'Aunt Mamie' worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy Albany family, the VanWormers. She cooked, cleaned, acted as a nannie, hauled coal, all for a few dollars a month. My mother (her niece) recalls stopping to see her on her way home from school, and the treat was when Aunt Mamie could sneak her a few licks of the ice cream she had just churned. One of Mamie's favorite stories was when she had been to the market to buy fresh fish, and the live eels she bought broke through the wet newspaper they were wrapped in and and slithered onto the trollycar floor. "They just squiggled right out" she would say with a twinkle. My favorite pastime as a child was visiting Mamie and going into the garden to dig worms, which we then kept in a can until I left. We would also beg her to stick her finger in the parakeet's cage and when it would nip her, we would all squeel with horrified delight. She never married; she was engaged to a man who was killed in a train accident, and she later found out he was a German spy. Aunt Mamie had gallbladder surgery when she was in her mid-seventies and never fully recovered: she was then bedridden for the rest of her life. We would visit her at the Albany Home for Incurables (a county nursing home) and bring her coffee and, on special occasions, the tail from our turkey dinner (which she called 'The Pope's Nose'). Our visits often ended with her weeping and asking us to 'pray that the Lord would take her'. I never understood such desperation until I was older: she had no TV, no radio, nothing to read except what her visitors brought her -she was bored to death, staring day in and day out at four white walls. She died when she was 91. A sad end to a wonderful lady who deserved better.