📌 Great Aunt Pitty Pat, Part 2
Two stories that Pitty Pat told me
Read Great Aunt Pitty Pat, Part 1.
This is the continuation of a double-post series focused on eulogizing one person from my life: this time, my great aunt Mary Florence (aka Pitty Pat).
How Pitty Pat Set Off My Grandparents Wartime You’ve Got Mail-ish “Meet Cute”
My great aunt Pitty Pat attended the Georgia State College for Women, and like everything else she did, she took her studies seriously. Unfortunately, being a women’s college, some sorority-like expectations were set on her—despite her lack of approval. One was the “pledge” system the college used and encouraged. So, when her happily solitary time was interrupted by two fresh-faced newbies one day, she was, frankly, a little exasperated.
The pledges were demanding jobs to do, but she didn't have much for them. However, she wanted them off her back (and quickly!), so she said: “Okay, one of you can do some laundry…and the other can, I don't know…write a letter to my brother.” One of the pledges, Louise, who HATED doing laundry (and loved to write letters), immediately interjected, “I'll write the letter!”
That well-fated (is this a word? It feels like it should be; the opposite of ill-fated?) letter from Louise went out to my eventual-grandfather, Mustang, who was stationed in the Coral Sea then. To say he was enchanted by this letter from a woman he’d never met was apparently an understatement, and he was no slouch in the writing-back department. They wrote back and forth for the remainder of his service, and when he finally had finished his time, they met in person and were relieved to find that the love and interest they had been building wasn't just good on paper.
Hearing the story and knowing how over-the-top sometimes the two of them could be about their happy coupledom, it's hard to imagine what might have happened if the other pledge had been quicker on the “letter-writing” draw. Or if Pitty Pat hadn't been thinking of her lonely brother, all the way on the other side of the world, when she was suddenly called upon to apparate some tasks.
One funny note: Mustang did all the family's laundry (Grandma Louise really disliked it). Maybe, like in M. Night Shyamalan's movie Signs, her aversion to laundry was less a funny personality quirk and more fate weaving its strange web.
Pitty Pat and the Floating Bobby-Pins
During my early childhood summers, I spent a fair amount of time visiting relatives, and one of those visits yielded me this ghostly experience at Pitty Pat’s house.
First, some setup: Given that she built it herself, it’s no surprise that Pitty Pat lived in a one-bedroom place. So, when I stayed at Casa Pitty Pat, I typically shared her bed—well, at least until one night when I, moving around in the way that all parents know kids have an unfortunate ability to do, thrashed my arm enough to give her a black eye. Understandably, I slept on the couch for the remainder of my stay.
Her bedroom was one large room that took up half of the house, with what the English would call an en-suite bathroom, and in front of her bed, just to the right side of the bathroom, was one of those old-fashioned beauty stands that women always seemed to use to have during that time period, with a big mirror that attached to the back of a diminutive stand with a bit of counter space and a drawer or two. I don’t remember much about Pitty Pat’s stand, except that it didn’t have much on top of it—a hair brush, a comb, and a dish full of bobby pins were the main things that were kept out. (She wasn’t much of a make-up wearer.)
Anyhow, I had been sleeping on the couch for some time when, one night, I heard Pitty Pat’s voice in a hoarse whisper. “Laynie?” (That was what Pitty Pat and my Grandma Louise often called me.) “Laynie?” she said again, a little louder…and as my eyes adjusted, I saw her silhouette, backing out of her bedroom in the dark into the living room/kitchen side of the house.
At this point, I was sitting up on the couch, and Pitty Pat sat next to me and then proceeded to tell me, in hushed tones, that the bobby pins had been moving and she had seen them floating in front of the mirror, by the little bit of light that came in from around the bathroom door. (Because I didn’t always know how to find it in the dark, she had left it on with the door shut during my stay.) “It must be a ghost,” she said, and we sat there on the couch, hearts pounding, until we finally got our courage up to investigate. Standing up, we both tiptoed back to the bedroom, switching on the bedroom light as we did so. I am the one who went over to the stand itself, and sure enough, there were some bobby pins scattered. I looked at Pitty Pat in alarm when I saw that—and saw her looking at them, apparently aghast at seeing them that way, too. Needless to say, we both were terrified for the next few nights, and the lights stayed on in the kitchen (and other areas of the house) for the remainder of my stay.
When I asked Pitty Pat about it later, she said she really did think she saw a ghost, and I believed her (either there was, or she genuinely thought there was). Of course, I think back now and don’t think there was a ghost! However, what kind of scares me is wondering: did Pitty Pat actually think she saw a ghost? (And if so, were the bobby pins already scattered, only no one had noticed?) OR, perhaps, even more terrifying (at least to me), did she just want to scare the living daylights out of me? And if so, why? (What about me made that seem like a good idea—or worse, somehow needed?) Did she make it up and then feel she couldn’t come clean when she saw how much it affected me? Or what?
I’ll never know the real story behind the bobby pins, but I refused to sleep alone on the couch after that, and she agreed that it would be safer if the ghost came back for us to be in the same spot. Somehow, she managed to avoid a black eye this time, though I admit I woke up a lot the following nights, sitting up and peering at the ghostly image of myself in the darkened mirror across the room. Just. in. case.
Pitty Pat passed away in 2005, but these stories will stay with me. And maybe they might stay with you now, too.
Your “ghost from the past” friend,
Elayne
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I love Pitty Pat! Great stories 😊