AUNT JEANETTA [M, 7-1-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—AUNT JEANETTA [M, 7-1-24]

 

As I write this, our heat wave holds on, and I am thinking about Aunt Jeanetta, for she once sent me a Christmas card in the middle of a heat wave.

I was on sabbatical and trying to finish up a book of Christmas stories. I had quite a few already. For several years, I had written a new story each year to use as a sermon at the Christmas Eve service. But there were not enough to present to a potential publisher as a book.

Writing about Christmas in a heat wave is tough sledding, but I needed to get that done while I had the time for writing. I’m not quite sure how Aunt Jeanetta learned of my struggles, but when she did, she sent me that card. “Maybe it will help you get into a Christmasy mood,” she wrote in it.

Aunt Jeanetta was always proud of her nephew, the preacher, the first in her small-town coal-mining family to go to college. She was always eager to tell people about me, and to help me achieve my goals.

Probably the best thing she ever did for me was to brag about me to Helen’s mother, Georgia, long before Helen and I ever met. Aunt Jeanetta was the daughter-in-law of Georgia’s best friend and card-playing neighbor in the little town of Monon, Indiana, where she had moved when she married Jack Madlung. Aunt Jean, as she liked to be called, talked about her nephew over cards. “He’s such a nice boy, and smart.” [One of the reasons I liked her—she was easily fooled.] When Helen told her mother about this boy she had met at Indiana U, Georgia said, “Oh, I know all about him.”

Helen was slightly miffed that her mother knew about me before she did, but it smoothed the way when she said she was going to marry me.

In some ways Jeanetta and Jack were a strange marriage match. She was kind and pleasant, almost glamourous in a SoInd [1] sort of way. He was boisterous and could be insensitive. He had been in a Nazi POW camp during WWII, but when I tried to suggest that had something to do with his bull-in-a-china-shop approach, everyone in Monon said, “He’s always been that way!”

He was a good father. Nancy, the first of his three children, was the biological child of Jean’s first husband, but you would not know it. Nancy adored her father, Jack, and thought he could do no wrong.

It was a good marriage. Jack was never abusive to Jean, or anyone, but he was difficult to live with, because he was always doing crazy things—like selling their house—without mentioning it to her.

When their kids threw Jeanetta and Jack a 50 year anniversary party, Nancy thought it would be neat to put in a surprise vow renewal service. By that time, she was a PhD college professor, so she should have known better. She arranged for Helen and me to be guests. Aunt Jeanetta was pleased that her favorite [2] nephew was there, and forgot for the moment that he was a preacher who officiated at weddings.

When Nancy announced to all at the country club that her parents were going to renew their wedding vows, her father predictably protested. Boisterously. Even thought it was Nancy’s idea, and she could do no more wrong in his sight than he could in hers. But Aunt Jeanetta calmed him in ways a long marriage had taught her, and by the time they were standing in front of me to say their vows again, you would have thought that it was his idea all along.

She was such a nice wife, and mother, and smart. It was my turn to be proud, of Aunt Jeanetta.

John Robert McFarland

Her full name was Anna Jeanetta, but I don’t think I knew about the “Anna” part until her obit. She often went by Jean. Sometimes Jeanette. I don’t know why she never used Anna. She was 6th of 8 in the birth order of my mother and her siblings. 

1] SoInd=Southern Indiana, like SoCal=Southern California. Except SoInd girls are prettier.

2] “Favorite” is my designation, not hers. Aunt Jeanetta eventually had five nephews, but I was first, so I get to claim “favorite.”