When you're a kid — we're talking under ten here — adults are always asking you the same questions…
When's your birthday? My parents were married March 3, 1951 and I was born on March 2, 1952 so I'd answer, "I was born on March 2nd. My parents were married on March 3rd." It always got a laugh. I didn't know quite why it got a laugh but it did so I left it in. It was usually followed by a hurried explanation from my mother.
What do you want to be when you grow up? From about age six on, that was an easy one: "I want to be a writer." I really did and I've never wanted to be anything else even though this response seemed to disappoint most of those who asked. They'd say, "Are you sure you don't want to be a fireman or a movie star or the President of the United States?" I'd reply, "Nope…a writer." They'd usually shrug and you could see them think, "Well, he's young. He has time to decide on a real career." I'm now 62 and I haven't come up with one yet.
What's your favorite color? Now, that was an odd one but I got it a lot. My parents would introduce me to some adult and within moments, the adult would be asking me what my favorite color was. I'd think, "Why? Are you going to paint me that color or something?" But I'd tell them it was orange and they'd react like I'd said something world-shattering…or at least interesting. Orange, huh?
Orange is my favorite color but it's not a vast preference. I don't go out and throw rocks at green or spread vicious slander about yellow or anything. I like lots of stuff that's not orange, a fact that my Uncle Aaron never seemed to grasp. I wasn't present whenever he and Aunt Dot were picking out a present to buy me but I just know it went like this…
AUNT: Oh, there's that game Mark wants so badly. Let's get him that. He'll love it.
UNCLE: We can't get him that. It's not orange and the boy loves orange. Hey, instead of the game, let's get him a couple of traffic cones.
When Uncle Aaron and Aunt Dot gave me a gift, I never knew what it would be except that it would be orange. One time, they bought me an orange shirt that was a size too small…and they knew it was a size too small for me when they bought it but all the shirts that were the right size were not orange. I guess the logic was: Better it should not fit him than it should not be orange. If they were around today, I'd probably get John Boehner for Hanukkah.
My Aunt Dot was my father's sister and she had married this man named Aaron who had a sister named Emma. Emma was a sweet, befuddled little lady who was very old. How old? No one, including Aaron, knew. The last twenty or so years of her life, she worked as a salesperson in a variety of department stores and places that sold women's clothing. It was not a mystery why she kept losing jobs. The mystery was why it sometimes took a whole three or four months for her to lose one of them. A more confused woman you never met.
Every few months, she'd be fired and go looking for another job. To get one, she felt it necessary to conceal her true age so she'd just make up a new date of birth, shaving a decade or two off her life. At some point, she seems to have lost track of the truth and literally didn't know how old she was. About me, she retained three facts: (1) My name was Mark, (2) I was just wonderful and adorable and (3) I loved orange. She too was forever giving me gifts that were allegedly the color we now call The New Black.
That was another problem with having orange as my favorite color. Some people have very odd definitions of orange. For reference, my idea of the perfect orange is the color of Baskin-Robbins orange sherbet…or maybe one shade darker. But it's not red with a little yellow in it or yellow with a little red in it. Orange is orange is orange. Aunt Emma — she insisted I call her that — once gave me a jacket that I suspect she fished out of the trash at the last place that had fired her. It was about the color of steer manure mixed with Chinese mustard. She said, "I knew Mark would like this. It's orange."
It wasn't. But almost every time I went someplace where I was going to see her, I had to wear this hideous thing. "Oh," she'd say with glee. "I see you're wearing your orange jacket!"
One evening, we got a call: Emma had collapsed in her apartment and been rushed to a hospital. We decided to go see her the next day and I made a mental note to bring the coat along.
The next morning before we left, the mail came and in it was a mystery: An envelope addressed to me from the Beverly Hills branch of Home Savings and Loan, which was then a big financial institution in Southern California. In it was a bankbook in my name showing a deposit of five hundred dollars. That's was a lot of money in 1966 when I was fourteen.
