Aunt Ida and Uncle Joe

By Dennis Edwards:

A personal account about how a faithful person was an inspiration to me and helped me grow in faith.

As a youth during the turbulent 60´s and 70´s the world seemed on the “eve of destruction” as Bob Dylan so rightly put it in his famous song “The Times Are a Changing.” With both the Russians and the US armed to the full with nuclear weapons, with war in Vietnam, discontent on the college campuses because of it, social and racial unrest at home, the world seemed on the verge of exploding either from within or from without.

I remember my second year of college being so depressed that I even ventured out to drive my car off the bridge over the Ohio River connecting Marietta, Ohio to Parkersburg, West Virginia. But somehow I couldn´t do it. I knew love existed in the world. Although I had neither communication nor open relationship with either my parents or grandparents, I knew one person loved me, my Aunt Ida.

Who was Ida? First of all, she was not really my aunt. She and Uncle Joe had been our next door neighbors when we lived in a small apartment complex owned by my grandparents in Brooklyn, N.Y. Both my older brother and myself were born there in Brooklyn and maybe my sister, too. Ida and Joe would babysit us for my parents and soon became Aunt Ida and Uncle Joe.

I am not sure where Ida was from. She grew up in an orphanage. I remember she had small feet because she had to wear the donated shoes that were too small for her so the toes of her feet were all squished together. Maybe she was Italian like Uncle Joe, but she could have been Albania because she looked a bit like Mother Teresa.

Uncle Joe had sold vegetables on the streets of Brooklyn when he was young. He was even offered to work with Al Capone´s boys, but wanted to earn an honest living. If ever I knew a Christian at that time, it was Uncle Joe. He would make a habit of stopping to help people who were having car trouble on the highway from Queens to Oakdale, Long Island. This was in the days prior to Emergency Highway Patrol, mobile phones and the like. He had a whole group of people who would come around and visit him because of the help he had offered them. He and Ida did not have any children, so their new friends adopted them as family. Uncle Joe even let us kids sip the foam off his beer, which was really something super special to us at the time.

After my girlfriend dropped me for another guy, I fell into a deep depression during my first year at college. Nick Verrastro my roommate from college could tell you about it. Nobody loved me. The world was a mess. I was due to be drafted into the military and go to Viet Nam when my college days were finished. I lost all hope for living. My college courses taught me evolution and I swallowed it down and rejected the faith of my youth and fell into atheism and existential thinking. But in that darkest moment, I could not admit that love did not exist, because I had seen it in the life of my Uncle Joe and had felt it in the loving arms of Aunt Ida.

I remember going out to our family bungalow on Long Island. Ida and Joe had a bungalow just near ours. I loved spending time alone at the bungalow to just rest and think and be away from the humdrum of New Jersey life and school. Between my first and second year at college, I was a closed up, depressed 19 year old. With my hair to my shoulders in protest to the war and the “American Way,” I sauntered over to Ida and Joe´s place. When I walked into their bungalow, Ida just put her arms around me and asked what the matter was. “Is something wrong, Dennis?” I could not reply. I was all bottled up and confused, depressed and hopeless. She sang a little song as she hugged me, a song she used to sing with us when we were kids: ”A bushel and a peck, and a hug around the neck.” There we stayed. She hugging me and singing over and over “a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.”

I never opened my heart to Ida and told her all that was bothering me. It was not until I had my God experience some year later that I was able to open up and begin sharing my heart with others. But Ida´s hug at that time was the assurance this distraught young adult needed to know that love existed. If love existed, maybe God existed also, and maybe there was some meaning to this seemingly meaningless world.

Thank God for Aunt Ida and all the other Ida´s in the world who give love and are examples of the love of God to others. If there were more of them, what a wonderful world it would be.