Editor’s Note: Mark Kennedy is off. The following Life Stories column was previously published on Aug. 3, 2003.

My late great-aunt Ida Lou taught me the virtues of guilt-free naps and cheating at cards.

Miss Ida Lou, as we called her, was an old maid who lived off a small pension and rented an upstairs apartment from my grandmother, Mabel, in a two-story boardinghouse in Columbia, Tenn.

As she grew older and wider, Ida Lou seldom saw the need to descend the stairs as there was nearly always a niece or nephew around to fetch her up a plate of batter-fried potatoes and green beans cooked in bacon drippings.

“Miss Ida-LOU?” we’d call up the staircase, sing-song.

“Yoo-hoo,” she’d sing back.

Hugging Miss Ida Lou was like embracing a barrel — you could never get your arms completely around her. She smelled like a giant gardenia.

As sisters, my grandmother and great-aunt were opposites. Nothing short of being laid out in a casket without rouge on her cheeks bothered Ida Lou, who was a big woman with large appetites. Everything bothered Mabel, who was wiry and took home chicken fingers wrapped in napkins from the Shoney’s Big Boy.

Mabel constantly fretted about cold weather, fearing her pipes would freeze. She spent endless hours in November mummifying her plumbing with old pillowcases and discarded nylons. Miss Ida Lou, on the other hand, was from the fiddledeedee school of life. If she bothered to think about it at all, she probably thought tap water arrived through the gutters.

For years, Mabel grumbled about Ida Lou’s laziness. Ida Lou thought Mabel was wound too tight. But the things that made adults like my grandmother resentful of Ida Lou made her a perfect playmate for children.

I spent much of my childhood in Miss Ida Lou’s upstairs apartment playing parlor games. Our favorite was Chinese checkers, but the marbles were always rolling across the hardwood floor and losing themselves under her bed. When she was hopelessly behind, Miss Ida Lou had a habit of tilting the board with her knee and spilling the marbles — oops.

Our card game of choice was Authors, which is played along the lines of Go Fish.

“Miss Ida Lou,” I would ask earnestly. “Do you have any John Greenleaf Whittiers?”

“Why no, honey, I don’t believe I have any Whittiers,” she’d say as she sneaked another card under one of her thighs.

Why Miss Ida Lou chose to cheat a 7-year-old at cards is a good question. I imagine, had you asked her, she would have answered simply, “Why not?” Long after we learned to spot her cheating, we allowed it to continue. As the years passed and she lost some of her mental edge, it seemed like a reasonable handicapping system.

Miss Ida Lou lived for food. One of her staples was chocolate-covered cherries. She used to get several of those doubledecker boxes for Christmas and stash them under her bed as winter provisions. Unlike us kids who would take a small bite of a chocolate-covered cherry and admire the half-eaten fruit, Miss Ida Lou would toss the candies into her mouth like popcorn.

She also kept a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey hidden in a drawer for emergency “medicinal purposes.” I assumed that meant amputations or thermonuclear war. Looking back, her actual threshold for needing Dr. Jack might have been more along the lines of hangnails and paper cuts.

Ida Lou’s great addiction, though, was dumplings. She would eat huge steaming plates of dumplings in chicken grease and close her eyes blissfully with each bite. “Dumps” was her pet name for the boiled biscuit dough.

There was almost always a chicken neck boiling on the little stove in her two-room upstairs apartment. I learned patience sitting with my chin in my hands, watching Miss Ida Lou looking for the last morsel of chicken flesh hiding in the vertebrae of a chicken.

Our friendship was based on creating mischief and breaking the rules. It was about winking at the absurdity of overly serious adults who seemed to have had all the fun wrung out of them by the curse of frozen water pipes.

Miss Ida Lou would slip you an extra nickel when she knew you were headed to the dime store for a cheap toy. She’d buy you one of those Sweetarts as big as a cake of hotel soap if you promised to bring her a fresh box of Milk Duds. She always promised grand gifts when her “ship comes in,” which it never did.

Miss Ida Lou delighted in watching my little sister and me play stare-down. In this game, you’d lock eyes with your opponent and then recite the rules: “The first one to laugh or show his teeth gets five slaps, five hairpullings and five pinches.” Bouts were usually over in about 10 seconds and erupted into chaos when I insisted on methodically administering the slaps, hairpullings and pinches to my sister.

All these years later, I still have a smirk I think I inherited from Miss Ida Lou. Sometimes I’ll take the irrational side of an argument, just for sport, in her honor.

I hadn’t thought about Miss Ida Lou much in years until the other day when someone reminded me that all kids need relatives who aren’t enforcers. Otherwise, they’d all grow up to be obedient but dull.

That someone who reminded me was my sister — my toddler’s aunt — who loved Miss Ida Lou and now adores my son.

My sister and my son have become a playful pair in a way that seems curiously familiar. So many rules to break. So much mischief to make.