Aunt Minnie and the moving peas

We looked forward to visits from my mother's beloved older sister, Minnie Carney, during the Great Depression. My younger brother Alan and I would walk several blocks to the end of the Number 9 Streetcar line on Kenmore Avenue to meet her, chatting excitedly as we escorted her to our small home on Lincoln Boulevard. Having Minnie visit made that day very special.
She was a spinster of sweet disposition and infinite patience who smilingly put up with out antics and practical jokes. There was always a lot of laughter when Minnie was around. Even our very adult older brother, Rich, 9 years my senior, couldn't hide a grin behind his newspaper.
My dear mother, Margaret, slim and beautiful with an Irish wit, mimicked friends and neighbors, sometimes in ways they might not have appreciated, but always with a laugh, and never maliciously. She whistled like a songbird, although her hearing was fading fast, even then. Minnie could hear just fine, but had poor eyesight and wore thick glasses.
I confess we took advantage of her vision at Christmas dinner in 1937. Mother had roasted and stuffed two chickens, which pleased her sons who could enjoy more drumsticks. Alan sat across the table next to brother Bob, 3 years my senior, and I nestled next to Minnie's left elbow. Rich sat on her right and mother and dad at each end of the table, which was filled with creamed onions, extra bowls of mother's delicious bread stuffing, gravy, yams and peas. Ah, the peas.
Alan held a small hollow rubber ball in his lap, attached to a thin tube we'd placed beneath the festive table cloth to a pad under Minnie's dinner plate.
Dad carved the chickens and plates were filled amidst much chatter and laughing. We pretended not to notice as Minnie's plate tipped and peas rolled to the edge. She removed her glasses and wiped them with her napkin.
She picked up her fork and stared at her plate. It lifted to the right and peas rolled off on the table cloth. Alan hid behid his napkin to stifle a laugh. I did my best to keep a straight face. Embarrassed, poor Minnie retrieved the wandering peas and resumed eating.
My dad realized what was going on and smiled sheepishly. Mother was oblivious to the fun. Alan squeezed the bulb again, hard, and Minnie's plate titled dangerously to the left.
"My peas are moving," she whispered in amazement.
I burst out laughing, and Alan raised the bulb so all could see, and squeezed again. Mother was upset we'd played a trick on her sister, but just for a moment as Minnie laughed and shared in the fun.
Alan and I remember 1937 as the Christmas of the moving peas.
Abdominal cancer kept Minnie from her job at the Erie County Court House the following winter and spring. She recovered from surgery at our home, a woman in her early 40s already frail and frightfully gray.
Life changed. We never imagined Minnie wouldn't get well. And when she died part of us died too. She was the one who watched over us when our parents went out for an occasional movie or took a rare weekend holiday. She was part of our family and the first person so close to our hearts to die.
My mother had taken me to see her in the hospital, tubes running from her abdomen under a dim light in the center of an open ward, the sight and smell indelible even now. She could hardly speak, and neither could I. My mother held her tears, and I was expected to do the same.
Rich was a pall bearer at Minnie's funeral mass at Blessed Sacrament Church in Buffalo, and when he came down the center aisle carrying her coffin with the other men, he sequeezed my shoulder as I sat at the end of a pew. I began to sob. Minnie was really dead, gone from us.
Christmas of the moving peas was the last we celebrated with Minnie. Perhaps that's why the memory is so precious. In life, she taught us to have fun. In death, she taught us to be grateful for life.

Carlton E. Spitzer