Alan S. Oser

Everybody should have an Aunt Mona. One like mine.

She is the close relative who has known you and loved you since birth. She never had her own children. She always lived nearby, and when you were young she was your mother when your real mother was away, except that she never found fault in your behavior. She unfailingly admired and encouraged you. She also had a wonderful husband named Jesse. Everyone should have an Uncle Jesse.

Aunts and uncles do not always fare well in literature. Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha chewed nails, according to Bertie in P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” stories. Even his Aunt Dahlia, who seemed at least to enjoy Bertie’s company, was not always an admiring relative. (Bertie had no truly admiring relatives, now that I think of it.)

Admiration is an underappreciated value. We all need it, adults and children alike. Adults may find sophisticated means of disguising their need. I brush aside the infrequent expressions of admiration or approbation that I hear with a simple “Thank you” and something between a smile and a smirk. Deep down, I don’t think I deserve either admiration or approbation, but I am grateful anyway.

There may not have been much to admire in me as a child either, but the point is that Aunt Monas are blind to this reality. Their faith in their nephew is firm. And if it should waver under the pressure of reality, an Uncle Jesse is standing by to restore the delusions that sustained it.

All things being equal, this should build the child’s self-esteem. In a family with parents and more than one child – I had an older sister – a younger child is likely to take a pounding, and self-esteem, a highly desirable attribute, will suffer. It is good to have an ally at the level of an aunt or uncle nearby.

My Aunt Mona was a trim woman with frizzy hair who trained in college to be a biologist. She was close to her elder brother, my father, and for years she worked in the animal lab of the scientific research laboratory he ran. I have early memories of her twirling little white rats by the tail as she prepared to measure their weight during product tests the laboratory was doing for food and drug manufacturers.

Her principal virtue from my standpoint as a young adolescent was her refusal to find fault or flaw in myself. If I was criticized or chastised in her hearing, she would unhesitatingly defend me. Yet she remained on good terms with my parents.

Aunt Mona had other virtues as well, and I list them in order to encourage them in other aunts, current or prospective. She was loyal to her brother and on close terms with her sister-in-law, my mother. She had a marriage that was happy except for its failure to produce a cousin for me. I think the couple wanted to have a child but couldn’t. She asked little of her nephew except devotion, and that she got.

Some people thought Aunt Mona carried family loyalty too far. Her own mother, my grandmother, was widowed at the age of 53 and lived with Aunt Mona and Uncle Jesse for 40 years, moving in with them only two years after Mona and Jesse married.

My grandmother was a fine lady with many virtues but she became too dependent on her children as she aged. She hated to be left alone. Aunt Mona and Uncle Jesse had to take her with them to nearly all social events. They were a threesome. Many twosomes weary of threesomes, as do their friends, and my grandmother’s neediness damaged my aunt and uncle’s social life.

Uncle Jesse, an unassuming man with a keen sense of humor, kept to highly regular habits. Every morning he ate puffed wheat for breakfast, and every night he drank one sizable glass of beer before going to bed. He got Aunt Mona in the beer habit too. In later years he drank one Martini religiously before his 7 p.m. dinner. The older he got the farther forward the Martini hour crept. He still held to one drink. Well, maybe two after he turned 75. He became even wittier, or looser of tongue, after the first drink, but I never saw him drunk.

Within families couples seem to take on contrasting attitudes. If a father is a taskmaster, a mother will be forgiving, and vice versa. If a father is disappointed with his son, a mother will defend him. Sons tend to disappoint fathers more than daughters, or at least they used to. Now that women have the same career ambitions as men, perhaps daughters will disappoint their fathers as readily as their brothers do. Maybe not. Fathers give their daughters a longer rope than their sons. Mothers are just the opposite.

Aunt Mona, on the other hand, was as supportive of my sister as she was of me. For some reason, we were incapable of disappointing her. She would present her left cheek for a pecking kiss when we arrived at her house, and she would patiently hear out the details of our lives since our last meeting. I rewarded her patience with stupendous detail.

It would be hard to equal Jesse in unclehood. I think he even got better as he got older, having no children of his own to divert his attention. He could hone his skills. But he also benefited from inherent character traits. He had an even temperament, and a talent for finding the amusing element in situations that were not fundamentally amusing. When necessary he could disguise emotional upset to spare the anxiety of others. His father died the night before my sister’s wedding, but no one in the wedding party knew this until the next day. His demeanor at the wedding betrayed nothing.

Jesse was also the opposite of an elitist and he could enjoy the company of people from all walks of life. He could handle himself well in a bar. One summer during my college years I had a job delivering Schaefer beer to small delis and bars during a marketing campaign. “Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one,” was its slogan.

Jesse and I put that advice to use two or three days a week when we would meet to lift a glass together at the last bar stop on my route in Queens. He would drive over after work and hold up the family’s honor at the bar. As a lad of 18 between his freshman and sophomore years at college I was welcome, but one beer was my limit. Jesse’s only limit was time: he was due home for dinner at 6:30 p.m.

Jesse did much more for me than instruct me in bar behavior. He would lend money longterm for important purposes if needed, and refuse to accept interest. He taught me some worthwhile principles. One was to buy well-located real estate when you needed it for your own use and not worry too much about what direction market prices appeared to be going in. He believed in owning and holding for the long term.

He was a sage investor in the stock market as well, and he lived a long life. On his 99th birthday he was physically feeble and when asked how he would celebrate his 100th, he said, “Sell!”

He didn't make it to 100. Aunt Mona didn't quite make it to 94. Their nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews, however, certainly got value from those 192 years.