Aunt Betty Koftan

NOTE: I should never improvise orally but always write. This is what I meant to say at Aunt Betty Koftan's memorial service:

Whatever you think of me, I am the product of my grandmother and mother. Consequently, whatever they thought, as the ancestral Twigg bent, I was bound to be espaliered in the same directions. Since Aunt Betty was my mom's very favorite in-law, she was naturally, unquestionably my very favorite aunt. Of course, it helped that she was tall, like my dad's side of the family, pretty, with a beautiful smile, like the one on the cover of the memorial service brochure, and with a certain serenity that was valuable in our high-decibel family.

Actually, I'm sure that she had times of tears and anger, but I only vaguely remember her in those Kodak negative moods. The photos I found missing from her childrens' montage of her life were one of her in her high school play and one when she was clearly very pregnant and mugging wryly, "Just take it from here on up," with her hand sliced across her neckline, her jaw jutting forward, a rueful look, a sweetly funny photo.

Otherwise, I remember her bringing a smiling calmness into our mostly noisy families. The Luckerts were notorious for emotional teariness, both aunts and uncles. The Peters emphasized their Irishness by noisy arguments, especially if there was a Republican foolish enough to admit it. Besides Grandpa's explosive Czech fury, Grandma and Grandpa Koftan had a wrangling relationship that bothered me as a little boy, but Mom always laughed about their sniping, treating it affectionately as their version of such contentious radio couples as the Bickersons. And Audree and Larry had a very strident sibling rivalry. Amid the noise, Aunt Betty was this quiet place, soft-spoken, all the more appreciated along with her other virtues.

Back then she spoiled me. When she found out that I really, really liked her cherry pie, that's what I got at family gatherings or when I visited their family. Because I sight-read piano music well, I never learned to play by ear or memory. When I went to visit them in Albion, she had nothing to sing, and I had nothing to play; so she went uptown and bought me the sheet music for an old Irving Berlin song, "[Let's Take] An Old-Fashioned Walk," a very singable waltz from a forgotten musical, Miss Liberty. Every time I ran across it, I thought of her. She also bought me the piano transcription of An American in Paris and possibly Rhapsody in Blue. The first was because the folks and Uncle Larry and Aunt Betty had gone fishing up at Enemy Swims, South Dakota, leaving me home alone. While there, Mom and Aunt Betty had gone to the drive-in to see the then new film version with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, which made me feel especially bad for having to stay home. So she made the special gift to me. While I wasn't Jose Iturbi or Oscar Levant, famous movie pianists of that time, I could bang my way through fairly well for her.

This was, after all, the time when many children had piano lessons just as in The Music Man, when people sang much more and much better than they do now, before TV (and even after, for that matter), when we spent much of our radio evenings with "The Hit Parade" and other musical shows, prize game shows like "Name That Tune" and "Stop the Music," talk shows featuring mainly vocalists; and singers like Dinah Shore, Perry Como, and Kate Smith, had their own variety shows. Gathered around the piano at Mary's Cafe or at family reunions, holiday occasions, even public meetings, we had singalongs regularly well before Mitch Miller made those a TV hit.

Of course, Mom and Aunt Betty had beautiful, strong alto voices. Mom's power offfset easily the rest of her church choir's sopranos; she sang frequently for weddings, funerals, conventions, alumni banquets, a local Kate Smith. Aunt Betty's sweetly strong voice could harmonize easily with Mom's, and she sang in duets and trios, as I recall. Besides choir, both sang everyday around the house, with or without the radio, with or without Gramma or me playing the piano. They sang us through car trips to Norfolk to shop or to picnics and reunions. They're the reason I learned to read the alto line in the hymnals and songbooks of the day long before I learned the tenor or bass parts. I cannot truly describe the tremendous joy they gave with their gifted voices, their own pleasure at singing.

Besides music, I should mention that we were all also readers, another habit almost lost. So I wasn't surprised to discover that Aunt Betty shared Mom's fondness for crossword puzzles, as do I, dependent as those are on vocabulary and widespread general knowledge gained mostly from reading--not from watching TV. When Cousin Linda told me of the crosswod puzzle club memberships she'd given her mother, I was impressed that Aunt Betty could probably have dealt with Will Shortz's well-known New York Times crosswords. Such verbal background undoubtedly contributed to her wry sense of humor, which her children have inherited to catch me off guard with.

I was also pleased when some earlier blog entries of mine delighted her about the 1950s we shared, the last happy era before TV and computers and microchips assaulted us 24/7 with world and data overload, agitating us into commercial-length attention spans. I had written about the popular songs on the colorful Wurlitzer jukebox in Mary's Cafe during my high school years, and she immediately e-mailed me what happy memories they gave her. The same happened when I catalogued popular candies of the time, mentioning such bygones as Walnut Crush and LaFamas, which had been among her very favorites too. Kindred minds with kindred tastes.

Finally, I have a habit of classifying even weather by art. Art museums are to me what churches are to you. Thus, summer dawns of pastel pinks, purples, peaches, those familiar Impressionist colors, are Monet dawns, as certain sunsets are blazing Turners. In this case, not so strangely, because artists have used women as symbolic landscapes--and I don't just mean Dali's surrealism--in line with Aunt Betty's symbolic serenity, how she made me feel, I not only associate her with Omaha's Lauritzen Gardens, where I go to escape stress in luminous green tunnels by trickling waterfalls, but with Constable days, especially Constable days. An English landscapist, John Constable is high summer, his scenes all deep blue skies with cumulous cloud boats over lush green pastures, cattle quietly grazing or standing in still ponds, farmers fording shallow streams with hayricks, romantic old farms and mills, distant villages with a church spire among their trees, the opulence of high summer in all its green wealth, so that you want to throw yourself down into the deep grass and fall up into the cerulean sky. Such calm beauty was Aunt Betty's. Such is how I remember her.