Obsessed by Quirks

Henry the Navigator claims an obsession with sex.. Now, that's a healthy obsession. The Old Baguette has been exhibiting an obsession with quirks. Is her obsession healthy, unhealthy, or ahealthy. (If "amoral" is a word, why can't "ahealthy be a word?") The Old Baguette thinks her obsession is just one of her own many quirks and is "ahealthy." Throughout her life, she has relished the peculiarities of her relatives while living comfortably at home within the skin of her own peculiar self.


My mother's sister Irene was two years younger than Elinor and two years older than Mother. She said she always felt like the dumb one in the family. She wasn't dumb, but she wasn't as brainy as her siblings, and she lacked their interest in ideas. Instead, Irene was popular, the belle of every ball, the rose in a family of wallflowers. Did she think the others liked being wallflowers? Irene was terrified of the oddest things. As a teenager, she'd race home after dark, certain she'd been chased by a drunken man. One night she claimed that her drunken man had climbed into the basement through an open window and that he was still there, just waiting to get her. To reassure her, my grandfather locked the door to the basement stairs. The next day he found fresh footprints in some newly laid cement that were too large to be the footprints of anyone in the family.

Years later I got polio. My father was in a different hospital from mine with back problems. Mother was completely alone. People were so afraid of catching polio that friends, even some of our relatives, wrote encouraging letters, slid notes surreptitiously under the front door. All avoided her except Irene. She was as afraid of polio as the rest, probably more afraid, but the instant she heard the news she packed her suitcase. Fears be damned! Full speed ahead! Within hours, she was in Chicago to stay with Mother for the duration. The "duration" turned out to be over two months in length. Mother said often, "I don't know what I'd have done if it hadn't been for your Aunt Irene."


During the fifties, pantie raids spiced up college life. Young men, often hundreds of young men, stormed dorms and sororities to capture panties as trophies. Women dangled their panties out of windows as encouragement. Take mine! Take mine! By pantie raid time, Irene was the middle-aged wife of a professor at the University of Missouri. On one side of their modest house was a dorm for women, and on the other, a row of sororities. The mobs of young raiders would run straight towards their house before splitting up into two groups, the dorm raiders and the sorority raiders. Irene could see them coming when she was washing dishes and she'd freeze. What if the mob didn't divide but headed instead for her house and her panties? If successful in capturing a pair of Irene's panties, what on earth could a young man say? "Well, now, these particular bloomers belonged to the professor's wife. You know, the one who looks like Queen Victoria."

When Irene died, the University tolled its bells, the first time ever for someone who had never been a student, faculty member, or employee. All her brainy sisters and her brainy brother were admired, respected, and liked. It was Irene, the "dumb one," who was the family's rose, the one who was loved.