Goodbye Nana Honey

It seems everyone has a favorite decade, usually relevant to the individual’s coming of age.

For me it was the seventies–the BeeGees, hip huggers, lava lamps, mood rings, Fleetwood Mac, and Freebird. The gas crisis (retro version) necessitated redesigned cars resembling roller skates.

Harvest gold and avocado green dominated the kitchens of America. Shag hair and carpet prevailed. I’m still trying to determine whether it really was a simpler time or if youth and innocence ostensibly made it seem so.

Like most middle (junior high back then)schoolers, I was part of a social group of girls. Jill and Emily were the “Jewish American Princesses” of our clique and they “represented” well. Jill was our nucleus and Nana Honey was her grandmother. I suppose it was the news this week of Nana Honey’s passing that led me down this nostalgic path as I considered what to write today.

Money was abundant among the families and in the Miami neighborhoods where I lived and went to school. Jill, Emily, Lynn, Michelle, and Gloria all lived in Coral Gables, one of the oldest, most affluent residential communities in the southeast. I lived on Key Biscayne, an island off of Miami’s coast, not far from Coral Gables and the funky eclecticism of Coconut Grove where my post elementary school adventures began.

Jill set the curve for every one of us. She had style, confidence, and exuded a “coolness” that we all longed to possess. Nana Honey took her to New York for school clothes. Her room, which was like her own apartment, was separated from the rest of the house by a huge kitchen (inhabited by a uniformed maid), had its own entrance from the patio, its own bathroom, and was newly decorated in peach and melon green with brand new modern, white furniture–courtesy of N.H.

Jill was allowed to have boy/girl parties on her patio and her free spirited parents seemed to have no rules. I’ll never forget the time Jill’s parents went to the Keys and left her home alone. They also left their new little Honda behind so, naturally, a plan was hatched.

Jill could drive a stick shift but was too young to have a driver’s license. Lynn was barely capable of walking without falling down, much less capable of driving a stick shift, but she had her license. So, the plan was for Jill to drive (illegally) the car to the end of my street where Lynn would take over. It bears explaining that Lynn was A-OK with every parent because she really was, mostly, a goody two shoes.

To this day, Lynn and I remain the best of friends. We have had many laughs over her lack of co-ordination and general physical incompetence. She is like the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy all rolled into one person. That afternoon we were really pushing our luck.

Although the car lurched to an awkward stop in front of my house, my mother was none the wiser and off we went to the daiquiri purveyors of Coconut Grove where we were served all night without the first request for identification.

Gloria was a ghoulish looking girl, tall and gangly with flaming red hair and huge blue eyes. Pale as parchment, she looked kitten innocent and it was ever helpful to us in our deceitful endeavors that her father was a preacher. Lynn just recently informed me, as if she were telling me the sky is blue, that Gloria’s pastoral patriarch was a complete lush. Her mother, we all recall, was definitely on something and she was zonked every time we saw her. Even Gloria’s four year old little sister, Martha Mae, was–so help me God–addicted to nasal spray. Martha Mae kept her own private supply of nectar of the gods clutched in her tiny hand at all times. Two squirts and the cartwheels and wall bouncing would commence.

It was quite an amazing household but even more amazing is how time, distance, and age are such arbiters of normalcy. Back then it was just kind of funny. Today it’s hilariously appalling.

My condolences go out to my old friend Jill today as she says goodbye to her Lucky Strike model, richer than God, obviously very special grandmother. So ends another era. By the time we are here we’ve seen too many endings and said goodbye too much. I remember these words from a popular seventies song but the artist escapes me… “it hurts so much to say goodbye.”