The Aunt and I
Year-end edition
In keeping with the end of a truly horrible year, I’ve committed to spending the next few weeks reveling in small discoveries of joy.
A thing that frustrated and amused adults in equal measure was my total inability to understand the concept of singular choice as a child.
Let’s take, for example, an adult, say, an aunt. This aunt would come up to me and ask in a falsely high voice, as adults do to children, what my favorite color was. Possibly there was the promise of sweets or compliments in exchange for an answer, any answer. Really, there are hardly wrong ones when it comes to asking a child what their favorite anything is. But for me, colors would flicker before my eyes, I couldn’t settle on just one, I didn’t understand what the point of establishing a color hierarchy was, and I’d finally reply, with certainty, Rainbow.
The aunt would flounder slightly. Rainbow isn’t a color, dear.
Yes, it is, I’d reply.
The aunt would then go off to have words with my mother, and the entire thing would take on the flavor of anecdote; it would be raised later as proof of how children say the darndest things. When I got slightly older, the aunt (who for me, represents an amalgamation of all the aunts who have ever approached me with a litany of inane questions) would return and ask again, What’s your favorite color?
By this point older and smarter, I’d say, White. It would have been alright if I’d left it at that, but I was rather irritating as a child; I had to explain the loophole or it wouldn’t be satisfying. I would continue: because white isn’t a true color, see, if you pass it through a prism, you’ll see it separate into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. So really, my favorite color is Rainbow.
The aunt, suspecting some smart-aleckness there, would go off to have words with my mother again, who would then half-heartedly lecture me on respecting my elders. She knew I wasn’t being intentionally rude: she had raised me to speak my mind. Unfortunately for her, this often led to troublesome conversations with other adults who had the bad luck of getting tangled up in conversation with me, when all they’d wanted was a bit of small talk.
There were other questions that the conference of aunts often posed. What was my favorite subject in school, what did I like to eat, what did I like to play, who was my favorite teacher, etcetera. I didn’t realize that no one cared about my answer; I would treat the questions seriously, as if giving an answer meant it was set in stone, as if saying fishball noodles were my favorite meant I could never opt for duck rice later.
The question that really sent me into a tizzy was what I wanted to do when I grew up. I had all these ideas and no concept of the conditions that would render them possible. (Pilot, I’d say, and the aunt would reply, smugly, oh no, you can’t, you wear glasses and pilots need perfect eyesight.) Furthermore, the idea that you had just one career your whole life caused me pain. My parents were of the generation that believed in lifelong loyalty to a company or trade, it is only today that we speak of job-hopping and mid-career switches with casual ease. I couldn’t imagine choosing a career path, and consequently having all these other worlds and realities closed off to me. In the end, the answer I most frequently gave partitioned my life into bits, I would say: I want to be an artist while I’m a kid, an astronaut when I’m an adult, and then an inventor before I retire. I was hoping no one would catch that I’d slipped two careers into the block of adulthood with a bit of wordplay, and I reasoned that inventing constituted variety, so I wouldn’t be limited or bored.
I forgot all about those childish answers as I grew up, and as my perspective on life sharpened. Today, I like firm answers, I don’t like leaving space for ambiguities or wriggle room. I want to know where we’re going for lunch, and what the plan is; I am now the kind of adult who might frown if a child said their favorite color was Rainbow. It annoys me when people bring up the silly things I’ve said as a child; to me, we are completely different people. It’s common for aunts I meet to say: do you remember, and quickly follow it with something embarrassing. In fact, I’ve come to expect it. All of that to say I was taken by the violent shock of surprise, then delight, when recently an aunt came to visit. Do you remember, she said, wanting to be an inventor?
I started to shake my head, I didn’t want to go back down memory lane, and find some nugget of information designed to tease or humiliate me.
But anyone who has encountered the kind of aunt I have knows that there is no stopping them. Isn’t it funny, she said, unrelenting, how things turned out? Now you sit around all day inventing stories. What’s that like?
She thought I was being smart-alecky again, but I suppose more than one thing hasn’t changed since I was a child — I treat questions seriously even if they’re rhetorical. I told her the truth: that it was difficult, but amazing, often I would come out of a writing session with my head in a different world, sometimes my made-up characters mattered to me more than things in this life, yes, this life, because for me there were more than one, this one, that one, they were all equally important. She looked at me, unamused, then went off to have words with my mother.
