E.T.

My great-aunt E.T. passed away yesterday at age 94. Her given name was Ethel, and she went by Et for a long time, then E.T., and yes, she kept a plush E.T. doll in her house. She was a slice, a real one-of-a-kind person, and I am so glad I got to know her a little bit while we lived in Maryland. She lived in a big white house with a tiny white poodle. The dog's name was Snooky (long before the reality TV Snooki) and she had taught Snooky funny tricks. She would say "Snooky, sneeze and sing! Sneeze and sing!" and the dog would dutifully achoo twice and then howl musically. E.T. loved musical theater and the golden age of Hollywood; she had a large painting of Katherine Hepburn in her living room. She also had a large purse, and whenever I saw her she would say "I have something I want to show you," and extract said thing from the depths of her bag, usually a magazine clipping. E.T. had a variety of medical theories that seemed fairly wacky to me (raw foods, that kind of thing) but who can argue, when she lived to be 94?

One of my favorite things about her was that she would tell the most fantastic stories about some weird thing that was going on in her life, and I would be sure it was an elaborate fantasy or delusion, but it would turn out that every detail was completely true. One such story was about a frightening black mold that was growing out of her ceiling; personally I was sure that she was imagining this, but when I went to her house, lo and behold, there it was. I also loved how her conversation would wind around through the most astonishing range of topics, and I would be sure we were out in la-la land, but if I tried to rescue the discussion she would not allow interruption, and darned if it didn't all come together eventually. She was as sharp as a tack and very funny, and her unusual theories and wild speculations were perhaps not so wild after all.