Ode to Eleanor Rigby

A series of odes...

For every unseen and lonely person. I love you.

So, my logo with the three people on it? That’s my Granddad Gunn, all dapper, leaning against a fence with my pretty Aunt Susan, (his daughter, my dad’s sister) and his handsome nephew Peter. Cousins. Granddad lost his wife, my Grandma Violet, when she was 42 years old. He never remarried.

Granddad had twin sisters, Violet (Vi) and Ivy. They both married and each had one child. Peter, is the son of Auntie Vi and Uncle Squibbs. In another story I mentioned that my Uncle Squibbs was a rear gunner in WW2.

Granddad’s twin aunties were beautiful and fierce. As Auntie Ivy aged, and Uncle Ernie passed away, she kept busy, stayed closed to her and Ernie’s daughter, my Auntie Christine, and loved to paint “windows” on her walls. I remember staring at the painting that “opened to a garden.” How beautiful I thought. She also artexed. That’s the lovely textured scrolling one does around fitted ceiling lights and on walls. Upon a visit in the early 90’s, John and I were fascinated, and came home with artexing combs in our suitcase.

It was said upon one Christmas in Greater Dunmow, where the Gunn family traditionally gathered around a piano for singing, spirits and laughter, Auntie Vi randomly stopped in her tracks, and said something like this, “listen up everyone, if anyone here has a problem with Peter, you can bugger off.” For good. Like out of the family.

I will always remember that story. It ingrained in me a sense of protecting anyone who might be different.

If you struggle, I will struggle along with you. We will stick together.

In a nutshell, my Auntie Susan was a lonely, obsessive-compulsive character that drove everyone around her mad. There have been about three ladies like this in every neighborhood I have ever lived in. Most memorable was Mary, who lived across the street, kitty-corner, and appeared to drive away once a week in an old gold Chevy or what the neighborhood kids called a bat mobile. If you caught a sideways glimpse of her heading west, she drove leaning forward, had a 50’s bouffant, cigarette in left hand, hanging out the window and dark sunglasses like a woman going on a secret mission to the grocery store.

Mary had a pointy iron gate all the way around her modest 1950’s fortress and a penchant for stealing any ball that landed in her front garden. In classic waits by the window style, the minute a ball landed inside her fortress, she would appear, grab the ball, as if to say “MINE,” turn on her heel, and take her prize back into the house. Our local babysitter said “any softball that landed in Mary’s yard was not a home run, it was a run home…”

When it was my oldest son’s turn to lose his football to the bat Mary’s house, I calmly walked over, knocked on Mary’s door and asked for it back. With much huffing and a good telling off, she had me follow her into her detached garage. There were no less than three large buckets full of balls. I took the football from the top of a bucket and walked away calmly. I informed the neighborhood kids that if they were so inclined to get a lecture, they might get their balls back.

Nobody dared.

Anyways, having a few complicated and childless marriages gone astray, my Auntie Susan apparently turned into a nasty lonely recluse, much like Mary, left everything to her cats and requested a horse and carriage, at the end of her life, to deliver her to the grave. Sadly, she was found in her home, a week after her passing. I don’t remember much about her, except that she struggled and for some reason needed to obsessively clean. A lot. At the end of her life she refused to speak to anyone.

Our sweet letter writing and fabulous Christmas card sender, Uncle Peter, was gay at a time when bullying was accepted behavior. He struggled his entire life to fit in. For the last several years of his life he had a partner with a female name. No one ever met her, but she seemed very nice from the correspondence. When our dear Uncle was found, lifeless in a chair, there was no trace found of his partner. No one ever showed up with her name. It was as if an imaginary life had died with him.

The cousins died a few years apart in their very late sixties, early 70’s. Heartbreaking.

Distance, especially in childhood, doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. It leaves the heart creating scenarios of what might have been. Unrealistic fairytales. Misunderstood could-have-beens. Questions like, what if we had stayed? would there have been more love and security for my complicated family members?

If I’ve learned anything about living 5,321.55 air miles away from most of my family it’s that every family has an unseen, misfit, lonely and/or complicated relative. Heck, every neighborhood has them. They might not be easy to love, or feel close to, but we can try our best.

When I look at my beloved Granddad in this image, I see a man who understood what it was like to lose someone he loved when he was very young. I see a man who chose to live his life for the ones left behind. I see why he never moved to America.

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Cheers to the misunderstood 
who wished to be part of a sisterhood
misty-eyed loners outside of their realms
lovely misnomers so overwhelmed
of complicated circles where squares don't fit
uncontrollable hurdles hard to transmit
of could have beens, might have trieds
and thin skins, as others implied
a perfectly imperfect golden worth
has abruptly left the scorched earth.

And I, and they, we could have tried
to hold back decay in a sea of tides
where oceans go round lost in time
and we aren't found struggling to climb
the mountain big and valleys low
ominous the dig refusing to grow
up to the heights of breath and strength
where God delights in our great lengths
of love and care, our flesh and blood
for those who despair trapped in the flood.

The Eleanor Rigbys of time and space
inclined I would be to show them grace
But if we move on, is our mission to pray?
what once was upon a midsummer's day
a face in a jar kept by the door
where rice is the star and no one keeps score
of dreams in the church where a wedding has been
oh the blind how they search for happiness within
all the lonely people of sermons so grand
chasing long steeples with the Word in hand.

Ode to the Lonely - deborah t. hewitt