The popular poet Rod McKuen died recently, and as so often happens when memories strike, I was instantly transported as if on a time-travel bullet train straight back to St. Louis, Missouri, circa 1968-1970. That’s where my mother, younger sister, and I lived when I was in seventh and eighth grade. That’s also the time and place that I first encountered the poems of Rod McKuen. And when I remember Rod McKuen, I immediately think of Betty Ann, my mother’s first cousin, who had such an influence on me, an influence I see only in looking backwards.

Betty Ann (known as Elizbeth or Liz to her friends) was a native St. Louisan, a city girl, while my mother was the proverbial country cousin from a farming town two hours away. My mother was introduced to all sorts of things by her cousin and her Aunt Marie and Aunt Edna when she went to visit St. Louis: department stores with escalators, major motion pictures at the Fox theater, and restaurants with white tablecloths.

Betty Ann was an only child, the daughter of my mother’s Aunt Marie and Uncle John. She was the most glamorous member of our extended family: slender with very large dark eyes, high cheekbones, and thin dark hair, which she kept cropped short so she could wear one of her various stylish wigs. She had an extensive collection of wigs that my sister and I loved to wear and play with.

She always wore huge Jackie O sunglasses and talked with a very deep, dusky, patrician voice. She smoked brown Virginia Slims cigarettes which she stored in a fancy leather cigarette case. She shopped at Stix Baer & Fuller and at Famous Barr and wore stylish new clothes that looked vaguely bohemian and yet very elegant: kaftans and flowing pants and silk tunic blouses. Sometimes she favored tailored clothes: a double-breasted camel wool coat with tall leather boots and a giant leather handbag swinging from her shoulder. Her purses were so large that she once used one to smuggle her mother’s dog Jackie, a Pekingnese, into the hospital for a visit when her mother was ill.

Betty Ann was single and often had a shiny new boyfriend on her arm. She even dated a doctor from the Master’s & Johnson sex clinic. His name, and I am not making this up, was Dick. My sister and I thought this was hilarious, but we kept it to ourselves. He was a good looking, clean-cut man with beautiful suits and very white teeth, and for someone so handsome, he was remarkably nice to me and my sister.

Betty Ann “came from money.” That’s the way my mother would have put it. Betty Ann’s father, my Great-Uncle John, had been an executive at the American Shoe company and was retired. Uncle John and Aunt Marie lived in a modern single-level house in south St. Louis. Aunt Marie’s sister, my great aunt Edna, was a widow, and she lived there with them.

We loved going to visit Aunt Marie, Aunt Edna, and Uncle John’s. Their house was low-slung and modern with a flat roof and lots of large picture windows. The guest bathroom had a sunken bathtub, a peachy rose color, the first such bath I’d ever seen. The window above the tub was built out of glass blocks. The kitchen was all white, with white tiles on the walls and floor, chrome appliances, and swinging doors just like a fancy restaurant. The living and dining room floors were carpeted in soft white carpet. Everything struck me as contemporary and shiny.

Their house even a separate “garden” room with its own door to the outside. The garden room looked like it belonged in Hawaii with all the rattan and wicker furniture and jungly palm wall paper, bamboo window shades, and tile floor. Uncle John’s white leather wing chair and matching ottoman with brass studs kind of took away from the Polynesian vibe, but his chair was still exotic to me and my sister. We would fight over who got to sit in his chair when he wasn’t in it.

At that time, my mother, sister, and I lived in a townhouse in Affton right off a noisy highway. Our tiny backyard was fenced and backed up to the road. A traffic light lit at the exit ramp up my room at night as it cycled through its medley of red, green, and yellow. We had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, so we had plenty of space, but the townhouse was nondescript and furnished with the avocado shag carpet and the Harvest Gold appliances that I’d come to loathe from our years of apartment dwelling.

Even more exciting than visiting the house in the suburbs was visiting Betty Ann’s groovy new apartment in the city. She lived in a tall apartment building in the Central West End, near Forest Park and down the street from the Chase Park Plaza hotel and the Cathedral of St. Louis. The Central West End was filled with restaurants, side walk cafes, nightclubs and bars with live music, art galleries, antique shops, bookstores and boutiques. It was as close as you could get to Manhattan in St. Louis.

Betty Ann lived at the Jackson Arms at 4482 Lindell Boulevard. The 1965 “mid-century modern” building (the first all-electric high-rise in St. Louis!) had an elevator, a doorman, and a rectangular outdoor swimming pool that stretched along the side of the building. The name “Jackson Arms” was inscribed on the building in proud white script against a charcoal gray background.

Her apartment was a studio, the first one I’d ever seen. The concept of a single room for sleeping, living, and dining was foreign to me. I found it strange to enter the apartment and have the kitchen to the right and then see the rest of the apartment spread out in front of me, a big bed and living room furniture and dining table, all the way to big picture windows looking out at trees and the apartment building next door. There was something very risque about having the bed out in the open like that.

