Remembering Unc

From my earliest memories and throughout my life, my Unc Hal was a presence in my life that embodied what family meant. If you asked me at any point in my life who my “close family” was, after my Mom, Dad, and brother, there was no question that it was Tante Elayne and Unc Harold, and their kids, my cousins Donna and Victor. My mother and her sister were not to be separated, so when my Mom got married and settled in Los Angeles, Tante and Unc uprooted their young family and moved from New York to be close to us. Thus, when I was growing up, they were just always part of our family life. Most days, we were over at their house or they were over at ours. I know I had other aunts and uncles and cousins in Indiana and New York and Washington, and we loved them too, but more abstractly. Tante and Unc and Donna and Victor were my familiar family, the ones I just took as a given that we saw all the time, so that when you say “uncle”, I can’t help but picture Unc Hal.

When they first moved to California, Unc drove a delivery truck for Frito Lay, and as a very little kid, I have memories of Unc’s truck parked in the driveway, and sometimes being allowed to go into the truck and pick out a bag of Fritos. (In those days, the delivery trucks were not huge, more like the size of neighborhood ice cream trucks.) Among the Dads in our family and the neighborhood, I think he was the most likely to get down in the grass and wrestle and tumble with us on the front lawn. He had a growly voice, but teddy bear growly, not scary growly. He was mostly soft spoken, although he was certainly capable of raising the volume when the discussion around the family dinner table got loud, and he and Tante had no trouble shouting to each other across supermarket aisles (“ELAYNE! DO WE NEED MORE COOKIES?”). (Unc did love his cookies, and there was always a well-stocked cookie jar at their house.) At some point in my childhood, Unc quit the FritoLay truck and started his own business washing windows for shops and restaurants, a job he would work until he retired. As a kid, I only understood that he had to get up crazy early in the morning because he had to drive to far-flung locations all over the city, and that his clients preferred their windows get washed before their open business hours. I also came to understand that some of the places he went were parts of town that the rest of us might be apprehensive to go to, but Unc was unassuming and approachable, the sort of guy who could talk to pretty much anybody. And he’d sometimes come back with funny stories. I remember one time, he asked us “Did you know that ‘bad’ can mean ‘good’?” Turns out he was washing windows at a furniture store, and while he was there, a couple of black women were there on the sidewalk looking in the windows and saying “Look at all that baaad furniture!” After they’d said this a couple of times, he got curious and asked them, “did your family have a bad experience buying furniture here?”, and they laughed and gave him a lesson in Inglewood street slang. His openness to talk to anyone extended even beyond borders and language barriers. When Tante and Unc traveled to Paris with my parents, at one point when they needed directions, Unc was the one who, despite any useful French, was willing to go up to someone and ask directions. He went to ask a nearby vendor whether they spoke English, but his attempt at “Anglais?” must have come out more like “une glace”. When he returned and the others asked what he had found out, he laughed and said “I still don’t know where we are, but I got this ice cream cone.”

Our family liked our routines and little traditions: Saturday night was always “restaurant night”, and we would always meet up with my aunt, uncle, and cousins at a neighborhood restaurant for a dinner out. Usually nothing fancy, except for birthday celebrations which were diligently observed. Sunday nights were “hamburger night” when I was young, and later evolved to “family dinner night” after the kids had all grown up and left home. Sunday nights alternated between my parents and Tante & Unc’s house, with whichever “children” were not out of town expected to show up. Conversations ranged from politics to family news/gossip to just the minutiae of our lives, as you do when you see someone so regularly. Unc and my Dad also shared an interest in business and investments, and would talk about that until Mom would scream “Are you two still talking about IRAs??”. (You can’t dispute that Unc must have saved and invested prudently, as he leveraged his modest window-washing business toward paying off a house in the suburbs, raising a family comfortably, and having enough retirement savings that his children never had to worry about paying for his care.) I’ve been grateful to have these family routines as steady markers throughout my life, something I could always count on even when other things changed. Except for the few years I lived on the east coast, and until he moved to Virginia just a year and a half ago, Unc has celebrated every one of my birthdays with me, and we’ve had a meal together probably three out of every four weekends my entire life. It’s only now looking back across all those years, realizing that our last birthday or family dinner together is passed, that I fully appreciate how remarkable that is.

When Tante passed three years ago, we kept up our Sunday nights, either bringing in take-out food to Unc’s or driving him over to my folks’ house. But after a while, he was becoming less capable and more depressed, so we convinced him to move to Virginia where he could be near his daughter Donna and her three grown children. Though we missed him in California, it was a great move because he got to see Donna and his grandchildren all the time, and he got to celebrate their family events together. He lived to see his granddaughter Brenna have a baby boy, and just days before he passed, he got to meet his newborn great-granddaughter. He saw his granddaughter Rachel regularly through her pregnancy, and was eager to meet the baby, excited to be a twice great-grandfather. It seemed he was hanging on just for that, before going to his rest after a good long life (just a couple months short of 90). Thanks, Unc Hal, for showing me what an uncle is, and for the gift of your faithful presence throughout my life.