My Aunt Dot was a very sweet, loving woman. As I've related in past installments of this series, she was sometimes a bit ditsy but she was at heart a very happy, loving lady. And she thought everything I did was adorable. Everything.
When I was under the age of around ten, everything I did was especially adorable but it was adorable the way everything a cocker spaniel puppy does is adorable. Once when I was six or so, I did a Jimmy Durante impression in her living room and you can just imagine how much I looked and sounded like that great entertainer. Aunt Dot thought it was the single greatest moment in the history of show business. For her, the top three were Judy Garland singing "Over the Rainbow," Harold Lloyd dangling from that clock face and her nephew doing Durante. Not necessarily in that order.
Whenever I visited her home if there was anyone present who'd seen it fewer than five times, I had to perform it. To her dying day, I think she felt I'd missed my true calling and should be touring in Durantemania.
As I got older, I grew weary of striding through my aunt's living room singing "Inka Dinka Doo" in the raspiest version of a voice which had yet to change. Mostly, I was tired of being cute. When you hit a certain age, you'd like to be treated as a person of that certain age. I especially wanted her to stop laughing and telling everyone about The Watermelon.
As much as Aunt Dot loved my Durante, what she really thought was wonderful was me doing chores like a grown-up. When my parents and I took her and Uncle Aaron to the airport, which we did a lot, she was in ecstasy if eight-year-old me carried her suitcase. It was as cute as…well, as if a cocker spaniel puppy had carried her suitcase. She kept laughing and saying, "Smash your baggage, sir?", which I guess was a line she'd heard someone say on TV once.
Then one day, I went to the market with her and it was somehow up to me to carry in The Watermelon —
— which I dropped right in the middle of her living room.
I can still hear the sound of it exploding. If this were a Don Martin cartoon, it would go KA-PLOOOP!! With two exclamation points and three Os.
Aunt Dot shrieked and moaned and threw herself to the floor with a sponge and some sort of cleaner she grabbed from the kitchen, making a desperate attempt to save her beloved wall-to-wall carpeting. No luck. The rug had a huge discoloration for the rest of its life — and it was right in the center so you couldn't walk into the apartment without noticing it.
I felt terrible…so awful that I momentarily wondered if the proper thing to do would have been to give up buying comic books until I'd saved enough money to get all new carpeting for Aunt Dot's apartment. This was around 1960 and if I'd made that supreme sacrifice, I might have been able to resume my funnybook collecting in time to buy the first issue I wrote of Woody Woodpecker in 1971.
It also occurred to me that maybe most of the damage was actually done by Aunt Dot and her cleaning fluid — a suspicion partially confirmed on my next trip to the public library where I researched the staining capabilities of watermelon. I never brought this up with Aunt Dot because she suddenly saw the entire blemish in a whole new light…
She decided it was adorable. In fact, it was in some ways better than my Durante. And you know by now how awesome my Durante was.
Thereafter when I went to Aunt Dot's and she had anyone else there (and she always had someone else there), we had a double feature: I had to do my Durante and stand there and listen to the hilarious story of how clumsy me had ruined her living room rug by dropping The Watermelon.
One night I had a dream: I cure a dread disease or abolish war or achieve my lifelong goal of eradicating cole slaw in our lifetimes. Whatever it is, it's big and very heroic and the world press rushes to Aunt Dot to ask her how she feels about her nephew winning the Nobel Prize. Standing before every microphone on the planet, she says, "He was always such a bright boy…but let me tell you about the time he dropped The Watermelon. Oh, and make sure he does Jimmy Durante for you. Now, that's impressive!"