My Crazyass Badass Aunt

"You know what really burns my ass?" This is one of the common curveballs thrown by Aunt Patty that gets us every time. "A flame, this high." and she signals with her hand that the flame would have to be about 2 and a half feet to burn her ass. She is a badass aunt, almost 60 years old still blowing through the country on a Harley, and a crazy-ass aunt who keeps things loud and wild wherever she goes. You never know what is going to be said or done when Aunt Patty is in the room, so you have to be ready for anything. Sometimes ridiculous, sometimes obscene, refreshingly random, and always genuine, Aunt Patty never passes up a chance to take a flame to the volatile.

Like the time David was sick, for example. This sickness of Davids could have passed like all of the others, him watching TV quietly and peacefully until he recovered. But everyone was busy with the preparations for Grandma Mancini's funeral, God rest her soul, and none of us could care for Davie. Aunt Patty had, however, just arrived and gracefully offered to babysit david (a high-school senior at this point). Aunt Laura had just delivered a forty sanwich tray of Mr. Pita to feed the funeral goers. As Aunt Patty was putting it into the fridge, the thin plastic tray carrying the mountain of pita rolls collapsed. The sanwiches went flying, splattering tomatoes and lettuce all over the floor. This did not phase her. "David, get me a mop and bucket" she said. David fetched her the mop and bucket. After mopping it up, she plunges five gallons of water into the sink with a drain of about 2" diameter. SHIT. water is everywhere. David didnt know what to do, he thinks she said dont tell your ma (nothing is a secret in this fambily). He dried up the cleaning job with a few large bath towels. It wasnt all hard for Davie, though. She made him about 7 oranges worth of hand squeezed orange juice, so he got better quite quickly.

Aunt Patty taught us to dance, I remember doing the mashed potato with her in the kitchen on Christmas. And I remember her saying that if someone had a messy room, they were interesting and probably quite intelligent. When she said that, I ran up to my room to scatter things around and ruffle up the bed I had made hours before. When I came back downstairs, I told her my room was pretty messy, would she like to come see. Then she told me that she meant messy as in a clutter of many differnt things that meant you were interested in everything and too busy to clean up before moving to the next thing. This explaination was the seed to the the clutter-philosophy I live by to this day.

Last year she and Uncle Barry came to the small town of Grayling, Michigan where I was living at the time. I had been waiting for them to arrive when I recieved a message on my phone from my aunt, proclaiming that they had arrived in Grayling. I called the number back and to my surprise, found myself talking to the waitstaff at BigBoys. "I am looking for my aunt," I say "I think she just called from your phone." The waitress was a bit confused for a minute and then remembered "Oh, does your aunt drive a motorcycle?" Hell, yeah. "She's in the parking lot."

Facebook has now made it possible to hear from Aunt Patty on a regular basis, and hear what is on her mind, whenever I want to. Her status updates are quite possibly my favorite quotes on the web, for some reason they always sound like poems to me:

"it is kind of strange, after hearing about my moms friend passing, I heard one of my dads best friends passed also... they are all sitting around with coffee cake and coffee, probably bitching about something"-PV

"this morning I found one of those chocolates wrapped in gold foil in my purse, and I have NO idea how it got there!"-PV

The stories are endless. Everyone who knows her has them. I will never tire of hearing them, and I look forward to the stories to come.

Happy birthday Aunt Patty. I know I have been telling you this every year on your birthday, but in the past, dad told me to say this. Now I can say, independently and for certain, that you really are older than most of the trees in our backyard. And we have a lot of shade back there.