My Aunt Helen was my favorite aunt. She lived in the same city I did when I was growing up, the only relative I had there. She was divorced, eccentric, and able to devote her time and energy into cultivating my education on culture and the arts. From the age of four, she started taking me to plays, musicals, ballets, and frequent visits to her friends’ homes for brunch and gatherings. At these I was forced to try things I would not dream of eating at home, including several dishes with onions (a food I despised in my youth). At one of the brunches I even foolishly tried green pepper jelly, an experience so bad that I still recall it almost 30 years later. There were entire summers in which my Aunt Helen cared for me while my parents worked. We visited every pawn store in Tulsa, every thrift shop, every second-hand store in elaborate quests for rings, necklaces, and other baubles. I owe my entire flute-playing career to Aunt Helen as it was at one of these pawn shops she found a second-hand flute and insisted my parents buy it for me.
Aunt Helen also loved to travel. Every year she saved her money in order to join a group tour to somewhere fabulous. She would always bring me back the required tourist souvenirs. From India a faux-gem barrette, from Peru a colorful woven belt, from Thailand a purse with an elephant in sequins, from China a fan, from Germany a stuffed mouse in traditional German dress. Her trips were magical journeys to me, and I looked forward to every return so that she could show me pictures and tell me of her adventures.
The first time I left the US, I asked my Aunt Helen where I should go. “Costa Rica” she said. “Really, Costa Rica?” I asked her twice. Her reply was the same, so my husband I bought tickets and away we went to Costa Rica. Aunt Helen did not lead us astray. It is a beautiful country and we couldn’t have been happier with the trip.
As I grew older, I respected Aunt Helen for her passion for travel. Raised poor, her expenditures on travel surely went against every Depression-era principal she had been raised to respect. No other member of her family shared her passion, and some even thought it odd. She made travel a priority, and I admired her ability to travel on her own and visit so many countries on several continents.
She traveled to South Africa when it was still under apartheid, China when it wasn't quite so open to tourists, and Russia when it was still a part of the USSR. Aunt Helen had several purses stolen, two in Rio de Janeiro alone! She faced translation problems, personal safety scares, and strenuous physical activity (such as the climbing required in Machu Picchu). Aunt Helen made amazing memories during her travels and inspired a little girl to one day try and see the world.
Toward the end of her life, Aunt Helen couldn't remember any of her trips anymore, at least we didn't think she could. She spent her last years in a full-care facility. She was fed, bathed, and dressed by the staff and my mother. I would visit and look at her sweet face (sometimes she seemed like she might have known who I was), and I wondered if she remembered all of our pawn store trips.
Did she remember seeing Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum?
I went to Russia this year. It is an amazing experience to visit Moscow as an American, even after all these years since the fall of the USSR. As I stood in Red Square, a surreal moment to be sure, my only thought was of my Aunt Helen. She had stood in this place decades before, when Russia was communist and times were uncertain. She had stood and looked at the beautiful onion-domes of the St. Basil Cathedral that I too stared at in wonder. Did she remember them in the end?
I have always thought travel was about making memories. We take pictures to make the memories more real once home again. Those memories are gone for her now, and she can’t recognize herself in the pictures anymore. I can retell the stories of her adventures, but does that make them hers again?
Aunt Helen and I are now separated by more than miles and time. But I found her in Russia, standing in Red Square.
Maybe we are all more than our memories. Maybe we are the footprints in foreign soil staining the lives of those we inspire. Maybe our travels are about connections we make while we are there and then the connections we make back at home. Maybe we can only measure our lives in moments and love, because ultimately, only others will be able to tell our stories.
Here is one for you Aunt Helen
Leslie Seawright
