by Randi Miller

Created on: March 04, 2007   Last Updated: April 23, 2007

A Snapshot of Lolly

Everybody called her Lolly because, as a child, my father's sister couldn't say the name Elizabeth. Unable to pronounce my name, my sister called me Wanny when we were kids, and I thank God every day that nobody decided that was a good name for everyone to call me for the rest of my life.

Lolly was actually my father's aunt who raised him from the age of three after his mother decided she didn't want kids after all. This bizarre form of abortion is hell on the psyche, and I don't recommend it to anyone. My father's been running away from his own personal barrage of demons his entire life, and for many years we found ourselves running too but we always thought it was my dad who was chasing us.

At 37, Aunt Lolly married a man called Ham (his real name was John, but apparently he really liked ham), and they built a house on the shore of the Corotoman River in Kilmarnock, Virginia. They had 31 acres of land there, and they grew corn, Christmas trees, and my father. When my uncle reached the age of three, he too was aborted and sent to live with Aunt Lolly and Ham.

After 20 years of marriage, Ham died in his sleep, and Aunt Lolly never dated or married again. Instead, she traveled the world (twice), by air and by sea, and told the most wonderful stories of her adventures. She played a three-tiered Hammond organ that she'd strap onto a trailer behind her Cadillac and drag back and forth from her condo in Silver Spring, Maryland to her place in Kilmarnock, Virginia. She had a straw hat with a circumference wide enough to shelter four people, and she loved to wear it while riding her bright red 1932 tractor all around the property in Kilmarnock.

My mother used to let me steer the car down Aunt Lolly's dirt driveway, which was a half a mile long. The house had a private dock, where I learned to catch crabs, one at a time, using chicken necks and a piece of string. My mother was chased to the end of that dock by a large buck, and one day my sister was chased off the end of that dock by a rogue crab set afoot by my playful (but evil) father. I never laughed so hard as I did that day.

Aunt Lolly made her own carrot juice, which she thought was just grand, but my sister and I always found vessels in which to casually deposit ours when she wasn't looking. She also hummed most of the time, and my memories of summers in Kilmarnock are filled with the smell of fresh cantaloupe and the sound of "Red Roses for a Blue Lady" being hummed throughout the house. I learned to play the guitar as a result of the love affair with music that Aunt Lolly and I both shared.

In her 87th year, Aunt Lolly had been smothered by Alzheimers for nearly ten years and could barely speak an intelligible sentence. When I visited her in the nursing home every Saturday, she looked at me with loving recognition followed immediately by confusion, for she didn't understand how I fit in her world. And on the day she passed away, she heard the piano being played in the day room down the hall, and uttered one word ... my name ... with astounding clarity. Her love of music connected her to me in her final moments of life. What a sensation to be loved so completely. Everyone should feel that ...

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