“IS THAT REALLY WHAT THE CONDUCTOR SAYS?”

[As we approach what would have been my Aunt Minnie’s 82nd birthday, I offer you this reminiscence I wrote to her memory five years after her death. Wish you could have known her.]

My body is suspended 33,000 feet over Kentucky, just a month from my 40th birthday, but my mind is hopelessly stuck in Saturday morning, 1955. And for now, I don't particularly want it unstuck.

My flight to Chicago is one more tedious episode in the four-year exercise of trying to bring some order to the irreconcilable disorder of my Aunt Minnie's death. Struck down on her way home from synagogue by an over-anxious driver. How tragically poignant, or perhaps how divinely unfair, a way for a decent, pious woman to die.

Minnie was my mother's soulmate, her closest confidante, and confessor of deepest secrets and emotions. No amount of pastoral hard knocks could have readied me for the unfathomable trauma, the disintegration of everything sane and sensible in my mother's world that ensued when I spoke the most difficult words of my life to her:

"Minnie is dead."

Minnie’s death, I realize, ruthlessly signaled the end of my mother's childhood. And mine, too. For Minnie – never married, the successful self-made executive – was the bridge that spanned the difficult transition from the insular naiveté of my youth to the tentative, self-doubting first steps of my adulthood.

She was my introduction to theater ("Fiorello"), and serious cinema ("Lord of the Flies"), and Downtown dining (corned beef at Harding’s and Viennese pastry at Carousel in the Sky), and shopping at Marshall Field’s, and understated agate cufflinks she brought me back from a trip to Stockholm. She became my literary mentor, and greatest fan, and severest critic. ("Loved your sermon, Marc, but try to watch ending your sentences with prepositions.") It was a credible caveat from a woman who did the New York Times crossword flawlessly in ink.

Ironically, it is not sophistication, but the little bit of 1955 Saturday morning silliness with Minnie, that makes me warmest bittersweet over the childhood that died with her death. Saturday morning meant six-year-old Marc snuggling deep under the covers in Minnie's bed pretending to ride the southbound Chicago El train – "Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo . . . Waaaaaaaashington! Change for the Lake Street train . . . Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo!” And as a litany, each time I would ask her, “Aunt Min, is that really what the conductor says each day?"

"Yes," she would assure me, "that's exactly what he says."

Minnie named me executor of her will. Only then did it dawn on me that she had actually come to see me as an adult. And now, five years later, I in my somber, ministerial suit-and-tie return to Chicago to answer yet another set of interrogatories about the circumstances of her death and unfinished affairs. And five years later, we wearily capitulate to the demeaning process of actuarial tables, and standards of liability, and projected earning capacities, and obstructive insurance tacticians, who will, through some sort of obscene alchemy, determine the intrinsic worth of one Minnie Goldsmith, deceased. And five years later, my mother and I sigh that knowing sigh and surrender to the oxymoronic futility that it is "now in the lawyers' hands."

And then, six-year-old Benjy crawls deliciously under my Saturday morning covers and petitions me for an episode of El Train, a legacy that Minnie has left me for my children, and all things that have grown tedious and weary suddenly become new. Now I, not he, am six years old again. "Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo . . . Waaaaaaaashington! Change for the Lake Street train . . . Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo!”

“Daddy, Daddy, is that what the conductor says each day?”

"Yes," I tell him, "that's exactly what he says." And I pray that he hears just the childish innocence, not the edge of melancholy that creeps into my voice.

So now let's see: If the deposition is at 10:00 and my plane back is at 4:00, it should leave me just enough time to grab a sandwich at Harding’s, then catch the El, head north to Fullerton, turn around and head south again, listening so attentively for the conductor’s cry that will transport me back to a different world, one of innocence, and warmth, and security, that all seemed so unshakable: "Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo . . . Waaaaaaaashington! Change for the Lake Street train . . . Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo!”

Yes, I'11 tell Benjy, that's precisely what the conductor says. And somehow I will convey to him without ever speaking the words that the real worth of someone beloved is never, ever, “in the lawyers' hands,” but in the most tender recollections of a snuggle deep under Saturday-morning covers and the Ka-shoo, Ka-shoo of an imaginary El train headed Downtown. And he will laugh. And I will laugh. And the tears I shed will be more, incalculably more, of the sweet than of the bitter.

Aunt Min, is that really what the conductor says?