As a young child it was a sublime delight to spend the summer months in northern Michigan near the shores of Lake Tippipitoo with my uncle Richard and aunt Sieglinde. Those glorious summers occupy a hazy, warm room in the mansion of a now enfeebled memory. The summer that stands out of all others, was the last summer I spent with my aunt and uncle.
Uncle Richard was a semi-retired ice cream magnate from Chicago. He spent his evenings devising new flavor combinations to try and revive his once flourishing, but now melting, ice cream empire. Aunt Sieglinde was a woman of many careers. She also tried her hand or hands at inventing a new foodstuff. She collected morels in the spring, as she had her favorite and highly secret, mushroom filled patches in the back woods. After her morels were collected, she spent a number of summers trying to perfect a new hot dog condiment called “Morelish”. It seemed that no one else had the vision that she did. One of the local gas stations did stock it for a few summers in the cooler next to the night crawlers, as a favor to Aunt Siegi. She was left with jars of the stuff in the pantry, a monument to mushrooms and pickles that just couldn’t get along together in the same jar. I believe that she was just ahead of her time and was an early pioneer of the spoon food industry that seems to be thriving in tourist-land today.
My aunt was a rather largish woman. As my father liked to say, though never to her face; “…Sieglinde is a woman who can really fill a doorway.” Along with her expansive girth, she also possessed a passably good soprano voice. At one time she was the lead singer for local polka band by name of Sieglinde and the Dancing Valkyries. The group did show some promise, but since the locals were mostly of Polish or Bohemian extraction, they were never able to find their audience with their German tuneage. It just didn’t have that toe-tapping beat that appealed to the beer drinkers. They experimented with other musical genres to try to revive the band, but after a plan to do a polka tribute to Dave Brubeck failed to gain any financial backing, they gave it up for euchre and bingo.
My aunt and uncle never had the time to have any children. They were so busy with their various projects, they rarely gave any thought to even spending any time with children. They did tolerate me for a few months every summer. I just figured it was an old debt that they had to pay back to my parents. The closest thing they had to a family was their pair of English Bulldogs, or their Bullenbeissers as they called them. Their names were Fasolt and Fafner. They were devoted to those ugly canines and the feelings were reciprocated.
part two — coming tomorrow