uncle jay

this entry is for folks still here wondering what we'll do now and who will tell about it. 

if you know my uncle jay you don't need me to tell you what sort of man he has always been. after all, he worked for the gas company, wore that gray uniform more often than he didn't, as far as i could tell. when there was some sort of emergency- a tornado, a flood, an ice storm, men like my dad and my uncle jay would go to work in the dark and the cold and the wildness. i didn't know all my childhood that not every family had themselves a telephone company man, a bank man, a gas company man. i didn't know then that not every family had all their bases covered and that not every family had a man like my uncle jay.

he was the narrator of my childhood, the chronicler of my whole family's wild history. he kept every story he ever lived and ever heard all stacked up in his head and weekend afternoons he'd hand those stories over to the whole ridiculous lot of us, sitting in chairs and on my great-grandmother's low couch and on laps and on the floor, all of us piled in that one small front room of hers, listening to anything he'd feel like saying.

that room was never quiet. there were other voices all the time, his own brothers and sisters, voices echoing his in their raspiness and twang. and all the children and the grandchildren of those voices crowded in there, talking and laughing in little groups, eating sugar cookies and bread and butter pickles on crackers. but uncle jay would say well, the other day i run into this old boy, you remember him from the bowling alley... and all that other sound would dissolve into nothing. because even if we didn't remember him from the bowling alley, even if we didn't know the man at all, we could tell by the way uncle jay was laughing at where he was taking us that the old boy he was telling us about was in for a wild time. and so were we.

winters we'd be there with the woodstove puffing away in the kitchen and summers we'd be there, too. i'd lie in the floor with my cheek pressed against the cool back of a fat cement frog and my belly full of blackberries, listening to my own mother's childhood and before, to the time all those old folks were too young and living piled up in that little house where what they had was almost nothing or when they were striking out on their own looking for something different than life surrounded by lead mines. but somehow the way he'd tell it i'd wish i lived in a tiny house situated right up next to the tailing piles of a strip mine pit that didn't even have an indoor toilet. a house where black snakes managed to slither up kitchen sink pipes.

 it took me a long while to understand exactly how much grown folks suffer at funerals because even there my uncle jay was telling stories. and although we all knew it was unkind to speak ill of the dead, we knew jay would remember something for us, a story the person not there would blush to hear but had no way to prevent, being gone from us. he could bring that person a little closer, make the goneness seem not so far and make the hurt just almost bearable, by telling a little bit of someone's foolishness.

in a day or so all the people i love most will stand together without his stories to hold them up and i will be here where they are not. but i can tell you right now that he is in my head every time i open my mouth. every day i stand in front of a ridiculous pile of teenagers and talk, trusting i'll be able to say something important while pretending to tell just a funny little story. so, the other day i run into this old boy, you remember him from the bowling alley... and they do remember him. or at least they want to. they listen because they hear in me an imperfect version of his own gift. i learned enough to trick them, to get by. i am grateful for this. grateful to them for their patience and grateful to him for every story i heard him tell.

and i know when all the people i love most are standing there together it might feel for a little minute like he's gone too much. someone will need to speak up, talk about that gas company uniform of his and how he must have had five million of them or my aunt annalee would have been washing gray twill until all hours. if that's too scary at first, they can start with a story about something else they all have in common. every last one of us in that wild family of his, of mine, is related to a little girl who gave her cousin ex-lax pretending it was chocolate, knowing all he had to spend his suffering time in was an outhouse. we are all related to a boy who ate the tops of chicken shits. only the white parts, momma! he'd yell when he'd get caught. they're his stories but he's given them to us because they are our stories, too. we won't be as good at telling them. we won't be him. but we are his and we should keep that in mind.