Uncle Kevin
You know that one relative in your extended family that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest? Not exactly the black sheep of the family, but definitely some shade of grey? That’s my Uncle Kevin.
One of the earliest memories that I can remember involving my uncle was around my eleventh birthday. My mom and I had flown out to California on my school break so that we could visit her side of the family and get away from the sub-zero temperatures of the Northeast. It was decided that I would be dropped me off at his house in a small rural town, about thirty minutes outside of Escondido, for the afternoon so that she could go visit with some of her cousins.
My initial reaction to where my mom’s brother lived was of shock, I could not believe how much junk he had crammed into such a small plot of land. There were piles of stuff lined up everywhere, which left only small one-person pathways to move about the house. The backyard was full of everything you could imagine, ranging from a working military land cruiser, which he had purchased at auction, to six goats that were given free roam of the yard that were treated as if they were his own children.
For the majority of his life, Uncle Kevin had relied on odd jobs around town to make money, his most recent gig being a dental chair repair and resale business. However, a few months before we visited he had begun to take disability payments for an injury to his back that made it unable for him to work. This meant that his time was now being spent on various projects he had going on around his house as well as the small airplane museum and fire station that he volunteered at a few miles down the road in each direction.
The project of the day when I visited was building an enclosure for his chickens so that coyotes would stop stealing them out of his yard at night. We started by driving down to the fire station and “borrowing” some sheet metal out of one of their storage areas, thinking back on it now I realized what we had actually done. We then brought the metal back and combined it with some wood and chicken wire he had lying around to finish the project.
As a reward for helping him with the project, and since we had a few more hours to kill, Uncle Kevin offered to take me down to the shooting range to fire off some of the many guns that he also was a collector of.
Although my mother was not pleased with my uncle once she found out how we spent our day, I can safely say that twelve year old me was quite happy. I would never have been able to do any of these things with anyone else in my family, my parents and other aunts and uncles are professors or doctors.
I have many fond memories of times I spent with Uncle Kevin spending our days doing many things just like this. However, looking back on it now I find it interesting as to how two people such as my mom and her brother were able to grow up in the same household, following the same rules and still be able to turn into such polar opposites.
