ABSTRACT
I remember the houses of my New Jersey aunts when I was growing up. For a curious little kid like me, they were wonderful places. They smelled of old furniture, aging wood, stale perfume, and the salty ocean air of Atlantic City, and every shelf and mantle had brightly colored knickknacks, browning post cards, framed black and white or tinted photographs, and a thousand other mementos of a long life remembered in moments. Being the youngest of seven children in a large Irish Catholic family, I had aunts, lots of them, who were the age of the grandparents of most of my friends. They still had antimacassars on the chairs when most people I knew didn't even know what antimacassars were. And they all had very big hair, many of them redheaded, and very brassy voices.
