Ella and Jim

My father's older sister was named Ella Viola Moody, my Auntie Lolla. She became Lolla because as a baby I couldn't pronounce 'Ella': Lolla was the closest I could come. Later she became like a second mother to me. My parents had problems, and Ella couldn't have children - a sad fate for a woman who graduated with a teaching degree from San Francisco State Teacher's College and ran a nursery school for ten or twelve years. She loved children and my sister and I benefited from all the love and attention she would have showered on a child of her own.

Anyway, she was two years older than my father. Growing up together in Santa Cruz they did a lot of things together, beaching, swimming, just about everything. At the drop of a hat she'd tell stories about how she and my father got into mischief together and played tricks on each other and on the other members of the family, on everyone except Mama Wallace, her grandmother, who, though she died before I was born, is vivid in my memory as a kind of a dragon lady, a fierce termagant who could freeze a miscreant small boy in his tracks with a single glance.

Aunt Ella loved my father more than just about anyone else in the world. And I guess, being his son, gave me a special place in her heart. She and my Uncle Ernie - I don't think I ever called him anything but 'Unk' my whole life - had me for weekends while my parents, already having problems, did who knows what. Their house, Ella and Ernies, was on 21st Ave and my house was on 23rd Avenue. It was a matter of a ten minute walk to be at their house and I think I spent almost as much time at their house as I did at my own. My Grandma Moody's house was immediately behind Ella and Ernies and Unk had cut a hole in the back fence and put a gate there so that we could all slip through to Grandma's house without having to go around the block.

I think I spent just about every weekend between kindergarten and junior high school at their house. We had a kind of a routine. I'd show up on Friday afternoon. We'd watch TV that night - they had one of the very first TVs anywhere in the neighborhood and so we'd sit in the living room and watch Milton Berle or Kukla, Fran and Ollie. I'd play around the neighborhood on Saturday. The Biaggio boys, Bob and Dickie, lived just down the street and we'd all go over to the big reservoir two blocks away and play cowboys and Indians in the sand hills that surrounded it, or else we'd make roller coasters in their basement.

But on Saturday night we'd go to the Parkside Theater. We'd see a double feature and three cartoons, all for a quarter for me to get in. We'd wait with baited breath to see if one of the cartoons would be Bugs Bunny, my favorite, and cheer like crazy when the Loony Tunes logo came up on the screen. After the movie we'd walk a few doors up Taraval Street to the Parkway Cafe and have ice cream. I always had the Ice Cream Sundae: three kinds of ice cream - vanilla, strawberry and chocolate - with three toppings - vanilla strawberry and chocolate - and sprinkled with chopped almonds, whipped cream, and with a cherry on top. Then Unk would buy me two comic books and the corner drugstore and we'd head back to their house. Auntie Lol would make me a baloney sandwich and a glass of milk and I'd read my comic books and then fall asleep around ten o'clock.

Sunday morning it was up around 8:00 o'clock. I had a toy trumpet (it was really a trumpet shaped kazoo) and I'd sneak into Unk and Ella's bedroom and play reveille on my kazoo until Unk groaned and woke up. Then we'd all sit up in their bed and read the Sunday funnies.

Those days, and the summer vacations I took with them in their summer place in Ben Lomond, near Santa Cruz, are some of the best memories I have. I'll write a little about Ben Lomond in another piece.

Ella loved my Dad beyond any measure. When things started to go really wrong between my parents it hurt her a lot. As my Mother's drinking got worse I think my Father just lapsed into despair. He didn 't know what to do about her drinking. My Mother absolutely refused to acknowledge that she had a drinking problem, even when, eventually, she'd be falling down drunk three or four nights a week. My Father shifted between anger and despair. He'd work as a police officer all day then come home and, as soon as he opened the back door and stepped into the house, would know that my Mother was drunk again and either hiding from him or passed out, often in the empty bathtub.

I guess it was natural for him to turn to his family for some solace or advice. I'd be at Ella and Ernies on the weekend and my Dad would show up on Saturday and have dinner with all of us, Ella and Ernie, Grandma Moody, Great Grandma Cererro, and me. He'd talk to Ella about what was going on at home and it was on those evenings that I saw my Father cry for the first time.

Ella had never been overly fond of my Mother from the start. My Mother was, for a while, a cute, blue-eyed blonde who was used to having the boys fight over her. Ella was the opposite: an attractive, intelligent, level-headed woman who didn't forgive and forget. When she saw how sad it was making my Father and my Grandmother, she got mad, and stayed mad at my mother for the rest of her life.

When we tried to revive the family tradition of big Italian/Irish holiday dinners with lots of people and wine and food and laughter it never was quite the same as it had been when I was younger. There was always an undertone.

