This afternoon I got a call from my cousin, Rebecca. She told me her father, my Uncle Jim, had died earlier in the day. It wasn’t completely unexpected as his health had been steadily declining, but that doesn’t make the news any less saddening.
Uncle Jim and my father went to high school together. They remained close friends and after college shared a house together. My father was dating my mother and when her sister, Pat, came to visit she met my uncle. And that was that, they were destined for each other. Which is how my uncle became my uncle.
I grew up going to visit my aunt and uncle fairly regularly. They lived about an hour-and-a-half away, which at the time seemed like a very long trip when I was a child. We played the counting cows game as we drove down the country roads to visit Uncle Jim, Aunt Pat and my cousin, Rebecca, who was four years older than me and was my idol. She Becky, not Rebecca back then. I called her Becky all my childhood and when, after college, she wanted to drop Becky and be called Rebecca, I had the hardest time making the change. Today, I can’t imagine her as any other name.
Aunt Pat and Uncle Jim liked dachshunds. There was Bud (short for Budweiser) and after that they had Bud Lite. Summers and holidays we’d go and visit them at their house on the lake. I didn’t know anyone who had a house on a lake besides my cousin. They had a dock and fishing poles.
Uncle Jim was quite the fisherman. He caught the largest bass ever recorded from that lake. He had the fish mounted and put on the wall. It was a big fish. I liked the fish that got fried up and served for dinner better, myself though.
Today when Rebecca called and told me about her father, we talked about life and mortality and how we thought we were going to live forever when we were young. We talked about fun times together and about children—ours. We talked about how raising them was sometimes infernally hard, especially as the rules kept changing as they grow.
Rebecca has far more experience in being a parent and is always there to say, “don’t worry, you’re doing a good job, children do that.” She and I swapped stories of children and childhood and laughed. Maybe we laughed because we didn’t want to cry for the loss of her father. Laughter is a good thing in a way. We laugh because it hurts sometimes, because laughter can help make the hurt feel better, even if only for a moment.
I’ll miss Uncle Jim, but he’s in my heart and my head. I can picture him now, talking about fishing with my father while my aunt and mother cooked dinner. Good times.
The Big Boy Update: My son has decided he wants to be a DJ when he grows up. He was playing some hip hop music when I came downstairs after helping his sister with her homework. He was dancing to the music as he brushed his teeth. Tomorrow maybe I’ll ask him if he knows what DJ stands for and if he knows what it means.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter got a letter today from Sydney, her cousin who she spent so much time with at the family reunion. Sydney is five but she wrote her a very nice letter and included a loom band bracelet as a present. My daughter typed a letter to her after completing her homework. I told her she could ask Sydney if she wanted to be pen pals. I got a lot of questions on what that mean. The phrase made no sense to my daughter so she wrote instead, “will you write back to me?” in the letter, explaining that Sydney would understand that better. Tomorrow we’re going to see if we can figure out something fun to put in her return letter and then mail it off.
No comments:
Post a Comment