Idol Thoughts

One time long after I was grown, Mama said, “The other day somebody told me that you were her idol when she was a kid.”

“Who on earth would say a thing like that,” I asked, clearly thinking Mama was cranking up on a joke. It turned out, however, that she was dead serious. The idol person was Julia, my third cousin, five years my junior. I remembered her only as a little girl who showed up occasionally at our family reunions — a virtual stranger, really.

Mama said, “She’s grown now, same as you. Came by to see me the other day and wanted to know where you were living and what you had been up to since you left town.”

“Dear Lord,” I muttered. “When you filled her in on my crazy life, I bet her idol world wilted faster than Strawberry Jell-O at a July picnic!”

As it turned out, Julia had made it her business to keep up with me through the years, only losing track after her mother died. She came to visit Mama with the sole purpose of catching up.

My mother told her that I was living at that time in Hollywood, married to a studio executive. I was writing a newspaper column and doing pretty well, but that she didn’t get to see me as often as she would like.

According to Mama, Julia’s comments about me were, “I remember the first time I ever saw her. She was sitting high up on a float in the Christmas parade wearing a red evening dress and a black velvet cape. Her blonde hair was long and tucked under in a pageboy style. She smiled and waved at people who waved back at her, and she had the whitest teeth I ever saw,” she exclaimed. “When I asked my mother who that girl was, she said, ‘Why, that’s your cousin,’ and I was so proud. It was the day your daughter became my ideal. I wanted to grow up and be exactly like her.”

As I listened to Mama tell this tale it occurred to me that, to my knowledge, I had never been anyone’s idol before and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Flattered? Well, yes, I was a little bit. How could I not be? But I had another emotion, too, one that crept like silent footsteps into my consciousness and stuck. 

Accountability.

In the course of only a few minutes, I had become answerable to a distant cousin I could barely remember, had known briefly. Not only had she patterned her hairstyle and clothes after a young girl perched on top of a parade float, she had gone on to model a portion of her life with me in mind. In doing so, whether she realized it or not, she made me accountable to her for my actions. I felt very strongly that I had to do right by her, if not in the past, then certainly now. 

When I voiced my newly born concerns to Mama, she smiled knowingly and quipped, “I always told you to keep your nose clean, didn’t I? You never know who’s watching you.”

I’m ashamed to say that today I don’t know what happened to my cousin Julia. Like me, she is probably a grandmother or at the very least, a grand-aunt. All the same, I can’t help but wonder if she, also like me, ever found herself alone, completely cut off from the people she loved passionately. I wonder if she ever felt that she had not made much of a difference in the world. 

Now that the years are winding down more quickly than I ever thought they would, I also wonder if Julia ever thought to question what was behind the cardboard character she so easily made out of me. Did she keep that first vision of a smiling young gracing a Christmas float, all decked out in a red formal gown and over-the-elbow white gloves? Or did she see beyond the fru-fru to the real mewho was just as scared, excited, happy, tearful and wonderment as any other fifties teenager? 

If so, did I survive her scrutiny? Would I still be her idol today?

Mama, who always insisted on having the last word, was right. It’s always best to keep your nose clean, because you just never, never know …