Prairie View

Sunday, May 03, 2009

Aunt Fannie

My sister Linda and my mother just returned from Uncle Glen's funeral in Iowa. Uncle Glen was 90 years old.

My aunt Fannie was there from Florida. She is my mother's older sister. I don't claim to know Fannie very well. Yet she has always seemed familiar, partly because I see her resemblance to my mother, and partly through what my mother has told me about her.

Fannie must have been quite a live wire in her younger days. She spent some time in Kansas before she was married. Once while I was looking through old pictures at Freddie Nislys, I stumbled onto a picture of her with a young man I did not know. Mary Nisly told me that Fannie had been a friend of hers. She told me too who the young man was. I've forgotten his name.

As a child, Fannie once hid in the cornfield along the road where a tramp was passing by. She called out "tramp, tramp, tramp. . . . ," probably in time to his footsteps. As my mother told it, the tramp was angered and tried to find her, but she was safely hidden away. Fannie had five brothers before she had any sisters. That might explain why she was inclined to hatch unladylike pranks like this.

When my father started dating Fannie's sister, more than one Kansan was surprised. To people who knew only my dad and Fannie, I doubt that Fannie's sister Mary seemed like a likely match for David.

Fannie married Eli C., who was a good and sensible man. Together they raised a family of four boys and a tag-along daughter. All of her boys have served as pastors--some of them after having made quite a name for themselves for youthful unpastorly activities. I'm sure I never heard most of them, but somehow "Harry" stories from Rosedale filtered all the way out to Kansas during his days there. I wonder if the stories survived until the years when my brother Myron taught there. He was Harold's age, and probably an occasional "partner in crime."

Linda reported that Mom and her remaining siblings had an evening gathering at Joe and Mary's house in the evening after Glen's funeral. The group was considerably enlivened by Fannie's presence. Mind you, this is largely an 80-and-older crowd, so liveliness is a bit of a relative term, but it sounded like a lot of fun.

Uncle Joe, who is very bald, explained his condition by saying something like "No grass grows on a busy street." Actually, I think he elaborated a bit on this by saying that all the activity underneath the skull interferes with the growth of vegetation on the surface of it. "Ay lobe shtinkt," (Self praise stinks.) was Fannie's big-sisterly comment--an effort, no doubt, to nip in the bud any tendency toward pride.

Another time, after someone told Fannie she looks just the same as she always has, she said, "Ich binn da same eppah." (I am the same somebody.) When the people who overheard this chuckled, she said, "Well, what should I have said?"

My brother Ronald said, [You should have said] "Thank you."

So she said it right then and there: "Thank you."

Fannie thought my mother looked well, and expressed great surprise at this. I suppose this is understandable, since she knew how sick Mom was last fall and winter. Fannie also kept marveling at how much my mother looks like their mother used to. "You look just like Mom," she told her.

***********************

My dad could not be present at Glen's funeral. He regretted this a great deal, but he was scheduled to be at a meeting in Harrisonburg, VA the next day, and his tickets to fly there and back had already been purchased--provided, actually by Ervin R. Stutzman, who asked him to come.

Ervin is writing a book on how the Mennonite church is moving or has moved from a nonresistant position to a pacifist position. The manuscript has been sent to reviewers, my father among them. As I understand it, Ervin gathered 20 of these reviewers for a day of discussing these issues, presumably in an effort to gain further insight for his writing project.

Dad was one of Ervin's pastors in his growing-up years, and my uncle Glen and Ervin's father lived in the same community in Iowa at one time, so the funeral and the reviewer's gathering had intertwining threads.

Ervin is now vice president of Eastern Mennonite University and academic dean of the seminary there.

This morning Dad attended church where Wendell and Jeanene worship. I'm sure that was a pleasure. It would have been that for me, at least. I was Wendell's co-teacher for three years.

3 Comments:

  • When people looked in the Hochstetler book to get stats on Fannie Jane's sister who was Levi's David's girlfriend, they found only one sister who was sixteen years old. Somehow Mom's name was missed in the list. --Linda Rose

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 5/04/2009  

  • Interesting. I never knew this connection with "Great Uncle Glen" . His wife, Susan, is my Great Aunt. She was a sister to my grandfather, Simon Yoder, and of course, Great Uncle Alvin.

    By Anonymous Cathy Miller, at 5/04/2009  

  • I would love to see those uncles and aunts again. I believe Uncle Joes, Uncle Jesses, and Uncle Henrys are the only Beachy uncles and aunts I have seen since Grandma's funeral.

    By Blogger Dorcas Byler, at 5/04/2009  

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