Aunt Esther
Home from a college break in 2003 I hopped on the phone with my Aunt Esther - I in New Jersey on the kitchen land line and she in San Francisco where she'd lived my whole life, the only member of our family to defect to the West. She was unequivocally the coolest one of us who I desperately aimed to impress, relate to, and make laugh when she visited twice a year for the High Holidays. She'd arrive to my grandparents' Manhattan apartment trailing cigarette smoke, dressed sort of like a grunge Diane Keaton, men's corduroy trousers and long wiry hair freshly dyed dark coppery red with blonde streaks and braided to one side. On Passover when I went with Bubbie Shirley to the door to let Elijah in (from the hallway on the 18th floor, where he naturally was waiting for a nip of Manischewitz), Esther went and smoked out Pop=pop's office window. As my grandfather's name was Herbert, Esther cracked "bitter Herb" jokes.
On the phone with her as a sophomoric college junior I remember saying something like, "there's just no good new rock music right now!" That was not true, I didn't mean or believe it when it came out of my mouth, and it made me sound like truly the oldest fart, but Esther was the embodiment of peak rock 'n roll and I needed her to think I was on her level. She hung out with a photographer in the '70s who traveled with the Rolling Stones and had given her an original shot of the band that she'd kept pinned to a cork board for years. In a rough period when her small publishing business went under she tried to sell some things and was told by an appraiser that the pushpin holes in the white border of that photo made it virtually worthless, so she gave it to me.
So I make this totally ridiculous declaration to Esther and she, rightly, shot back, "what the fuck are you talking about, there's so much good new music!" I was mortified and so mad at myself for trying to impress her with an angle that would embarrass a middle schooler. She was like when there's an edgy cool kid in the popular group who isn't elitist or exclusionary so you could actually get to be friends with them if you did a group project together. The University of Illinois' mind-bendingly great independent radio station had by then introduced me to The Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Le Tigre, The Streets, The White Stripes, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Gossip, Belle & Sebastian, and everybody else fantastic in the early 2000s. Within a week of that idiotic phonecall Esther mailed me Kings of Leon's first album. She didn't live to see them churn out anthems that would blare from every sports arena and car commercial.
August 31 is Esther's Yahrzeit, or the anniversary of her death, so of course I'm thinking of her today, though she's been with me constantly in a way that's more spiritual than I generally consider myself to be. She died suddenly in 2007, terribly young, when I'd just moved to Alphabet City (where she'd once lived out of wedlock with a boyfriend after getting kicked out of art school, to my grandparents' horror), and three months before I turned 24, met Wendy, and decided to become a hairstylist. I got the call from my dad at some ungodly hour that I answered from the air mattress crammed into my "bedroom" which was a sliver of living room partitioned off by a plywood wall and no closet that I was exhilarated to pay $1000/month for. More than career aspirations at that time, my priority was to live in Esther's old haunt and the epicenter of so much of the indie rock I lived by.
Esther was an artist and a weirdo and somewhat of a black sheep who'd been my grandparents' soulmate in some ways and constitutionally incapable of sticking to their version of the straight and narrow in many others. Everything that's transpired in my life since Esther left is the stuff that would've bound us together by the threads of our shared subversive traits, so I choose to believe that she's sent gifts and guidance my way.
She called the Hamptons the "Hamptoonz." She was obsessed with the San Francisco Giants and once took my dad to a game where she used the sandwiches they'd packed as a seat cushion for herself and then told my dad he was "really fucked up" for being mad and not wanting to eat his. She hated war and protested relentlessly, including when a bunch of people got together in SF to spell I-M-P-E-A-C-H on the beach with their bodies during the George W. Bush years. No matter how little she had - and at times it was very little - she gave money to every unhoused person she saw, saying, "there but for the grace of god go I."
Have a beautiful Labor Day my gorgeous friends, and for Aunt Esther and really for yourself too make it a point to carry a little cash so you can always help a local who has less than you.
Love, Caroline