I’m at home, working on a book proposal and watching coverage of women’s college soccer. (UCLA, alas, fell short against Anson Dorrance’s perennially mighty Tarheels.)
Lauren has finished the first Help Us Help Ourselves carnival; do visit and learn.
Lynn has a marvelous, long, but very worthy post on “Premarital Sex and the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.” Best post I’ve read in a month.
And I want to note the passing of my great-aunt, Dorothea Roeding Bishop. “Auntie Dot”, as we called her, died on Wednesday in Carmel Valley. She was 97 years old.
My grandmother’s older sister, Dot grew up in San Francisco and lived for many years on Russian Hill. She and my grandmother moved to Carmel Valley thirty years ago. She was a gentle, elegant woman with an extraordinary artistic talent. She had a natural skill with a paint brush, and an equally impressive knack for decorating. Like her great-nephew, she was devoted to animals and gave generously to various rescue and wildlife conservation organizations. She and her late husband had one son, my cousin Tom who makes his home with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.
My Auntie Dot had been in poor health for many years. She had struggled with the onset of dementia and various other ailments that afflict the very old, and we are grateful that she is now fully at rest.
I write today both out of gratitude for her great kindness and gentleness and out of a sense of sadness that with her passing, we’ve now lost the last member of my family born before the First World War. Born in 1909, Dot remembered the roaring ’20s vividly; I have pictures of her with her perfectly bobbed hair when she was a student at Miss Burke’s school in the City. With her death, there is no one left alive in my family who remembers well the world of silent movies, the Coolidge Administration, and when it was that the California Golden Bears won their first Rose Bowl. This is the nature of things, after all. When my mother was a little girl, there were still family relatives alive who remembered the Civil War; when Dot was a child, she knew family members who had come to California for the Gold Rush. The historian in me thinks about these things with wonder, and with sadness.
When I die, perhaps some great-niece will say of me that I was old enough to, say, know veterans of the Spanish-American War, or to remember Watergate, or — barely — to recall when men walked on the moon for the first time.
On the other side of the Jordan, there’s a gentle new arrival with an exquisite sense of taste. Things will be looking spiffier soon.
UPDATE for the family: A short obit here.