CONVERSATION WITH ALICE

    My second cousin Alice turned 80 this past November. She is my mother’s first cousin and they were as close as sisters when my mother was alive. I called her for our annual birthday chat. I love talking to her. She is the source of some of my most colorful language. I should call more often. As usual, we talked about everything under the sun. Here are a few highlights:

    Her house is 135 years old. Built in about 1887. Two stories of solid brick in a gentrifying area at the center of St. Louis. She has lived there my whole life, she is our family historian and her archives are very old school. Every wall in every room of the house was lined from floor to ceiling with family photographs dating back to the 1800s. Amazing. I didn’t appreciate them when I was a kid. As an adult attempting to take over the mantle of family historian, I was obsessed. The last time I visited, I took pictures of all of her pictures! My goal is to enter all of them into ancestry.com.

    She and her longtime husband Wilfred, were preparing to move out of the big old place to an apartment five minutes away. A two bedroom unit with a bedroom for each of them. She had already packed all of her thousands of pictures. Many were removed from their frames to be put into albums at some point. Her nieces, Janice and Angie, have tried to get her to move to the county where they live but she says, “I’m a city girl and that’s where I will be for the last chapter of my life. I want to be where I can walk to the store nearby and stuff like that.”

    For her birthday she had a nice meal and chilled in front of the TV. That’s what I’m talking about! We both did the same for Thanksgiving. 

    She told me, “You know, that Janice is a night owl. She even does her grocery shopping in the middle of the night. Around 7pm. That’s why she carries a gun. She got a permit and everything. Angie’s got a permit and a gun, too!” I wasn’t upset by this. As a woman, you need a gun in St. Louis, that’s just the truth of it. 

    Alice says, “The reason you have a house is to “Stay yo’ ass at home!” Now that I’m old I understand completely. 

    We swapped some good get high stories and laughed hard. That’s my favorite part of our conversations, the laughing. We laughed until we cried. We’ve both done some fun, crazy and dangerous things in our youth. This call, we spoke very briefly about my mother, who died in 2011. That’s OK. I think we’ve talked through our grief over her. 

     I asked about the dogs they always have, if they are going to the new apartment. “Hell, naw! Wilfred was supposed to take care of the dog.” Their recently deceased son Anthony gave them the dog. Alice didn’t want the dog. Wilfred, who doesn’t even like dogs, said he would take care of the dog. Alice told him, “You don’t even take care of your damn self, how you gone take care of a dog?” Alice chose not to get attached to the dog. She doesn’t feed him or anything. The Animal People wouldn’t take the dog because they were full. Alice doesn’t know or care what happens to the dog. All she knows for sure is that, “He ain’t coming to the new apartment!”