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She Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’
My lost love for Aunt Carole
I remember the day that my Aunt Carole began complaining about numbness in her fingers and toes. It was a Sunday afternoon, one of our usual, regular visits to my grandmother’s red-brick apartment complex, the only non-tony section of Mountain Brook, Alabama.
Carole lived across the street in a similar apartment with her then-husband Leo. Before marrying Leo, Carole lived in that same apartment with her mother — a one-bedroom apartment. Their bedroom had twin beds separated by a night table where my grandmother’s short-wave radio sat, ready for her nightly airings of talk shows up and down the eastern seaboard. She said that the talk show hosts were her “boyfriends.” She’d also tell anyone who’d listen about the latest late-night conspiracy theories she’d hear from these programs.
The only one I remember is the “theory”/reality that within the earth, the inner or middle earth, there lived little alien beings just waiting for the moment to announce themselves somehow.
That my grandmother believed this theory is not, unfortunately, the strangest thing about her. Every night she climbed into bed around 6:30 and began that ritual, stopping only to receive my father’s nightly call where she’d proceed to tell him all she heard so far and fill his mind with the latest…
