With Sugar Gone a World is Lost

28 December 2019

Writing Just for Me

There are times I write for a clearly defined audience.  There are also times when I write just for me.  Pieces I create for myself are a bit rougher in terms of grammar and language.  Often I must move quickly and just write what comes to mind because I want to capture an idea before It just vanishes.  One comment from my wife akin to, “Hey did you hear…”, and the narrative piece I had in mind is gone for days, if not forever.  This piece  is one of those quick jots.

My Aunt Sugar’s death weights on me.  In thinking about a world without Emma “Sugar” Huber, the phrase that comes to my mind is a lost world. Aunt Sugar was the last of my  aunts and uncles by blood.  Some of parents’ siblings died before I was born, that is they were gone from this earth more than 63 years ago.  But Sugar died just died a few days ago.  She was the last.  She was also sui generis. With her passing a touchstone of family narrative and of historical awareness has been lost.  With her passing the worlds I occupied as a preschooler and a teen have in many ways vanished.

When I grew up my older relatives talked about experiences tied to World War II and also of the Great Depression.  Uncles served at Anzio and with Patton. Aunts worked in munitions plants. Sugar was young, a youth when World War II was on so these were not her conversations, at least not in my presence. 

Sugar was born in 1934. My late oldest brother was born in 1941. They, as the years went on, were more contemporaries that my brother and I were.  She was 7 when my brother was born.  My brother was 15 when I was born. She left school in the early fifties. She had my cousin Bill in 1956.  Rough math makes her 22 that year. Really, I am not sure if it was a family competition or what, but my mom, Aunt Sugar, two of their other sisters and one of her brothers had five kids in 1956.  All of us were boys. Each of us was a handful.  No place was that on greater display then those days we ran amok in the Gaventa’s Christmas trees in the mid 1960s.

With Aunt Sugar’s passing the memories of gatherings at my Grandmother Asher’s home fade a little bit more.  When you come from a family that had fourteen children, and when most of them lived in the area, dinners on Sundays and major holidays were command performances. Thirty or more attendees were not unusual.  The rituals of who ate in what room, the kitchen, the dining room or the living room, don’t matter any more.  But back then when Sugar was in her late 20s and early 30s they did. Who brought what and prepared what in the way of food mattered too.  Memories now, these things are no longer moored to one of the principals, and we the children have imperfect perceptions of all the machinations of an Asher family dinner. The rules and rituals were established before we came along.

With Sugar gone one of the most important and joyous period of my life no longer has a co-narrator. In the first few years of the 1970s when I was a mid-teen, Aunt Sugar and Uncle Bill lived in a garage apartment. It had cedar shake siding and was about a block away from the first floor apartment my parents rented. There in Ocean City, NJ., we were part of what in essence was a family compound.  I did most of my emotion maturing there.  Aunt Sugar was one of the guides to my growing up.

So much love came from her.  I can remember playing cards with Aunt Sugar and Uncle Bill and one or another of their kids until late into the evening many a night.  I could stay out late if I was at their place. I remember playing rummy with two decks and playing to some ungodly number of points, because with two decks ungodly point totals were to be expected. 

 I can remember eating Campbell’s takeout seafood at the enamel table up in the top of that garage many, many times. My guess is that some of her children can remember exactly what the order would be and how much it would cost back then. Memories from the ritual of settling in on the beach for the day with towels and chairs and umbrellas and floats to outdoor showers back up at the apartment to get the beach sand off our bodies, these have direct ties to my memories of my Aunt. “Jay Todd don’t you dare come in here with sand on your feet, don’t you do it.”  Yup I can hear her voice now.

Just as certain as I remember the feel of a white linen shirt my slightly sunburnt skin, is my memory of my Aunt Sugar walking to or from the water’s edge.  With Sugar gone the seasons there in America’s Family Resort will fade a bit more. I am a poor historian, she was not.  My confabulated memories will not have her clear voice to set my tales straight. With her rich, full, and when it needed to be, loud voice stilled, the meaning of the battle of wits she waged with us unruly teens is rendered moot.

Sugar will be greatly missed.  Her husband will miss and mourn her terribly  So will her children my cousins. Their hearts will be marked forever with her absences from their lives. So will her nephews and nieces and a hundred other people who her life touched.  I will miss her for my own selfish reasons, from the times I spent at her house as a preschooler to those days at the beach as a teen.  With her passing a rich, vibrant, life filled world had been lost. Memories remain but they do not compare to what my Aunt was in life.

The photo is of a child, my great nephew Jack, playing on the beach at 33rd/34th Street in Ocean City where my Aunt Sugar once ruled. The joy of the ocean, the warmth of love.