, and I write for adults, so there, I mention them.
The brothels of Watsonville and Pajaro affected my family's life.

After the death of my grandmother, Lyllian, from Pick's disease (a dementia that affects young to middle aged people. You can look it up) in 1938, my grandfather consoled himself in the brothels of Watsonville, and across the river in Pajaro.
He brought some of the girls home, to the extreme annoyance of his adult daughters, and eventually married one named Sally. They had an agreement that Sally would stay with him until he died, at which point she would inherit the ranch.

But Sally – oh, Sally – at some point got weary of her promise, or perhaps got a better offer, and she ran off for about six months.

When she came back, my grandfather changed his will. She would no longer inherit the whole ranch, however she would get a lifetime income from the ranch, until she died. After her passing the ranch would go to my grandfather’s heirs.

The heirs were my grandfather's four children, Thelma, John, Lois, and Vivian (called Chick).

Two of them, my dad John and his sister Chick, died long before Sally did. Chick from multiple sclerosis (1964) and my dad from heart disease (1975).
Chick and her husband Art had two daughters, Nancy and Charlotte.

Nancy was about 9 months older than me, and we bonded early and deep. After I moved to Washington state, we didn’t see much of each other for a few decades except for occasional visits, but we talked on the phone and sent each other cards and letters.

Nancy and her sister Charlotte and I developed a running joke: "Is Sally dead yet?" Meaning, are we getting an inheritance yet? It made us laugh. We were not exactly holding our breath for that big pie in the sky day.

Nancy and I used to talk for hours on the phone, and one time when she called me, I had been having a rough time and when she asked, "How are you?" I said, "I am - just - *ucking - peachy." 

We both fell out laughing.

Later she was diagnosed with colon cancer and she had surgery and chemo. That went into remission, and then it came back, and “*ucking peachy” seemed like an apt expression for how things were going.

The cancer finally got Nancy in 2014. Isn’t that just *ucking peachy?

 She talked to me beforehand about knowing she was going to die, and knowing the surgery and chemo were stalling tactics, and about the nights she cried, alone in her bedroom, knowing her life was going to end, and how scared and sad she was.

She also lived her finite life to the fullest. She and her sister Charlotte went on road trips around the West. I got included in some of those trips. I went to Glacier Park with them, and decided that Glacier Park should be on everyone's bucket list. My gosh. Natural beauty like I had never seen before.

We also did a cemetery tour in Watsonville, where various relatives were buried. My parents, our grandfather and grandmother, a few great aunts and great uncles, and next generation aunts and uncles. My stillborn sister, who rests in an unmarked plot under grass.

In January, 2014, Nancy went blind in one eye, the result of her chemo treatments.

That’s one of the things about cancer treatment. The treatments can be more brutal than the disease.

At that point Nancy said, I'm suffering, and she decided to stop fighting the cancer.

In April she went into hospice, at her home in Benicia, California.
I went down to see her.

Now, Nancy was the most ridiculously upbeat person I have ever known. I cannot tell you why. Life sure did not give her many breaks.

Her favorite song, which she asked me to sing for her, was, "Smile." The haunting melody was written by Charles Chaplin, and the lyrics were added later by a couple of guys named John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons.I sang it for Nancy:

Smile, though your heart is aching
Smile, even though it’s breaking
When there are clouds in the sky
you’ll get by
If you smile through your fear and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You’ll see the sun come shining through
for you

Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That’s the time you must keep on trying
Smile what’s the use of crying
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile
If you’ll just
Smile
©Copyright 1954 by Bourne Co. Copyright Renewed All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured

I visited Nancy, I sang the song for her, I said farewell and came home to the Northwest.
Sometime in May her sister Charlotte called me and said that Nancy wanted to talk to me.
Her voice was so gravelly from her illness that I could not understand what she was saying, so I had to ask her to repeat herself a couple of times.

Finally, I got it.
She was saying, "Is Sally dead yet?"*

That was the last time I talked to her.

She died about nine in the evening on my birthday in May.

It was about five months after my husband Rick died. I spent some time being a little pissed off at God then. How was I to get by without those two, who had known me the longest, and known me the best, and loved me anyway? You know how I did it - how we all do it - one foot in front of the other, one day at a time. 

How I miss them both. 

*Sally died in 1990 or ‘91.  We did not hear until months afterward.