Deborah C Grossman

Deborah C. Grossman

          My mother’s sister Goldie remained in the old home town, or what was then the countryside to the north of it, for several reasons, including her husband’s business and her love for her house, despite my mother’s toxic presence on the other side of town. Goldie was as tough as they come, though, and wouldn’t let her sister dominate. She had three daughters, two of them older than me and one of them, Debbie, a couple of years younger.

          I had two boy cousins closer to my age, but my mother’s psychopathic behaviour had helped influence her brother to settle far away in Tarrytown, New York, and to visit infrequently, and it cut off all but the most basic, unavoidable contact with my father’s sister, so I saw my boy cousins little.

          Deb and I had the sort of friendly-but-distant relationships that girl and boy cousins not quite the same age have. Our contact was mostly in the context of multiple family members getting together. My only vivid childhood memory of her is of visiting at Aunt Goldie’s house when I was a preschooler and she was a just-out-of-nappies toddler, and she dropped trou and peed in the back yard. I didn’t know that people were allowed to do that, but she did it as a matter of course. I’d also never seen a girl pee before, and wouldn’t do so again for decades.

          One time when I was home from the university and hiding from my mother at Goldie’s house I was amazed, of course, by how Deb had grown from being, as her mother had called her, the ‘little round one’ to a person who Goldie, always a lover of words, would accuse of being profligate for buying two new bras when she only needed one.

          As news dribbles through a family I learnt over the next few years that Deb was getting her degree in Library Science, had joined Mensa, and through Mensa had developed a thing with a genuine London Cockney named John Astell. The story came to me that Astell had visited from England, got his papers in order, returned to Delaware, converted to Judaism, and they’d married.

          In 1973, my first wife and I moved to Delaware and I reconnected with Deb and met John. Astell seemed to be somewhat flabby physically, but with an overabundance of self-assured Cockney cockiness. Deb, despite her role-model mother’s sassy stroppiness, seemed to be in his shadow, or at least conceded him centre stage, serving him unhealthy amounts of ice cream whilst he told me about his love of automobile graveyards.

          He also, as I recall, had one or two uncomplimentary things to say about the Irish. I personally thought this was somewhat silly, as I couldn’t tell the English from the Irish to look at them, and said so, but he pooh-poohed my naïvety with a reference to black hair, blue eyes, and thirteen kids following them down the street. Cockney ethnic-stereotype bigotry humour, I supposed. Anyway, he laughed.

          John had secured himself a job teaching English at some public school, Cockney accent and all, thanks to Goldie’s efforts through the placement agency where she was then working. Deb had come up with some job with the Dupont Corporation, which wasn’t that surprising, since most people in Delaware work for the Dupont Corporation, or so it seems, and it sorta made sense for them to need a librarian, being a research-oriented organisation.

          We saw Deb and John a bit socially, which in those days meant drinking, but not that often. When my beloved’s mental health broke down intolerably – and, well, schizophrenia is often more than challenging to live with – I slept on their couch once or twice.

           By the time I just couldn’t take it any more and left Wilmington and spouse on a Greyhound bus, Deb had become part of what Dupont called its Integrated Data Processing group, retrieving technical information via punch cards – remember them? This was in 1974, before the acronym IT had been invented.

          Over the years I learnt that Astell had become a part of her past and that Dupont had eventually moved her to facilities it owned in Mississippi and various parts of California, eventually in Silicon Valley, moving from computers to human resources, where she felt more comfortable.

          By the early part of this century she had retired, comfortably, from what she calls ‘Uncle Dupy’, remarried, and resettled in Pleasanton, an affluent town in the hills about 20 km east of the southern part of San Francisco Bay. She helped Goldie with her autobiography, My Golden Childhood, in 2000, took up poetry, had a book published in 2006 called Goldie and Me that contained stuff by both her and my auntie, and had served a tenure as Pleasanton’s Poet Laureate.

          More significantly, from my point of view, she has made her way into the wonderful world of writing about food and wine, and, mostly via facebook, she has treated me to a series of photos with her in various parts of the world with wine glasses in her hand and goofy, this-aint-my-only-glass-today grins on her face. She was tasting some upmarket plonk at a winery in Chile when the big earthquake hit in 2010, and other thrills.

          She’s also taken to genealogy and has organised an association of our extended family (Yiddish: mishpukha; Kiwi: whanau) on facebook. We two have grown a bit closer over distance over the past dozen years or so. The importance of family – and family relationships – runs deep in many ways.