A Few "Aunt Frankie" Stories

Aunt Frankie’s memorial service last Saturday lasted for almost two hours and would have gone even longer if my brother Tom had not cut the sermon short.

If we could all put our stories of Aunt Frankie into one volume, what a book it would make! Here’s one I never heard until last Saturday:

Back in the early 60s, Aunt Frankie and her pastor’s wife were calling for the Sunday school when they found themselves driving behind a vehicle whose driver was obviously drunk. As he approached a railroad crossing, he made an abrupt turn onto the tracks. The bumpy ride got his attention, and he quickly came to a stop. Aunt Frankie had pulled off the road and jumped out of her car. “What are you doing, man?” she called. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

Walking up to his car door, she demanded, “Move over, I’m driving you home.” She instructed her astonished young pastor’s wife to follow them. Fortunately, the drunken man knew his address, Aunt Frankie lived forty-plus more fearless years, and the pastor and his wife had a great story.

On the way home last week, I thought of this long-forgotten story to share with my children: Back in the day, single gals were advised to use only their initials for telephone directory listings. One of my roommates had not “gotten the memo,” and believe it or not, there really are losers who have nothing better to do than to go through the phone book looking for women’s names, so we got a few obscene phone calls. We always slammed the phone down. One night I even slammed the phone down on a caller with a slurred Southern drawl who turned out to be my housemate’s boss calling about work. I was zealous!

During this time, the early 80s, Aunt Frankie received an obscene phone call of her own. Apparently no one had ever told her to slam the phone down. When the voice on the other end of the line whispered, “Do you want to go to bed?” Aunt Frankie whispered back, “Do you?”

Excitedly, the voice responded, “Yes!” Now Aunt Frankie stopped whispering and said, “Well, go to bed!” Then she hung up the phone.

Aunt Frankie told my mother that story, and my mother told me. She told me not to tell anyone, but it was way too good to keep.

One evening in the late 80s Aunt Frankie and I were together in a little seafood restaurant. We bowed our heads in prayer before we began to eat. At the table next to us were four or five guys relaxing with beers after a day’s work. If you’ve ever been in a restaurant in South Louisiana, you know how loud it can get. It wasn’t difficult to hear one guy grouse, “Oh great, we’re sitting next to a freaking Sunday school!”

That was all Aunt Frankie needed to start a conversation. Wagging her finger, she said, “That’s what you need!”

The guy couldn’t believe she was for real. “Pardon me?”

“You need a Sunday school,” she admonished, smiling.

Now in Politically Correct School, I had learned that it’s never okay to begin a sentence with “You need,” no matter what you might think. Aunt Frankie never went to PC school. She just pressed ahead and made four or five new friends that night. They conversed throughout the meal. She invited them to church –mine – since hers was in another town (and one of them actually showed up a few weeks later). By the time we got up to leave, they were begging to buy her dinner.

The thing about Aunt Frankie was that she was neither impressed nor intimidated by anybody’s titles or lack of them. Their reputations, good or bad, meant absolutely nothing. The fact that someone was a stranger was no obstacle. She was simply and completely a people person.

“Everyone loved your mother,” she would tell me, “and my sister Grace.” She knew she was more abrasive. Aunt Frankie was nothing if not confrontational. But when it came to loving back, no one could out-love Aunt Frankie. She loved so well. Everyone felt it.

You would think ninety-nine years would be enough for a life, no matter how well-lived. Somehow it’s not. But for all of us who find it hard to say goodbye, there are many more who are welcoming her home. I can just imagine the stories they are telling.