Uncle Buck

Odd, now that I think of it. I told you earlier I always looked on Aunt Thyra as being my second mom…but I just realized that I never thought of Uncle Buck as a second dad. He was just my Uncle Buck, and he had…and has…a special place in my heart like no one else. And yet both Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck treated me as though I were one of their own, and I never had the slightest doubt that I belonged.

Uncle Buck was an auto mechanic all his life, and a darned good one, too. He had a definite preference for Ford products and I still can close my eyes and see his four-door 1939 Mercury, which he had all during WWII (they stopped making passenger cars from 1942 to 1946 because of the war).

At one point he worked for a local dairy as a truck mechanic. Crates of milk were conveyed from the dairy to the trucks by putting them, like train cars, on a long track of metal rollers. He often worked weekends, and on such occasions, I’d go with my cousins Jack, Cork, and Fat to visit him. Those were my favorite times, because one of them would put me in an empty milk crate at one end of the rollers and push me, giddy with delight, down to the other end, where one of the other boys would catch me.

And I remember the dairy still had an old horse-drawn delivery wagon. It was no longer used, but it was there.

One of my earliest memories is of standing in the back yard of Aunt Thyra’s and Uncle Buck’s house watching him while he worked on the engine of a car in the driveway. It was the first time in my life that I was aware of the sound of someone breathing. And I see him in the coal bin of the basement, shoveling huge mounds of dusty coal into the fiery maw of the house’s furnace.

Often, when Mom and I were living apart from my dad, Uncle Buck would come by in a dairy truck and pick me up and take me with him wherever he was going.

Oh, yes…and I was never “Roger” to Uncle Buck. I was “Guggenheimer.”

But our very special time together was when he would take me down to the train station to watch the trains come in. He would put me up on one of those large, high-wheeled baggage carts that were high enough to be level with the doors on the baggage cars. I’d stand there, lost in wonder as the iron monsters chugged ponderously past, not eight feet away, grinding to a stop in a cacophony of clanging bells and groaning brakes, all wreathed in steam and smoke from the engine’s smokestack. And one time, while Mom was with us, Uncle Buck actually handed me up to the engineer and I got to stand in the cab of a real train! And it wasn’t until the engineer went about getting the train ready to move that Uncle Buck took me down. Mom was furious with him, sure that the train was going to pull out with me still in the cab.

Uncle Buck was probably the quintessential big brother. My mom worshiped him, and it was clear that he was always, first and foremost, her big brother. It wasn’t a matter of lots of kisses and hugs and open affection: they weren’t necessary…love often goes far deeper than that.

I was just getting ready to enter my sophomore year in college when Uncle Buck developed cancer. He’d been a heavy smoker all his life. No one in my immediate family had ever died before, so it never occurred to me that Uncle Buck might die. But he did. I got the call at college and immediately returned home.

A strange thing about immediate grief. There is much comforting and consoling among family members, yet each one suffers in his or her way, alone. I remember the funeral. I was there physically, but totally numb. That man in the coffin wasn’t Uncle Buck. Not my Uncle Buck. I last saw him in St. Anthony’s hospital and remember knowing, when we left, that I would never see him again.

At the funeral, I was sitting in the seat furthest away from the aisle and as everyone got up to file out, I managed to stand too, praying that I could make it outside. I couldn’t. The dam burst and I was swept away by a grief I’d never known until that moment. I heard someone say to my dad: “Get Roger.”

I don’t remember the rest of the funeral, or the burial. I do vaguely remember going back to Aunt Thyra’s and Uncle Buck’s big house on School Street…the house in which my mother was born and her mother and Uncle Buck died…for sandwiches and coffee, as that was what people did after funerals.

But what I do remember with crystal clarity to this day, and will remember until the day I, too, die, is Uncle Buck and how much I loved him.

-----------

This blog is from Dorien's ebook of blogs, Short Circuits, available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com; it's also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. You can find information about Dorien's books at his web site:  www.doriengrey.com: