This is a tribute I wrote for a family anthology about my Aunt Edna Wallace, whose memorial tribute is Saturday

One of my most exciting memories as a kid came when I was about 12 in the mid-1960’s and visited the Wallaces in big L.A.  I thought it was cool I had an aunt, Edna, who was a bona fide sports fan, since few women were passionately interested in those days.  She and her eldest son, Carter Helton, took me to the most beautiful baseball park in the land, Chavez Ravine, to see my hated and Edna’s beloved Dodgers take on the St. Louis Cardinals.  On the mound for the visitors that afternoon was the immortal fireballer Bob Gibson, even then a certified Hall of Famer to be.  Gibson as ever was throwing about a hundred miles an hour, and trying to force the Dodgers away from home plate with his feared “chin music”, but the men in blue, after falling behind, broke through in the late innings, knocked glowering Gibson off the mound and won the game.  Edna and Carter Helton stood and cheered, and for still the only time I too applauded the Dodgers.  Of course, if Willie Mays and the Giants had just lost, as they did more than half the time to less-talented but more-clutch Dodger teams, I probably would’ve sulked for a couple of hours.

During an even earlier vacation, Edna took me to Catalina Island.  That’s still my only visit there.  We saw undersea wonders through a glass-bottom boat, took a bus tour of the island, and walked around town.  On the way back to the mainland, all that sun and excitement compelled me to run around the vessel with a plastic bat – as Edna sometimes recalled at family gatherings – and shout, “How about if I hit this?  How about if I hit that?”

Ultimately, the exertions soothed me into spontaneous slumber on a bench.  Edna later was about to tell me something when an alarmed passenger ran up to her and said, “Ma’am, if you wake up that boy, I’m jumping off this boat.”

Those familiar with contemporary Latin culture, which is more laid back than our own, will perhaps be reminded of Edna’s personal style as well.  She came from a different America, an agrarian place where a down to earth manner was appreciated, and a milieu that has formed many women from Mexico today, though that country is fast changing, and not always for the better, as it becomes more urbanized.  Edna had the charm and tact of a Southern lady born in Tennessee during the First World War.  In all the time I knew her, from my childhood in the 1950’s till our final meeting on her 92^nd birthday in March 2008, she never spoke sharply to me.  And there were times when she could’ve and perhaps should’ve.

A couple of events come to mind.  In the mid 1980s, when I was still living in Sacramento and she and Uncle Carter were on their pretty rolling and wooded estate in Loomis east of town, a half mile from my parents’ golf-course-enhanced place, I was a frequent visitor.  Few readers from this group will be surprised I was not always sober at the Wallace abode.  One Sunday afternoon I was really rollin’, and in regard to two of her female guests, who were freshening up down the hall, I said, “Edna, get those babes out here, I’m horny.”  She, Carter, and I laughed several minutes, though I still acknowledge the inherent inappropriateness of the joke.  Under such circumstances, humor is often painfully absent.  On one of my head-busting Sunday mornings in the early 1990’s I was sitting amid the beer cans with Edna, the only other person in the house who’d arisen.  I knew I’d pushed things a few furlongs too far but wanted to make sure not into the Twilight Zone, and said, “There are a lot of drinkers worse than I am.”

“I’ve seen better, too.”

That was all she said.  Her laconic, and in many ways literary, style could convey great meaning in few words.

I know Aunt Egg Nog was delighted I became a teetotaler more than eleven years ago.