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Brooks Peterson
Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com
Monday, January 31, 2000
Remembering a life lived with grace and elan
There probably aren't half a dozen people in Corpus Christi who knew my aunt, Shirley Amanda Brooks Greene, who left us Jan. 16 after spending 93 eventful years on this orb of ours.
All the more reason, then, to share a few reflections with you about her.
As I sat through several nights at her bedside in a McAllen hospital, I had to marvel at her elan.
It was there at the end as it had been throughout. Indignantly, she rejected her doctor's suggestion that she permit herself to be placed on life support. Then, after the doctor warned me she probably wouldn't make it through Thursday night, she stayed with us till Sunday morning.
That was her way from the outset. With my mother, her younger sister, she was born in New York City and reached her early teens in the metropolis. Then, improbably, my grandfather inherited a ranch in South Texas, and relocated, willy-nilly, to Rio Grande City.
Culture shock, anyone? Mother and daughters came later - arriving in South Texas, as it happened, right after the hurricane that hit Corpus Christi in 1919.
Whatever its charms, Rio Grande City was a little short on amenities - indoor plumbing among them. But Granddad found the place congenial, and that (in the fashion of those days) was that.
The girls attended school in the town: Mom told me one of her teachers kept a six-shooter on his desk in the classroom.
And of course Granddad, being the kind of cuss who would relocate halfway across a continent, didn't shrink from involvement in Starr County's political life, which was . . . eventful. On one occasion, as he and the ladies were on the platform at a reform rally, shots (as they say) rang out and people began falling. In the end, some lay dead. Those days, pols played for keeps.
Relatively late in life - in her 40s, not long before Granddad died - Aunt Shirley, in one of those unlikely encounters that seemed to happen with some regularity in the Valley, met Waldo W. Greene.
He was a big, strapping man, a Yale grad, captain of the football team, an all-Amer-ican. He seldom discussed any of that, nor did he speak much of his Navy service in the South Pacific in World War II. Quiet and serious, he was unfailingly kind to me.
They were different people from disparate backgrounds, but their devotion was complete. They were together for over 40 years, until his death in 1994 after a long, punishing illness.
They were also very determined individuals, and now and then there would be a difference of opinion. An almost palpable clash of wills would ensue: You had a sense of a great subterranean struggle, of tectonic plates shifting. A settlement would ensue - reached always with the utmost civility.
Aunt Shirley fascinated me from day one. For one thing, she was an artist. She worked in oil, water color, linoleum block, even soap sculptures. She never pursued her art in a systematic way, though - in part, I suspect, because she could not abide the pretensions of the arty set, and, perhaps, because she had so many other interests.
She was a birder and conservationist, for instance; an author (she wrote, illustrated and published "When Rio Grande City Was Young," chiefly to promote preservation of the town's landmarks); and, not least, an endlessly supportive and generous aunt.
She bore with my passion for things automotive, and in those days was something of a hotfoot herself: She drove fast enough through the emptiness of back-country South Texas to impress a callow teen-ager.
She could surprise you in other ways as well. Though her politics (and Uncle Waldo's) were Rockefeller/Bush Repub-lican, she defied pigeonholing. She was no fan of Bill Clinton, but she startled me once, when the prez was deep in the soup, by coming to his defense - sort of: "Oohh," she said, "I just wish someone would hit that Monica Lewinsky in the head with a brick!"
She was generous with advice, among many other things, and had for years been after me to get bifocals (which, yes, I need). When I walked into her hospital room, finding her on oxygen and with IVs in both arms, we talked for a while - then she looked up, her glance as sharp as ever, and asked, "Gotten those bifocals yet?"
Not yet. But soon.
(Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com)
Brooks Peterson
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