Hello and welcome to the last Saturday of January 2021 here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is January 30th.
It was a sad week at our house. My uncle passed away on Tuesday, January 26th at the age of 78. (See his obituary here.)
Writing for the Roseau/Warroad Visitor Guide, I've had the opportunity to interview many of the Olympic athletes who grew up on this side of Wannaskan country. What often came to mind as I listened to them tell their stories was the African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child." This was the case for me as well.
Growing up on a family lake resort is possibly one of the most ideal environments a kid could ask for. With all my relatives only a house or two away - my grandmother and her husband, two sets of aunts and uncles with loads of cousins - tourist kids for summer play, and my best friend across the road, there was always an adventure to be had and a pal to go exploring with. Roaming was my normal and I was impervious to adult scolding. Rules were floaty, faraway objects like cotton clouds dotting a blue sky.
With his blond crew cut, a faded eagle tattoo on his forearm from his Navy days, and piercing blue eyes that told me right off the bat he would know if I was lying, Uncle David was the enforcer of all the rules. Routine a habit ingrained from his 20+ years in the military, he was up at the crack of dawn ready for a regimented day of making his rounds, attending to maintenance, and running errands. He did the shopping and the cooking and his family ate dinner together every night. And they always had dessert. Always. Oh, how I envied those blue plastic cups of butterscotch pudding, even though I found the color reminiscent of cat diarrhea.
He listened to WJJY which, back then, was a station that played croony old people music. He went through a Hawaiian print STIHL baseball cap phase.
I was wary of the guy even if he was my uncle. He was the naysayer. The antithesis to my yes. The boundary setter.
Like the time he put a stop to my game with the yellow tubing that encased the power lines. Fascinated by the satisfactory shloooh of the plastic covering sliding over the braided metal, I repeatedly pushed it back up the power line, hoping that one more thrust would be the oomph that defied gravity and would make it reach its final destination at the top of the pole.
He was quick to catch my littering offenses and watched until I had indeed deposited my candy wrappers in the large metal dumpster.
I wasn't allowed to enter his garage barefoot or touch his tools even when I did have shoes on.
Sneaking out at night with boy(s) staying at the resort was forbidden. (Sneaking out was categorically forbidden for all of us kids, actually. It didn't matter the reason.)
Neither was gambling with the "yahoos" (what we called the resort guests), even if I had already amassed an impressive stack of quarters.
And I really needed to stop tromping into his house without knocking. (Oh, wait, that was my Aunt Jan.)
But woven through his litany of no's were steady acts of kindness, that even my child's heart could appreciate.
He built a playground which all of us kids enjoyed. I practiced many a penny drop on the high bar and dreamed about many a boy on the high platform. I swang for hours. The teeter-totter taught me important lessons about what happens when you suddenly hop off and the brilliance of balance (fulcrums and physics come to mind) and the wisdom in see-sawing in large numbers.
I played "P.I.G." with the basketball hoop he maintained, pitching granny shots while daydreaming of becoming an ambassador or a diplomat - I couldn't decide which - with the basketball he always provided. (I don't think my own family even owned a basketball.)
I don't know if it was already there by the time Uncle David took his watch over MinnOhio Round Lake Resort, but the best game on the grounds was tetherball. I got good at playing against myself and he was good about replacing the rope and ball.
And he planted trees, like maples and apples - saplings that stood no higher than my armpits that grew into towering limbs of expansive branches providing shade, shelter, beauty, and red apples ripe for the picking. He had the best climbing trees in his yard, large pines with sappy eyesores you had to steer clear of lest you end up with a sticky tear on the inside of your elbow that would not wash off, no matter how many times you jumped in the lake.
In the summer, he'd wordlessly untie his speedboat from the dock, clip on a pull rope, and toss a large inner tube and some life jackets in the water to us kids and say, "Well, come on." Or he'd point and say, "You. You're up."
In the winter, he kept our ice rink cleared. Both my happiest and saddest childhood moments were on that ice rink. And when my dad moved out of our house after my parents announced their divorce, my uncle became the last adult male family member in my daily life.
Uncle David was the one who took our sweet family dog, a black, curly-haired Irish setter named April, to the vet to be put to sleep when she got too sick.
After becoming a parent myself, I came to understand that my uncle had been on constant call to save me from myself. That in seeing my willy-nilly ways, he recognized my need for structure. He had helped keep me safe.
As an adult, I enjoyed his teddy bear hugs and the twinkle in his eye. He surprised me when he told me he had read my romantic comedy, Elevator Girl, and liked it; his only objection being I had used the f-word. ("One time," I teased.) Conversation with him was always about things in which he delighted: his woodworking, his RV, his latest trip. I'd discovered in that craggy man who had so often told me "no" a kindred spirit. He wasted no time fretting or complaining about the world but enjoying his small place in it. He taught me the simple pleasures to be had in a life well-lived.
These last couple of years, I watched as my cousins rallied around their father. Dementia had taken its toll and the time had come when his children, with his wife, would step in and provide the structure my uncle had sustained for decades for everyone else. And they did it superbly. I marveled at their capacity to come together to make decisions with him and for him, to sell the dream house he had built in the woods (his own retirement retreat from the busy lakeside resort he'd given his life to), and to move him into a memory-care facility and my aunt into a new house with one of the kids.
What I witnessed was love. Compassion. Care. And sometimes big heated arguments, because, boy, that branch of the family tree really has no problem telling you when they don't like something you did and to knock it off and cut it out, please. But the way they united around their dad and worked together left me in awe. "I want to be like that when I grow up," I thought.
Then I realized - my cousins were this way because of my uncle. That, for all of his stern ways, my uncle (and aunt) had provided a home of such stability and love. And that, my friends, is my uncle's legacy. He loved his family well.
Even this kid.
And for that, I will be forever grateful.
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| Uncle David keeping his little sisters in line. |
On This Day
Remembering You
Kim
FANTASTIC.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful tribute to your uncle.
ReplyDeleteGot me a little teary there, Kim.
ReplyDeleteNice appreciation. Yes it takes a village.
ReplyDelete