Memories of Aunt Margie
AUNT MARGIE
What can I say about Aunt Margie?
From my earliest memories of her, I fell in love with her easygoing way of treating us kids. Though she was crippled from the age of 17, she never let that damper her enthusiasm for her nieces and nephews.
She lived on West 9th Street in Greenwich Village and ran her own secretarial business. She would handle overflow work from the top law firms and accountants in Manhattan. She was smart and selected that location to put her business right in the middle of the lawyers uptown and accountants on Wall Street.
I remember going to visit with some of my brothers and sisters. She was always excited to see us and would arrange for her housekeeper to do the touristy things since she was unable to. The one trip that stood firmly in my memory was to Staten Island. We were taken to a farm that had pony rides. I was probably about 10 and I refused to get on the pony because it was being led around by a worker. I found that degrading but our escorting housekeeper put her foot down and said, “get on, it’s paid for and you will ride!” I never questioned that woman again.
Even before I was a teenager, I would ride the bus then 2 subways by myself to spend time with Aunt Margie. It was safe to do that in the 1960s. Soon she hired me to do office work and deliver work product around the city. Sometimes I would be collating documents hundreds of pages long. I spread the big ones across her living room floor. The biggest I remember was about 50 copies of an 800 page will. Who has that many investments!
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Aunt Margie was generous to a fault. She was always handing out money to us for pretty much whatever we wanted when we visited. When my niece, Becky, was in from California, she treated a bunch of us to dinner at Windows On The World even though she was unable to join us. Sometimes friends of mine would come to visit with me and she treated them like they were her own. My friend Tommy told me decades later how much he liked her and enjoyed visiting with Aunt Margie.
Margie believed I could do no wrong. When I was 16 and was sent to a reformatory for 3 years, she was incensed! She felt I didn’t deserve it but, in reality, I knew that I deserved every minute of it. It was also the turning point in straightening out my life!
As I got older and she felt I could handle it, she told me of some of her difficulties from her illness. I remember distinctly her telling me about 2 brain surgeries that had to be done while awake! I can’t imagine how scary that must have been and how she came through it mentally intact.
During the 1970s, a miracle of sorts happened. Artificial hips were developed and Aunt Margie had both of hers replaced. After so many years of near isolation due to difficulty walking, she was able to amble about nicely. Prior to this, she rarely left her apartment unless she was going to the hospital. Now, she was free to enjoy life a bit more. She took my ex-wife and I to the opera at Carnegie Hall and loved it. When the show ended, we were shuffling with the exiting audience while little Aunt Margie lifted one crutch in front of her and said “excuse me, pardon me” to get through the crowd. It was like the parting of the Red Sea as the crowd let her pass. Meanwhile, we were still stuck back with the audience shuffling out when she had already exited the theater.
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In all the time I spent with Aunt Margie I never heard her express her political beliefs. She kept them pretty much to herself, or so I thought. Perhaps she had the wisdom to know that family time should be devoid of unnecessary disagreements? I found out about her beliefs in a roundabout way when I was repairing machines for IBM. In the late 1970s, I had a new customer in Oakland, NJ, a lawyer named George. He asked me if I was related to Margie Devlin. When I told him I was her nephew, he told me of a side of her that I had never seen. When he was a student at NYU, he belonged to a liberal student activist group that met regularly on Saturday night. Their meeting place was around the corner from Washington Square Park, right on Aunt Margie’s living room floor. He told me that they would discuss how to move forward with their plans and ideas. He couldn’t say enough about what a wonderful person she is and asked me to say hello for him. I did say hello for him but never let on that I knew about her clandestine meetings. If she wanted me to know that stuff, she would have told me herself!
When Aunt Margie died, her funeral was held on a side street in Manhattan. During the eulogies, a loud explosion shook the building. At least one manhole cover went flying off it’s base. It may have been a coincidence but I like to think she was saying goodbye and don’t you dare forget me.
To return to my opening question, I can say that Aunt Margie was a wonderful woman, had a loving heart, cared deeply for her fellow women and men, and never let her own physical pain and shortcomings interfere with her love of others. I remember her only with unwavering love and respect!