Two uncles
Though I had but two uncles, I was rich in uncles, for they were honest and genuine men, wry and gentle, generous in everything but words; you never met two quieter souls, and many was the family event during which I sat alongside or between them, and every hour or so one would murmur yes, in response to some moppet’s question, and the other would smile at the garrulity of his counterpart, and they would both sit back and again be as silent as mountains.
One was a telephone lineman, the other in the insurance trade; both had the swept-back hair of a certain time and sort of man in America; both were friendly and witty and gracious but somehow sad in the most subtle way; and it was not until years after their deaths that I began to learn of the real shapes of their lives when they were not silent and smiling uncles in the hubbub of a clan event. One had been a fine student, and saved his boyhood money for college, and lost it all in a day, when the market crashed, and dragged down millions of dreams with it; he then married and raised many children, and ran his business, but never loved his business, though he did it well; to spend a life doing something well but never liking it would be a sort of a prison, wouldn’t it?
The other was in the army during the war, and met his wife on a train, and they were inspired by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and Catherine de Hueck Doherty, and went into rural America, and tried to live simply, and attend to the holiness of the quotidian, but they were city people, not farmers, and they needed to eat, and many children were born to them, so my uncle became a telephone lineman, and his hands were dark with pitch, and that was his work for many years, though he never loved it. I suspect he did it well, and never complained, or hatched schemes to get rich, but again, to do something well all your life that you never loved, what would a man think in the evenings, as he sat on his porch and smoked and watched for swifts to pour out of chimneys, and stitch dusk into dark?
