In Eddie's family, there are lots of stories about his mom's aunt, Mary. Nobody wanted to cross her. She said what she felt, and did what she wanted. She'd open the Christmas present that you gave her and tell you right then, right to your face-- no, this is too small, this is inappropriate. My parents claim that she would drive up and down the Garden State Parkway and take the azalea bushes off the side of the freeway, and take them home.
Because she felt that they were free. She said, "Oh, they're just growing on the road! And we tried to explain to her, no, Aunt Mary, they're not growing, just growing there wild, you know-- someone planted them there. And then she would try to make excuses-- well, she only took a little piece of the plant, she didn't take the whole thing, there was plenty more there. There was the time she invited the family to dinner but didn't want to cook a chicken in the middle of a hot summer day.
So, she cooked it in the morning, covered it with a piece of newspaper, and left it sitting in the attic. All day. Nobody wanted to take a bite, but you didn't argue with Aunt Mary. Aunt Mary had a tremendous cackle. It really was like a sort of room-stopping sound that as a kid she always appeared to me like sort of the joker from the Batman TV show.
But she wasn't necessarily trying to be funny. She would just say something crazy, and then you would laugh at her laughing. You weren't laughing at what she said, you're just laughing at her laughing because it was ridiculous. Aunt Mary lived with her second husband, Uncle Vito, under one roof, but separately. They slept in separate beds, ate food from separate refrigerators.
Uncle Vito had a refrigerator of his own in the garage and Aunt Mary had her refrigerator in the kitchen. I guess Aunt Mary did not really care for Uncle Vito's children, her stepchildren. And so she put a padlock on the refrigerator in their house, so as to keep Vito's children out of it. And so Uncle Vito decided that it would just be easier to keep his own set of food and drink in the garage. And beyond that, he I guess actually built his own sort of, like, Italian, manly palace in the garage, where he had a couch, and a television showing sports games, and, you know, a little rug.
