I Met My Uncle for the First Time
I learned more about myself in the process
When you’re young and someone tells you not to do something, of course you do it.
“Don’t drag race down a residential street,” they said. So what did I do three months after I got my license? I barreled my rickety old Ford Taurus down Cobblefield Drive at the speed of way too much, slammed into the rear bumper of my friend’s ‘96 Chevy Blazer and almost totaled my first car as it rocked into a neighbor’s yard. I was lucky no one got hurt.
My uncle John carried a similar risk assessment, according to my parents. He had poor taste for insensitive jokes, a hot temper, and an appetite for the drink—but he was completely absent from my childhood so any visions I had of him were merely second-hand rumblings.
John was described as a walking, fumbling memory of a turbulent childhood rot with abuse, neglect, and parental misguidance. As I got older, though, he also became an important puzzle piece in the greater picture of my mother’s tumultuous childhood.
I didn’t have a very good opinion of him, though. My mother barred him from our home before I was even born.
I may or may not like him, but I still wanted to know him to understand my mom’s family. That’s why when a work trip intersected with John and his remote mountain town just north of Tahoe, I decided to extend my trip and pay a visit to his cabin.
My mother — Supportive but cautious.
“Some fucking sport that is,” says my uncle John of a group of slow tubers along the lazy Truckee River that hugs the road beneath us. The canopy in the back smashes against the rear window of the crew cab causing me to flinch as my uncle’s post-stroke driving mechanics force his Ram 3500 flatbed to jolt along the windy, Tahoe mountain road.
I thought tubing looked fun… relaxing.
Because I had never met my uncle John before, the two-hour drive weaving around the perimeter of Lake Tahoe was all the more clumsy. For most of the drive, we looked off into the distance in a deafening silence.
“Are you enjoying Chicago?” asks John of my upcoming 3 year anniversary of the move to the big city.
“Yeah, I love it.” I respond.
“I hate that place.”
For the better part of my visit at Uncle John’s cabin, I hyper-analyzed every move that he made and carefully tip-toed around a multitude of sensitive subjects. I counted the beers, I examined and reengineered his jokes, and I managed to capture more explicit renderings of the same stories I’d heard for years. I was imposing judgment wherever I could find an empty crevice without any real context as to why I was doing it.
Here’s the thing, I was trying to justify why he wasn’t in my life.
I was actually looking for reasons to dislike my Uncle John, because the pain that might result from John being a good guy was too great. It was easier to assume that John was in the wrong than it was to come to the realization that my mother was.
If I could just dislike him, then I might miss the void altogether.
You see, our world failed my uncle John. His parents abused him, his cousins shooed him away when he needed them most, my mother barred him from our household when I was a child, society took everything during the housing collapse of 2009, and now his health was in a steep decline. The man was rightfully sour.
But what no one ever warned me about, was the size of his heart.
Overlooking the pearlescent lake in Tahoe City, we sat for dinner one evening at a grill by the road. The food came rather quickly and I immediately began stuffing my face like I usually do. John, though, was staring intently behind me and refused to start his meal.
A small bird was eyeing our table, so John grabbed a few of his french fries and tossed them beside his foot. When the bird cautiously approached, John reached out as if to signal that he came in peace. The bird methodically inched closer, watched carefully, and bowed to John’s presence. As John reached out to stroke the small bird’s beak, the moment seemed to freeze in my mind. It was as if John and the bird were greeting as old friends.
John didn’t need to give me a bed or feed me for nearly three days, he didn’t need to amuse my obsessive amount of questions. He didn’t even need to answer the phone when I called him a month before to tell him I was visiting. But he did and I am forever grateful.
I didn’t get to color much more of my uncle’s life, my mother’s childhood. Some things, are just meant to stay with him.
My family was almost completely right about John’s personality. His spitfire attitude and his hard wired habits. However, there’s a third-dimension that I see now and I’ll never truly be able to put it into words. I think I love my uncle John the same as everyone else.
What I’ve discovered on this journey is that my mom wasn’t wrong, but I don’t think that John was either. When I asked John how he came to love animals so much he said:
“They’re the only thing that’s never let me down.”
