Shopping Saturday: "Do Day"
My aunt Elizabeth Reed . . . Wait. I need to explain something, briefly. She really was my first cousin once removed. My mother was an intra-family adoption, and Elizabeth Reed became her adoptive sister. So my sister and brother and I knew her as our aunt. We also knew her as "Sissy," because she was our mother's sister.
"Do Day" is what Sissy called Saturday, when she ran all her errands. During the week, she worked as the Director of Health Information for the State of Florida. At that time, the 1950s and 1960s, the agency for which she worked was known as the State Board of Health. These days, it is the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. Its headquarters are in Jacksonville, where we lived.
When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, I would ride with Sissy on these errands. We enjoyed each other's company, having fun with word plays, silly songs, and jokes. We also sometimes had more serious discussions, and I learned a lot about health and about how Florida was in previous decades, from her experiences as a young nursing student, a public health nurse, and her travels around the state in her job with the Board of Health.
One of those experiences -- one among many -- brings a smile to my lips now, some 60 years later. She was traveling in central Florida, seeking a small town in which she was to give a presentation on some aspect of public health. She had a car issued to her by the state. It was a 1958 Chevrolet, a big and heavy car, as cars were back then. She stopped at a gas station in a rural area. In those days, the gas station attendant would come out from the station office and fill the gas tank, check the air pressure in the tires, clean the windshield, and open the hood and check the oil level. As the scrawny country man was cleaning the windshield, he kept looking at my aunt. You have to know at this point that she was large, and had been all her life, topping out in adulthood at some 300 pounds. It was a cross she bore all her life, but she came to terms with it and developed a sense of humor about it. The gas station attendant finally said, "I notice you're a large woman."
At that point, Sissy began to bristle. Bad enough this man had been staring at her; now he's on about her weight. The attendant continued, "I like large women. My wife's a large woman." He paused, then uttered the line that absolutely broke her up, and got bellylaughs whenever she told the tale: "I always say I never want to have to shake no sheet to find no woman."
When I reached 14, the age when most Florida teenagers began to learn how to drive, Sissy became my driving instructor. We kids got our "learner's permits," driver's licenses that required a licensed adult to be in the car with us and who taught us how to drive. Sissy's private car was a 1955 Chevy Bel-Air, and it was a bear to drive. I developed arm muscles driving that thing! Once I had mastered the basics and could manage safely, I became Sissy's chauffeur on "Do Day." It was good experience. The Southside of Jacksonville had been a separate town called South Jacksonville early in the 20th century, but it eventually got gobbled up by the larger city. It still had a small-town atmosphere.
Sissy liked to shop in the San Marco shopping area, a two-block length of two parallel streets with a slew of businesses. There was Coley-Walker drugs, one of the owners of which lived in the same block my mom and sister and brother and I did, and around the corner from Sissy's house. There was The Silk Shop, a fabric store, owned by the Barnerts, whose daughter was an elementary-school classmate of mine. Mims Bakery and Marsh-Kornegay photographers were owned by fellow parishoners at the church Sissy and I attended, All Saints Episcopal Church. Kinship, friendship, and other links ran all through the area.
Sissy lived a life of service, and was a great influence that guided me in the same direction. She had a fulfilling life, but part of that was to soothe the wound her weight was to her. On the wall in her bedroom was a poem that I memorized; the author remains Anonymous. It described an outlook that infused her life:
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