My first memories of my uncles do not include my uncle. Although I can't be absolutely sure, I think he was living in another part of the country when I was little. This was part of his pattern; more than anyone else I knew growing up, he had been places. He had lived in areas that were just names on a map, certainly not real. When my mother mentioned him, it was usually as part of a boisterous childhood in which her five brothers had merged together in her memory to form one ravenous, oafish, teasing herd of capital-B Boys. If he was mentioned in the present tense, there was always a shadow that seemed to fall over his name. I was told that when he was born, he had a caul covering his face. There was supposed to be something strange about him, something that kept him from the normal run of middleclass attitudes I was absorbing with my milk and cookies.
When I finally met him, I think I was surprised to find that he wasn't spooky or weird (or at least, no weirder than the rest of his brothers and no weirder than myself). My first clear memory of him is when he came home from China the first time. He had been teaching English that year, and had been there in time to see Tianamen Square enter into the history books. On his return to Canada, he brought his new wife, a woman who spoke very little English but was willing to learn. To prepare for her arrival, my mother and I checked a Chinese phrase book out of the library and made a game of learning some basic words. That year, when asked to write down a personal timeline, I recorded their arrival as one of the most significant moments of my recent life. He and his wife were new and different and exciting - three things that I badly wanted out of life.
(I just want to pause for a moment to say that I don't mean any disrespect of my aunt by the last paragraph. My aunt is, as you know, one of the gentlest, kindest, most loving and genuinely sweetest women you could hope to meet. She is also different & exciting, but she is connected to me now in a way that my former aunt never was. My thoughts and prayers are with her now.)
When I was young, and my uncle and I would talk, we would talk about books and cartoons and life in general. He was one of the few people who didn't talk to me like a child, but as another person who happened to be 11 years old. He leant me a book about whales, and after I liked it and returned it, I got it for Christmas that year. It's easy to be cynical about that gift, to question the motive behind taking something in the house and wrapping it as a present. But at the time, and even now, I look back to that Christmas gift as a real turning point in my life. My uncle was the first person to give me a gift that fitted the person I was (or wanted to be) instead of fitting the person the giver wanted me to be. To steal a phrase from Theodore Sturgeon, this is who and what I love.
As I grew older, I became better at talking to people. This was never much of an issue in my mother's family, where oddness was in fact the norm, but I noticed that my uncles seemed to like me more every time I met them. When I decided that I wanted to do something practical with my English degree and become a teacher, my relationship with my uncle moved into a new phase. This was a topic that he had researched painstakingly, and every time we met, he would regale me with options and plans that would allow me to see the world, train as a teacher, and make a good wage while doing it. Dizzied by overchoice, I picked the safe path, and went off to Nova Scotia to rack up debt and complete a 2-year program. I did one thing right: I saw some of the world outside of Southern Ontario. Now we talked about curriculum and classroom management and designing brain-based assignments.
The other new thing about this phase of our relationship was the inclusion of the Boy. As I like to tell people, I think the Boy and I are about equally intelligent - but he's much nicer. People take to the Boy right away, and my uncle was no exception. In fact, just like my university friends when they met the Boy, I began to get the sneaking feeling that my uncle liked the Boy better. I'm proud to say that I wasn't jealous - well, not too much - and I delighted in the fact that my uncle & the Boy would spend all their time together locked in esoteric and delightful conversation. I like to think that each man found kinship in the uniqueness of the other. Soon I wasn't even needed as a social buffer, and they went out to movies without me.
The last part of my uncle's life was a sad one. After decades of teaching English overseas, he was finally ready to formalize his impressive teaching skills and get a licence to teach in Canada. I liked the fact that we were on the same road, separated by a generation but going to the same place in the end. When he had to come home from Northern Ontario, I don't think I ever realized what it meant. Over Christmas we joked about his reduced diet - my brother, a sometime vegan for the past 6 years could eat about the same things, and Nic ate almost nothing. When it was time to visit my uncle in the hospital, I was finally able to face the facts. The Boy, always the clutch player, brought his best book on Zen meditation, and a funny novel about Biblical times. That afternoon we were able to talk, although there wasn't that much to talk about. I took pictures that day. I worried that other people would think that I was acting badly, but that day I felt an overwhelming need to capture my uncle's radiant expression on film.
That face is before me now, as I write this. I am saddened that I couldn't be here today, but I am more saddened that I never told him about any of the things in this memorial. I wish I could have read it to him, so that he could take my love and admiration to the next part of his journey. I will miss him terribly.
