My Aunt Gertrude was always Gertrude or Robbie, never Trudy or Gert. She lived in the Bronx, near Fordham Road. For her entire career she was a children’s librarian with the NYCPL. I think she was the last puppeteer in the library. She had learned puppeteering many decades ago, when the library had the time and money for things like puppet shows. She’d been with the library so long that she got four or five weeks vacation. We always spent August upstate, we in our stone house, and she in her cabin a half-mile up the road. She always seemed to have time for her long road trips too. She and her friend Mabel (also a librarian) had driven across the country five or six times, camping along the way. She always had fabulous stories from her trips to Yellowstone, and Mount Ranier and Cape Breton Island. She had stories of people she knew and met: The Maytag Repairman, the heir apparent to the Turkish throne. I remember her story about a trip to Canada with two sisters who were Jewish refugees from Russia. The one sister changed her name from Puschkoff to Porter, to sound more Americanized, and spoke English like a native. But Miss Puschkoff wouldn’t be so Americanized. They were hung up for hours at the border when she told the border guards that she was corn in Russia. Aunt Gertrude was in her mid-70’s and planning a camping trip to Alaska along the Alcan Highway, when she died, about thirty years ago. I finally got to meet some of her friends who made the trip out from the city for the funeral. I especially remember Anna Puschkoff and Omar Beyyazid (the Turkish puppeteer.) © Paul (AHikingDude@aol.com) ~A HIKER'S MEANDERINGS ~INDEX~ ~WRITERS' CORNER~