Originally There Was Adam And Eve, Then It Was Aunt Eve And Niece Elita ---- Elita Sohmer Clayman

My friend, Steven Behr, a senior dancer like me, said “dance is a great way to reduce anxiety both participatory and the mind. Go there visually and be dancing with Fred Astaire” When I was in Miami Beach, Florida in 1948 I went to the beach and met some young people. They saw I was an out of towner and invited me to join them every day for fun and I told them my name was Ginger. I guess even at fourteen and lying, I knew I would be a dancer. I had no desire to be a professional, just wanted to dance competitively and also for fun and social times. So Ginger I was there at the ocean and at home with Aunt Eve and Uncle Maurice, my step-aunt and uncle, I was niece Elita. I was the daughter of Uncle Maurice’s late wife’s sister, his first wife, who was my mom’s older sister. She passed away at age thirty-eight and he remarried Eve and she was a lovely lady and invited me to spend one month there with them in Florida. How nice of her and I will never, ever forget her kindness to me for thirty days of fun.

When I was married and had kids of my own, she was widowed from Uncle Maurice and she came to town and I took her to lunch at a Chinese restaurant and also invited her to my house for dinner one night. I reminded her of the nice time I had way back in 1948 at her home in Florida and she was happy that I remembered all those  years and now it was 1974 and I was forty and she was an old lady then, probably the same age I am now or a few years older. She was the same talkative, sweet person who always had something nice to say about everyone. She had no children herself; she helped raise my two cousins with Uncle Maurice.

She had been to Europe many times as a well to do young woman and we all thought her a millionaire, because we knew no one who had been to Europe on a vacation. She was extremely frugal even though she had enough money to live well. I remember she was ahead of her own time. She always took home food from a restaurant, even if it was someone else’s left overs. No one did that then and she was the first I knew who asked for a little doggie bag. She had no doggie, so it was for her. That was fine and she use to send my children little birthday gifts from Florida and me bottles and bottles of orange marmalade and fruit jellies, which we hated, but we thanked her. For the children whose birthdays were in May and June, she always sent a wintery wearable and time it got to be winter, it was too small. Once, she sent a pair of winter gloves and they were two different ones. That too was fine because she was so nice and kind and always complimenting and she could find something pleasant to say about everyone, regardless of if they deserved it or not. That was her cheery personality and it was a breath of fresh air to know someone like her. She came up from Florida once a year to visit her step children and she always called me and we visited.

It is great sometimes to be in the company of an extremely kind person, who speaks lovingly about everyone. She was very educated and had waited a long time in those days to marry at about forty or so which was quite late then. She and Mom got along fine and though Mom looked at her sometimes and wished her sister was still living and not have passed on from Leukemia so young. Eve was a nice and a dear mom to Mom’s niece and nephew, children of her late sister Elizabeth.

If you put a person with Aunt Eve’s personality against a person or persons you know who are the opposite of Aunt Eve, and are snippy, have nothing nice to say about anyone and you have to walk on eggshells,before you speak one word , because you think they will start up with you and say derogatory remarks to you,you will realize what a gem Aunt Eve was and she was an angel.

I heard this comment today on television. “Plant a seed for the intention of your day, today.” I will add that if you think about a good intention day, then you can fix the future before you try to repair the past. Sometimes things in the past seem so good and sometimes maybe we remember them better than they were. However, I have the capacity to really, I hope and think, I remember them with clarity and if they were delightful back then, I know I remember them correctly. If they were sad, I still think I remember them accurately and if they were bad, I remember them the true way they were too.

So ballroom dance is a great way to reduce anxiety, because when we are dancing, we forget everything bad or even good for those five minutes. Then time we come off the floor and back to our seat, perhaps and usually, the bad disappears and we are visually dancing with Fred Astaire because our partner who danced with us is Fred and I am once again Ginger, a bit older, a now senior, a grammie, wife, mom and a great, great aunty to my two great, great niece and nephew. I have accomplished so much since those beach days down in Florida when I was magically Ginger and not Elita for about four hours a day, six days a week. I have accomplished all those things mentioned above and I will never forget dear, sweet, Aunt Eve, a great step-aunt. I should by now stop calling her the official name of step-aunt. She really stepped in (pun intended) and became a real aunt because she gave a  fourteen year old young teen a fun summer in 1948.Those were the days when most fourteen year olds did not travel or go further than to the local swimming pool, not more than about three miles from home. We had to go on the transit bus and carry our swim gear to get there. Here I was at the ocean a few blocks from home in Florida and when we went to her home development pool, she had her own changing place and I learned a new word-cabana.

I look back with love for this childless of her own nice lady, who happened to marry my widowed uncle and she came into my life and one brief summer made me into a very savvy traveler on the train for twenty-four hours of a trip to get to Florida. She made it possible and I will never forget her and this tribute is to honor my memory of her.

Sometimes in our lifetime, we meet someone who does something for us and is not waiting to be rewarded; they just do it because they like you and want you to have a happy experience. She did that for me and I appreciated it and still do. I had so much to tell my school friends when school started again in September 1948. I think I topped all of the girls as to where I went and went alone, by myself on the B and O train to lovely Florida. When I danced in a competition in the same city in 1983, I called her and we were supposed to meet again, but something came up and she did not come to the hotel, where we stayed for the competition. She passed on about eighteen months later. Her name was Eve Stein.

So Ginger came down to Aunt Eve’s Florida and danced with Fred and called Aunt Eve. The years had passed and I wonder if any of those beach pals I had, did come as visitors to the competition events. Would they have said when they saw me at age forty-nine, say “wow, there is Ginger dancing, we remember her from the beach.” What fun we all had! Ginger is back.