Boundary lines

In “Two uncles,” Brian Doyle describes how a pair of his uncles were unique and peculiar men who would sit at family gatherings “silent as mountains.” Doyle’s piece made me think about my own uncles. One of them, Uncle Short (yes, he was short), was gone for many years. The story my mother told was that he worked for General Electric in western Pennsylvania and was too busy to come home to visit.

But when I was ten, Uncle Short suddenly appeared. He moved into my grandparents’ house and sat in his room all day reading salacious paperbacks. He was gruff, and he didn’t smell too good when I planted the obligatory kiss on his cheek. But I was always compensated with a 50-cent coin and a “Here, kid. Now beat it.” Decades later I learned that he’d served time for embezzlement in the state penitentiary.

Short was the oldest of eight children; the youngest was Uncle Jack—John Calvin McCormick, my mother’s favorite brother and my namesake. Jack was lively, full of fun, and constantly in trouble. He enlisted in the Marine Corps after Pearl Harbor, and I have a faded photograph of him at 22 in his uniform, walking arm in arm with my mother. It was 1942. In 1944 he was killed in the assault on Saipan, in the Mariana Islands. I’ve thought a lot about him over the years.