Charlie Cairoli

 

Every time an old relative dies, so do snippets of your past .

It’s as though a string connecting you to the past has been cut by a pair of scissors, and like a tethered balloon , the memory bounces in your psychi for a moment before flitting away.

My sister messaged me a few days ago to let me know that our Auntie Joyce had died at the age of 97 .

I hasn’t seen her for forty six years, so upset wasn’t on the agenda, but I was transported to a time my parents were party people and relatives ways looked older than they actually were.

Aunty Joyce was in fact a second cousin. She was a short, pear shaped and overly vivacious woman , with red lipstick and strangely surprised looking drawn on eyebrows. She laughed long and hard and looked as though she had just walked out of a 1940s drama movie. 

She always wore a full length fur coat

Even when I was a young man, I was always fascinated by Auntie Joyce’s eyebrows, or more importantly  the lack of them. She drew her brows with an obvious flourish, giving herself an exotic,and permanently shocked look.

Remembering Joyce brought back vignettes of house parties when the men all wore ties and drank whiskey and the woman sported lumpy dresses and drank martini and lemonade. The house stank of cigarettes and cigars, perfumes and old spice.

And as a child the extended family visits reinforced my father’s status as patriarch 

Joyce and her famous eyebrows have now gone 

And another sliver of my past has dissolved into nothing