Whoever invented aunts did us all a fine favor. Having your mother’s sister or your father’s available to coddle you can count for a lot when you are growing up and, perhaps, later.

Your uncle’s wife, an aunt by marriage, can and often does, fill the same kin-keeping role. I remember with affection my aunts Grace, Katherine, and Rose, all of whom helped me feel strong ties of kinship.

My aunt Grace, a charming hospitable Southern lady, was married to my uncle Bill for more than 60 years, and lived to see (and delight) four generations of descendants.

The other two aunts by marriage, Katherine and Rose, I knew less well, though I cherished their obvious affection for me. Each of them had one son, cousins whom I liked but lost close contact with in later years.

My father had two sisters. The elder of the two, Margaret, was a nun stationed in western Massachusetts. Her visits were infrequent but welcome to us children. She always came dressed in full habit with another nun as companion, the common practice for religious of her order.  Since she was tall, we called her “Big Auntie,” a descriptive name but also an affectionate one.

My father’s other sister, Mary, was a social worker in New York City. After her death, we found out that, during the years when she visited clients in the tough sections of the city, she had packed a gun in her purse. We had always admired her independence, but this news added a special aura to our memory of her.

But my favorite aunt was another Mary, my mother’s sister who lived with her mother in Peabody. In the days when Sunday automobile rides were a family tradition in middle-class America, our most frequent destination was my grandmother’s house.

Aunt Mary and our grandmother Hannah Barry would make much of us children, shaping our visits into the stuff of family legend. It was this aunt who introduced us to finger bowls for use at the end of dinner. Sometimes, in order to tease her, we would affect to drink out of them rather than use them properly.

As this custom may indicate, Mary lived in the backwash of the Victorian era. Her style of life, as a single lady of fastidious manners, suggested a bygone time. We loved her but could not resist making gentle fun of her even in our young years.

As the eldest, I enjoyed special privileges: being taken to Boston for plays, movies, lunches at Schrafft’s or the Hi-da-way.

Among the shows we went to, I recall the Student Prince, an operetta by Sigmund Romberg, full of sentimental songs. We also went to see Walt Disney’s film Fantasia. Few were then aware of the film’s particular appeal for pot-smokers─something that, in any case, Aunt Mary would not have noticed.

According to family lore, Mary had been disappointed in love and turned down an offer of marriage, an event that I still find poignant. She reportedly spurned an eligible man with a name famous in the city.

Be that as it may, Aunt Mary always enjoyed a wedding─or a funeral, for that matter. Wakes also were for her, as for many of her contemporaries, an important part of the social round.

As I recall, when coming home after a wake she would often talk about the fine appearance of the corpse, often better, she would observe, than he or she had looked when still alive.

My aunt’s room was a place of mystery for me and my brothers and sisters. Mary kept the door closed; only rarely did we catch a glimpse of its contents. These sightings revealed boxes galore pushed under her bed, and other spaces filled with old newspapers and other relics of the past.

After her death, a niece and nephew helped clear out the contents of our aunt’s room: old letters, balls of string, hat boxes, and books from some of which fluttered long-forgotten 20 dollar bills.

Mary enriched my life, as did my grandmother with whom she lived almost her whole life. In many different ways, this aunt made me feel important and gifted, qualities that contributed to my development. In spite of─indeed, perhaps because of─her abundant eccentricities, she was dear to me and enhanced my childhood.

In the light of this tradition, I greatly value seeing the ways in which my two sisters now fulfill the role of aunts. The affection they show our nieces and nephews increases my appreciation of having an extended family.

Their feeling for younger family members younger extends beyond the generation immediately after themselves. My sisters also cherish grandnieces and grandnephews, the beginnings of yet another generation. It gladdens me to see how they reach out to these children and share with them some of our family traditions of love and support.

Yes, aunts count for something. That holds now as it did for me when growing up.

Richard Griffin