Later, when my Father died of cancer, Ella swore up and down that my Mother's drinking had killed him. She was sure that his depression had led to his demise, that he just hadn't wanted to live any more. By then I was full grown and out on my own, but Ella and Ernie's place in Ben Lomond - they'd retired there - was my second home. I'd often show up there with a couple of buddies and eat Ernie out of house and home. If I was on my own Ella would hold forth about my Mother's many shortcomings.

It all came to a head after my Father died. My Mother was, as I've said, a vain woman who went to the beauty parlor every week, had her hair dyed so often that I never knew, until after her death, what color her hair really was. She was also an incurable flirt and flirted with most of the men that she and my Father knew, to my Dad's consternation. Even so, I was a little surprised when, about three weeks after my Dad passed away, I dropped by her house one evening to see how she was doing. It wasn't a long trip from Berkeley across the Bay and out into the avenues. Anyway, I came unannounced and when she let me in she was looking a little sheepish. There was a man sitting in her living room and they had obviously been having a few drinks. She introduced me to him as her 'friend', Larry.

He was a tall, overweight guy with a drinker's shapeless red nose. He was dressed in a houndstooth sports jacket and looked like he might be an insurance salesman or something. It turned out that he owned a furniture store and that he was more than my Mother's 'friend'. Over the next few weeks, now that the cat was out of the bag, so-to-speak, my Mother invited me to dinner a few times. I declined until she more or less begged me to come and have dinner with her and Larry. He was, she assured me, a nice guy and he really liked me and blah blah blah. The thing that decided me was when she said that she was really lonely and that Larry took her places and ......  Anyway, I didn't go to dinner but agreed to go to the Elk's Club Gym with larry one Saturday afternoon. I was a little uncertain about the whole occasion because my Dad was a member of the Elks and he and I had gone to the gym fairly often and played handball.

We showed up at the gym and there was a $10 fee for me to get in; I was a 'visitor'. Larry tried to wiggle out of paying the ten bucks, even though I offered to pay. He told the attendant that I was his son and that meant I could get in free. The attendant bought it and I was too polite to embarrass Larry and expose the lie.

I didn't accept any more invitations until Xmas rolled around a few months later. My Mother called me at the University and asked me to come over for Xmas dinner. Ella and Ernie and Grandma Moody were coming up from Ben Lomond and it would be a family affair. I was thunderstruck. Once they'd retired there Unk had never gone further than fifteen miles from Ben Lomond. But sure enough, on Christmas Day they showed up at my Mother's house on 28th Ave. I was glad to see them and we were doing a little reminiscing, having a cocktail or two, when the doorbell rang. My Mother went to the door and buzzed the security gate open downstairs. I heard someone coming up the stairs. I hope it was my Uncle Arthur and his family, but it wasn't. Larry stepped through the door. My Mother did her "... this is my FRIEND, Larry" routine, but she wasn't fooling anyone. The look on my Grandmother's face almost made me burst into tears.

My Grandmother married my Grandfather when she was 17, was married to him for the next 38 years or thereabouts, and wore his wedding ring to the day she died at age 103. And her was my Mother standing  in front of her with a new boy friend less than four months after my Father's death.

The meal was a disaster. As soon as dessert was over they all got up, Unk murmured something about getting home before it got dark on those roads down in the mountains, and off they went. I stayed another 15 minutes and then pleaded that I had homework to do and off I went as well.

The next weekend I drove to Ben Lomond. My Aunt was fit to be tied. "How could she, " she kept saying, ".... and right  in front of Grandma." Then she went into a long rambling narrative about things she and my Dad had done when they were kids. None of them ever saw my Mother again. They didn't even come to her funeral. I couldn't blame them. It's hard to forgive when someone seems to insult someone you love.

In the end things slowly got out of hand for Ella, Unk and my Grandmother. Unk died first. He got something called a twisted bowel which turned gangrenous and he died in about three days. Ella was desolate. She'd had Ernie and her Mother with her for her entire adult life and now Ernie was gone and my Grandmother was in a nursing home. I took a job at Borland Software, just a few miles from Ben Lomond and moved in with Ella. Just a short while later the region was tossed and turned by the Loma Prieta Earthquake, one of the strongest in living memory and centered only a few miles away from where we were. Ella was frightened, literally, out of her wits. The doctors said that they thought she had a minor stroke. It didn't effect her physically, but she sank into a kind of dementia that just got deeper and deeper. The quake had frightened her so badly that she never slept in a bed again until she entered a nursing facility near where my wife Yvonne and I were then living. She slept in a big easy chair that she put right next to the door.

Then my Grandmother, 103, passed away and that was just about it for Auntie Lol. She'd spend hours talking to me about her childhood, but the stories often rambled and didn 't make much sense. The one theme that ran threw all the tales was how much she'd loved my Dad.

She died in her sleep one night in the nursing home. She rests next to Ernie and her Mother in a cemetary in Santa Cruz. They spent their adult lives together, and they'll spend eternity together too, I guess.