Linda Pastan's LAST UNCLE and My Last Aunt

(reflections on poetry by Linda Pastan, collected in THE LAST UNCLE.)

[PHOTO: Blanche Frisch Maier, my aunt Blanche]

I packed Linda Pastan’s collection THE LAST UNCLE for the trip north for my aunt’s memorial. A couple of years ago, Aunt Ginny died, and Aunt Harriet died in February, so Blanche is my last aunt. I’d read Pastan’s book a couple of times, so maybe my fingers knew where to look, but it seemed that every page I turned to was analog to what I was seeing and thinking.

“After a Long Absence, I Return to a Site of Former Happiness” (p.61) is an apt description of any visit I’ve ever made to the home of Aunt Blanche and Uncle Jack. For others, it’s a grand old house; for me, it’s a personal Garden of Eden. It's where she and Uncle Jack raised eight children, their six cousins, and occasionally three cousins visiting from far away (my brother, sister, and me); and where she hosted thousands for a perpetual open - house "Monday night dinner" throughout her adult life.

One of those Mondays in the summer when I turned 14, Blanche sat with a cocktail and me and talked with me as if I were an adult. While servants prepared for the dozens of guests who would be arriving for dinner, Blanche listened to my dreams of writing musicals and becoming rich and famous -- like her. "All of this," she said with a wave of her arm to indicate the mansion, the servants, the rolling acres of lawn and trees, the sculpted garden, "could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't mind. I'd still have all that matters, family and friends, just the way we did when I was growing up poor." I was awestruck.

I sat last night in Blanche’s garden for the first time without Blanche, and thought, with the poet This is what the world will be / without me, and would have to agree that this knowledge does not make me want to write a poem of affirmation without a shadow of self-pity.

On the road, I saw the same green road signs / the numbered highways / of home while the radio blares familiar music (“Wherever We Travel” p. 54). With Tennessee mountains in front of me, I opened to this line:

I always take a book along
raising it between my eyes and
whatever landscape I've come
so far to see -- blue mountains... (58)

For Pastan, the last uncle has pushed off as on a boat, and locked the doors behind him / on a whole generation leaving us the elders now / with our torn scraps of history without a map on the shore of the new century (29). In another poem, Pastan remembers her mother’s long illness, like Aunt Blanche's, and wanting her to flee that ravished flesh / but willing her to stay (28).

I asked Dad about memories going back to his teen years, when Blanche was like an older sister to him and Mom. Pastan, writing "March 5" on the thirtieth anniversary of her father’s death, regrets not having asked her father more. Looking at her own grown children, aging as I and my cousins have done (all of us within one to ten years of sixty, older than my grandmother was when I was born), Pastan writes, Ask me, I want / to tell them. Ask me now (23). Pastan’s collection CARNIVAL EVENING includes another one that came to mind: “Cousins,” which begins

We meet at funerals
every few years – another star
in the constellation of our family
put out – and even in that failing
light, we look completely
different, completely the same.
(p. 246)

[See links to my other reflections on Linda Pastan's work at my my poetry page.]