Namesake

Oh, lotta catching up to do. We were away nearly the whole of July, and there were many adventures worth mentioning. But I made a promise to do this one first.

We took a day trip down to the White Plains, NY, area -- still a bit familiar to me, even 21 years after I last co-oped for IBM there -- and visited our daughter Amalie's namesake.

My grandmother-in-law, Pauline, passed away six years ago this month, just before the great unpleasantness -- and while I would have loved her to stay longer, in some ways it was just as well, as she deserved to live in a better world than what we have today. I only met her the one time, on a trip with Val to Wisconsin in, oh, 1995 I think it was. She was delightful, and honest in that special seniors' way -- tell you to scoot, leave, she needed her time alone. No one minded.

Long ago, after she had her only child, my father-in-law Jack, she remarried to a man named Spiegel, who had a sister, Amelie. Pauline and Amelie were great friends as well as sisters-in-law. And, glad tidings, Amelie is still with us. She turns 102 right about now.

After Pauline passed, and Val was carrying our first, we thought to name her (we knew we were getting a girl) after her great-grandmother, but the name didn't quite fit. However, "Amelie" just sang to us both -- yes, there was the concurrent movie in release, but that had nothing to do with it -- and after tweaking the spelling (I thought a second "a" was more feminine), we had our daughter's name: Amalie. (To this day, she is still the only Amalie we have known, although there is a brand of motor oil, which was good for a chuckle when we found out.)

Amalie (age 5) meets her namesake, Amelie (age 102).

We drove down; Amelie and Amalie met. "Elder Amie" is still spry, gets around fine, sharp; has a morning helper but gets by otherwise. We showed pictures of some visits to various Wenner kin, and asked for some olde-tyme stories of Pauline when she lived on Park Avenue in NYC. Amelie related one anecdote -- Pauline's apartment had a balcony overlooking 34th Street; turn and look west and the Empire State Building is but blocks away, towering over everything. Pauline had been preparing for a fund raiser dinner and had set many fresh gardenias out on the balcony, among the many tasteful preparations for the evening. As party time approached, she went out to check the balcony -- and pigeons had descended and camped, utterly ruining the gardenias. Pauline was livid, her mood was ruined (along with the flowers), and the fund raising didn't come off quite as planned. (Amelie made this sound better than I have recounted.)

Junior and senior.

Time passed, and we had to leave. It was a good visit, we hope we can do it again.