The Coolest Aunt in the World

(Originally published on May 1, in The Riff)

Photo: RCA Victor Records

My Aunt Sylvia died early yesterday morning. I got the call around lunchtime from the friend who had been taking care of her. I’m sad but not shocked — she had, after all, just turned 95, and had been hinting that she felt the end nearing. She and her friend spent what was to be her last evening opening the week’s mail, including many cards wishing her a happy birthday.

Sylvia was not technically my aunt; however, she was my mom’s lifelong best friend. She was closer to us than our actual aunts and uncles, most of whom lived ten or eleven time zones away. So she became Aunt Sylvia and eventually became my lifeline to another world.

Like my parents, she was an immigrant. She was tiny, almost elfin, and full of energy. Over the years, I heard many times that men considered her pretty. I guess the word today would be “hot.” She had a corporate job as a copy editor at Time/Life, in an era when it was unheard of for women to hold such positions. She later worked at Sports Illustrated in the same role during that magazine’s glory years.

Sylvia was a character. She was the life of the party in certain New York social circles, and always dressed in the latest mod fashions. She was the first person I saw wearing go-go boots. She laughed a lot. She was the antithesis, in many ways, of my mom, who worried too much, never updated her wardrobe, and, I think, secretly struggled against a self-imposed prison.

I grew up with parents who saw the world as a scary place and tried to shield us from it. When my dad left, it confirmed my mom’s worst fears, and she doubled down on protecting us. It could have been crippling, and for a time it was — it took me years to shake off the reflexive feelings of fear.

We lived in a grimy industrial town sandwiched between wealthy enclaves where New York lawyers and bankers slept at night. Our town was the biggest in the area, the only one with three high schools. It was big enough to have racially separate neighborhoods and rudimentary gangs. We were more than a ‘burb’, less than a city.

Our schools were well-stocked with big kids from working-class Polish and Irish families, but our football teams consistently lost to the teams from the neighboring tiny rich towns. I eventually concluded that it was because all our players were smokers, and most of the rich kids were not. (I later learned that some of those rich kids had already graduated to more exotic substances.)

Our upbringing brought certain blessings, too. My parents listened to music all the time. For my mom, it was classical and jazz. For my dad, it was swing and American songbook — Cole Porter and all that. I still listen to music, even punk-rock and metal, the way I listened to classical: My attention on the instruments, obsessing over the little, magical sonic details.

Of course, being into classical music or jazz wasn’t cool. A few kids were learning instruments, and they played in the orchestra or jazz band (I sang in the choir). The rest of the kids were listening to Top 40, if they listened to music at all. They had to be force-marched to see us nerds perform our holiday and spring recitals.

One boy in our school, who stayed after class every day to take piano and singing lessons, was ambushed and beaten up for being a sissy. Maybe that was an early salvo in what would become the “culture wars.”

All the while, there was a massive revolution taking place in the popular music of the time. My peers didn’t know about it, except for a few members of the Jazz band who were a bit ahead of the rest of us.

It was my Aunt Sylvia who clued me in, though ironically, it was my mom who first opened the door. She came home one day with a copy of “A Hard Day’s Night.” Before playing it, she said, “Everyone keeps telling me about something called Beatles, so I thought I would find out what the big deal is.” She added, “The name is sort of clever, don’t you think?”

Of course, the Beatles were everywhere: in the water, in the air, on the radio. Everywhere. Even the squarest families had at least a couple of Beatles records. They were the soundtrack of the era and the gateway drug to a whole new universe.

Sylvia seized the opening. She would tell us about other musical groups that did this thing called rock and roll, but all in their own way. She brought us presents: Albums by the Blues Project, Procol Harum, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, and more.

Listening to them rewired my brain permanently.

Cream “Tales of Brave Ulysses”

…….

The Blues Project “Catch the Wind”

…….

Procol Harum “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (with lyrics)

…….

I wasn’t the only one who fell in love with this stuff. My mom did too, and began actively collecting what would later become known as “classic rock” albums, on top of her already extensive library of classical music. As for Sylvia, rock was only a tiny part of her canon. Her library of vinyl included a seemingly inexhaustible catalog of Western classical, Indian classical, Jazz, American songbook, folk music, African folk, and more.

It was Sylvia who took me to my first rock concert. My mom had been letting me take the train into New York on weekends or holidays to hang out with Sylvia, on the condition she never let me out of her sight. Even so, Mom was terrified of me going to something with so much potential for chaos. It was the height of the civil rights movement and the antiwar protest movement, but on that day, nothing chaotic happened. All I saw was flower-power everywhere I looked. And lots of ethereally beautiful hippie girls.

Aunt Sylvia and I were probably the only people in the crowd not high on something. At the time, I knew almost nothing about drug culture — that would come later in college. What little I knew came from all the psychedelic rock I was listening to.

I only remember bits of the concert itself — the music was all new to me. I do remember that the main attraction was Jefferson Airplane, and I fell in love forever with Grace Slick.

Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit” is still my favorite song by them and one of my favorite songs of all time.

Jefferson Airplane “White Rabbit”

…….

Epilogue

Sylvia had married early on. Her husband died abruptly the year I was born. She never married again, though she had a long line of suitors. She eventually moved to Arizona with a boyfriend, at the age of 60. They set up house together, and she took driving lessons to get her first license. A true New Yorker, she had never driven a car before then.

She had an unhurried life in Tucson. She took up sculpture., working with found materials, scraps, and the remnants of broken toys and appliances. She turned them into eerie, vaguely alien totems. I have a couple of her pieces, and they are the most beautiful objects in my house. She was happy in Tucson, but I sensed at times that she never stopped missing the craziness and excitement of New York.

Thank you Aunt Sylvia for opening my world up the way you did. You were the coolest Auntie anyone could wish for.