Time keeps creepin’ through the neighborhood

Caroline — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 04:05:39 +0000

When my mother passed away in 1975 I had not seen my father for a while.
They were separated and visiting arrangements were a little
problematic.

When it was suggested I’d go live with my mother’s sister, my aunt
Ineke, I was all for it. She was married to my favourite uncle and I
was close to her two youngest sons. They lived what I at 12 years old (and for a long time after) considered the
high life. International schools, a lot of travel, all the toys in the
world.

It would have meant leaving Holland and growing up in Jakarta and Copenhagen. I think I was ok with that too.

My aunt and I would have eventually come to blows had this plan (One of several… boarding/finishing school in Switzerland was another. That would have been something.) got the
go ahead, I’m sure. I’d have been the rebel child. I eventually went to live with
my father instead and consequently did not see a lot of my mother’s family after that. I spent my whole childhood missing them and learning to do without. Then I forgot how to get back in touch, and they seemed to have forgot about me.
–

The last time I saw her, she got on my nerves as most of my adult
family members do. This was two years ago, at my uncle’s place. We had
Christmas dinner and she demanded to know ‘what I’d done with my
mother’s money’ and why I didn’t believe in God. That got my heckles up.

But she and her husband were very kind and welcoming to me on many
occasions, and she and I wrote letters for a while, that kept me in
touch with and part of the family.

When I got the news about my uncle two months ago, I was also told my
aunt, like her brother, had been diagnosed with lung cancer in the
final stage. The same disease, by the way, that took my mother.

God must have had an off day when he concocted our family gene pool.

My aunt, who was in Copenhagen for treatment, passed away Wednesday night. She was spared much suffering.

Mrs Lynch’s Christmas pudding’s always the same

Caroline — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 19:35:39 +0000

She makes her Christmas pudding in plastic containers, not like her mother, god rest her soul, who’d wrap the thing in cloth and let it hang and rock from her Singer sewing table.

Is the recipe secret? ‘No, I’ve got it on a piece of paper,’ she says, with serious intent. The same recipe for the last 30 years, involving carrots and sultanas and many other things. Whiskey, of course. Just a drop.

It isn’t ‘ripe’ yet, still a little soggy at the top, but Mrs Lynch tells the husband to serve us slices. ‘We’re out of cream,’ she says, despairing. But it tastes heavenly regardless. ‘You don’t have to eat it,’ she adds, almost incredulous we should eat her sticky black concoction. But we want to. Oh, we want to.

She stands on the porch as the husband drives us to the bus stop, in the freezing cold and forgets to wave, her mind already caught on other things. Like the neighbours’ daughter, who she used to mind, who now has a little wan herself. She’s in and out the door and regards Mrs Lynch’s front room her own. Didn’t they buy the DVD player when the little wagon said they should so she could player her Disney DVDs in it? They did.

We thank her for her kindness and the tea, fish and chips and buttered slices of bread, the biscuits and the cider and washing up when we said to leave it. But it’s no bother, didn’t the husband do the cooking?

So he did.

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Time keeps creepin’ through the neighborhood

Mrs Lynch’s Christmas pudding’s always the same