I had never set foot in a Home Savings and Loan and we — my father, my mother and myself — could not for the life of us figure out where this money came from or who'd deposited it or why. Home Savings wouldn't tell us over the phone so we decided to stop there on our way to see Emma and find out. I went in, showed the bankbook and what little I.D. I had at that age and they told me. The account had been opened in my name four days before by Aunt Emma.
No other name could have been as startling. We didn't think she even had five hundred dollars, nor did it make a lot of sense that she would give it to me. Might she not need that money for medical expenses? Or to live on when she got out of the hospital? She had reached the stage where she probably was never going to get another job.
Twenty minutes later, we were in her hospital room. I, of course, was wearing the non-orange orange jacket.
She was surprised but not upset that we knew she'd opened the account for me. I expressed my thanks but told her I didn't think I should accept it. "You might need it," I said. She said she wouldn't need it for medical expenses because her insurance was covering every penny of that stay…and she also wouldn't need it when she left the hospital because she wasn't going to be leaving that hospital. Then she added in a joking manner, "Not alive, anyway."
She wanted me to have the money so her daughter, of whom she was seriously not fond, wouldn't get her hands on it. She sounded fairly lucid and serious about it so I said, "Okay, I'll hold onto it for you…but when you need it back, you're taking it back." She replied, clearly at peace and without the slightest trace of despair, "I won't be needing it back." Then just as we were about to leave, she said something else I'll tell you in a moment.
As it turned out, she died a few days later. She had prepaid for her funeral but it somehow fell to me to make some of the arrangements. When the mortuary called, one of the things they said was, "We're having trouble verifying her date of birth. We've checked hospital and government records and found several different ones that don't match the death certificate. Can you tell us when she was born?" I couldn't but I figured Emma would appreciate me lying about her age so I just made up a year. I don't remember now what I said but it's on her tombstone. I'm sure it was one she gave out at some point. She was somewhere between 91 and 100.
I left the five hundred dollars in the Home Savings account and eventually added to it. So did Home Savings. This was back in the era when banks paid real interest on the money they held for you.
Around 1975, I decided to start saving for a house so that became the purpose of that account. Any money I didn't need to live on went into the account Emma had opened for me. A good deal of that dough came from writing variety shows hosted by people who didn't speak English very well, including the infamous Pink Lady and Jeff. (Jeff's English was fine but his co-stars…well, that's a long story. Or probably a lot of long blog posts someday…)
In 1980 after an exhaustive search, I found a house that I wanted to purchase and a price was agreed-upon. The seller had one special condition of the sale: She was still paying off her loan on the place and under the terms of that loan, she could save a hefty fee if the person she sold to obtained their loan from the same outfit. So I had to either qualify for my loan there or if I couldn't, get a loan somewhere else and pay the hefty fee along with the purchase price. Fortunately, her loan was with Home Savings and Loan. In fact, it was at the same branch where Emma had opened the account…and there was yet another nice coincidence I'll get to, paragraph after next.
I made an appointment with the gent in charge of approving loans, dressed up nicely and went in to see him. He said, "Ah, I see you've been banking with us here for fourteen years." I said, "Yes, and I have most of my down payment money in your bank here." That helped me a lot to qualify for the loan and that account was there because of Emma. The gent then said, "Well, all I need now is to see your income tax forms for the last several years. Can you arrange to get me copies?"
I said, "If you'll let me use your phone, I can have them here in ten minutes." The office of my Business Manager was directly across the street from that Home Savings. That was the other coincidence.
I made the call, my Business Manager himself ran across Wilshire Boulevard with the necessary papers and I qualified for the loan right then and there. I'm sorry Emma never knew she started my home-buying fund…and that she started it in exactly the right place. She did me a much bigger favor than either of us knew at the time.
I'll never forget her for that but what I'll really remember is the last thing she said to me. Let's roll the tape back to that scene in her hospital room, a day or three before she passed. As we were about to leave, I thanked her one last time for the cash in the mystery account and I told her it was maybe the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. Fortunately at that age, I had enough sense to not add, "And it sure makes up for this ugly coat."
She was lying in that bed, grinning with almost no teeth and she said, "I wanted you to have the money, Mark. I'm just sorry I couldn't figure out a way to make it orange."