Remembering Janet Poggi  (1922 - 2001)

by Cecilia Cohen, Israel

    I remember Janet as my closest aunt, the only one I shared jokes with, fought with, and danced with.  The one I insisted on meeting at the airport when she came to visit my mother.  The aunt who would ask to sit with me in the back of the car so that we could giggle together.  There was never any doubt in my mind when people asked me who my favorite aunt was, I always answered without hesitation, "Aunt Janet."

    I was about 12 years old when I spent a summer with her; she introduced me that year to the music of Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass, to modern dance, and showed me the lights of my own brain waves.  We wrote poetry together, and shared our dreams of being writers.  When we went apple picking, we both found it funny and offensive when the farmer referred to her as my grandmother - - and to me as her grandson. We researched what "crystal eggs," round rocks with crystallized centers, would look like before being split open, and then drove off together to find some. With Janet, all was possible.  This was the era before Internet and cable TV, when games and imagination ruled.  Janet had plenty of imagination; for me, that whole summer has always been like one of those eggs, blazing with color and beauty, exciting to discover, raw and sharp to remember. 

    It's true that all this was a long time ago - 30 years ago.  I grew up and moved away, virtually to another planet.  Janet and I kept somewhat in touch by mail, and as I got older I got to know her differently;  we no longer giggled about elves and magic rocks, but shared ideas about marriage and families and mature choices and priorities.  And from this sharing I know that life was not always kind to her.  As an adult, I can see that my aunt in turn was not always kind to those around her.  It seems to me that as she aged, she grew bitter. As a younger woman she had been held back by her fears but still fought to keep her creativity alive.  As a very older woman Janet most likely regretted some of her earlier choices and rejoiced in others, but she was limited by her body, which set the painful rules by which she had at first to live, and then to die.

    More than any of my other aunts and uncles, Janet and her creativity had a positive, lasting influence on me.  The darker side of Janet that her daughters knew, I did not have to see.  I could love her without regrets or anger.  I won't remember her as she was in her last few years, because I did not really believe that she would ever die and so did not make the time to visit her, and although I did not know it, she was already too sick to visit me.  I will not remember her as an old woman - I will remember Janet walking with me down the grassy hill to the lake, both of us singing, "Lemon Tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet...."