Anne Preston Donnellan
1914 - 1993
This is my Aunt Anne, my mother's sister. She was about 16 in this picture. My mother got the photo recently from her cousin Mary so it's a whole new way of seeing this woman I know. I've written about Aunt Anne in Cool for You, so go read about her, it's close to the end or else you can go now to the MP3s and hear about my amazing aunt.
I also have a poem about her in Not Me. It goes:
ANNE
All things are possible
in my world
I mean really
Aunt Anne put her mother's
clothes on for Hallowen
her mother's wig
her dead mother's
glasses.
She never resembled
the woman
but she became
her. It's a
facet of my aunt
which terrifies
my mother
but I find
it powerful
& strangely
beautiful
like looking
death in
the face
and saying
okay,
get going.
Weirdly, this poem which is in Not Me never got into the table of contents of the book which came out over ten years ago. It's like it's in the book, but it's not. The book is in denial. I tried to incorporate the poem into Cool for You in Aunt Anne's section. But it kept not working.
I also tried to include my favorite story about her, but it also didn't fit. It's about Aunt Anne using a telephoto lens to film the Kennedy family having a party from the bushes of their compound in Hyannisport-back in the 60s when Jack Kennedy was still alive. My family used to stay half way to the Cape, on the south shore every summer, and once a year my aunt would make the pilgrimage to Hyannis. Her footage of the Kennedys is lousy: leaves, leaves, leaves and Kennedy's brown head etc. Then a secret service man stopped Aunt Anne but he didn't take the film out of her camera, so it's in my family, our own Zabruder footage, and JFK didn't get killed that day.
Aunt Anne showed this footage
all the time and we just laughed and laughed. First we'd look at the movies
of us, then we'd look at them. Show the Kennedys we all screamed.