In one corner Betty Ann had a modern sleeper sofa covered with a muted orange and green tight woven material. I picture it flanked by swivel leather bucket chairs grouped around a kidney shaped glass coffee table. Her double bed was pushed against the far wall. A mirrored freestanding closet acted as divider between the bed and the bath area. It was very modern and minimalist, urban and urbane.

The small kitchen had a passthrough opening and a counter jutting out into the dining area with a glass-topped dining table. My sister and I always hung out on the two bar stools, spinning around and watching my mom and Betty Ann cook.

Sometimes on Friday or Saturday nights, the three of us would spend the night at Betty Ann’s apartment and have a three-course fondue dinner, the height of sophistication. The first course was melted Swiss cheese with chunks of bread. The second course was tiny pieces of beef tenderloin that we cooked in hot oil and then dipped into different sauces that we made from scratch: sweet and sour sauce made from mustard and honey, a ketchup and steak sauce one, and a creamy horseradish sauce. For dessert we swirled chunks of apples, strawberries, and pineapple in hot bubbling chocolate.

In the early 1960s Betty Ann had lived in New York City where she worked as a nurse. I loved hearing her stories about life in New York: going out to bars and restaurants, the movies and the theater, concerts, Central Park, taking taxis and the subway everywhere.

She still subscribed to The New Yorker. When we visited, the latest edition was always on the glass coffee table. I read it the way a thirsty person drinks water, sitting on the couch, drinking it all in while my mother, Betty Ann, and my sister carried on around me. I loved disappearing into the world of Manhattan, so exotic and yet almost in reach, the magazine itself a messenger from the metropolis. And the cartoons, so witty, so incomprehensible, almost as confusing as the ones I surreptitously read in issues of Playboy magazine that I came across when babysitting.

On the nights when we slept over at Betty Ann’s, my sister and I would sleep on the pullout couch, and I would lie awake, too excited to sleep, and contemplate the day when I would be living in New York City.

Also on the glass coffee table I discovered Rod McKuen’s book Listen to the Warm. I believe it was an orange hardback, slender with thick creamy paper. His poetry was different from the poetry of dead poets that I studied in school. Rod McKuen was possibly the first contemporary poet I’d ever encountered. I was quite taken with his poems: they conjured up an adult world where romance and sex, solitude and loneliness, mixed together in a heady brew that I, as a junior-high student, found irresistible.

I was especially enamored of the phrase “Listen to the warm.” I found this attempt to evoke synesthesia to be brilliant and innovative. The phrase was sort of sexy in a non-threatening, gentle way. It suggested evenings curled up with Rod in front of the fire, a fluffy white fur rug on the floor and cozy wool blankets wrapped around us on the couch as we gazed into the fire and then into each other’s eyes. Cool jazz, a tenor sax most likely, played in the background. The San Francisco fog rolled in on cat’s feet…

I was aware that Rod McKuen lived in San Francisco, which was bursting onto the national consciousness as Hippie Central, and that made him especially desirable. My Uncle Jim had gone to San Francisco from Missouri on business during the Summer of Love and checked out Haight-Ashbury, where a hippie girl gave him a tiny green turtle with a peace symbol drawn on the shell. He brought it back to my sister and me. We held a piece of San Francisco in our little hands and looked at it with wonder.

Naturally, I developed a crush on Rod McKuen, despite the feeling in the back of my mind that perhaps he wasn’t exactly a literary giant. I had just memorized for school Romeo’s monologue “But soft, what light in yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” So I knew Rod McKuen wasn’t Shakespeare. But he looked so handsome and rugged and lonely and well, just groovy, with his shaggy blonde hair. How could I resist?

What escaped me at the time is that Rod McKuen was likely gay, but I didn’t have that concept or that label in my vocabulary at the time. Of course, contemporaneous with my crush on Rod McKuen, I nursed a crush on Tom Jones (yes, that one). What can I say? I have diverse tastes in men.

Anyway, eventually I bought my own copy of Listen to the Warm, so I could curl up in my single bed in our Affton town house and read the words at night, as traffic hummed on the highway outside my room.

Betty Ann eventually gave give me my own subscription to The New Yorker after we moved to Memphis, where I attended high school. I am quite sure that I was one of the few teenagers in Memphis in the early 1970s who had her own subscription to The New Yorker.

Eventually, I would become a writer just like Rod McKuen. Eventually I would live in Manhattan just like Betty Ann, in a 10-story building on the Upper West Side with an elevator and a doorman. Eventually I would write poems and stories and try to get published in The New Yorker. I would even receive and treasure a hand-typed, personal rejection letter from The New Yorker, which was almost as thrilling as getting an acceptance letter. Eventually I would settle in the San Francisco Bay area and climb the hilly streets of San Francisco in the fog, just like Rod.

But all that was far ahead of me, so out of reach that I barely dared to dream about it.

Now Rod McKuen is dead, and Betty Ann lives in an assisted-living facility in Kansas City. She spends most of each day in bed, wearing a nightgown and a bed jacket. But I remember her when she was young and vibrant and full of life, and that’s how I choose to remember her. I hope Betty Ann remembers those days, too, and maybe just possibly, the poems of Rod McKuen.