Aunt Barbara

In the spring of 1953, I was on a trip to San Francisco.

The school I attended had a choir that had been invited to sing at a conference. Miriam and I were “going together,” but she was not in the choir that year.

My Uncle Wayne (my middle name is after him) was a young pastor in the area, and he was to meet me sometime when we were there at the conference. Instead, he got in touch some way to say that he had to meet his girl friend and could not see me.

The next year he married the girl, and she became my Aunt Barbara.

So I did not meet her at that point, but I made her acquaintance, in a round about way!

Many years later we drove from Washington State to Massachusetts for my brother's wedding. We stayed, all 6 of us, at Uncle Wayne and Aunt Barbara's house. We arrived a day or so before the wedding, and later that same day Wayne and Barbara and family took off for a trip to Switzerland, leaving us in a state where we knew no one, but staying in an unfamiliar house.

Barbara was in nursing school at the time. I remember Miriam saying to her that she looked tired, and Barbara answering that she “was not as tired as she thought she was.” I think that meant she was not quite at total exhaustion, but close.

Through the years, our paths did not cross often.

Wayne was my father's youngest brother, but there was about 12 or 13 years between them. By the time Wayne was going to school, my father had left home.

Wayne was the young uncle I never really got to know. Even though Barbara lived here for a few years after he was killed, I did not really get to know here either.

No not really, and now they are both entries in my memory.