Lost Loves

I grew up asthmatic and allergic in the days before Zyrtec or Claritin.

Most of the time, I existed in a world of fantasy and imagination, of quiet thoughts and contemplation, against the backdrop of the world around me. Yes, I played and laughed like normal kids, but often, there was a steep price to pay. Steam treatments, inhalers and steroid-based medicines that induced terrifying nightmares and hallucinations. Not fun.

Since my parents divorced before I started elementary school, I spent summers with my father. God love him – a newly single, body building veteran with an ultra prissy, imagination-driven, somewhat delicate little girl. I can only imagine what must have been going through his head as this little person loaded into his car each holiday.

I think my dad did what most men do when in doubt about unfamiliar, female territory: he looked to his mother for help. I haven’t asked, but I suspect this is how I came to spend so much of my visits with my father in the small country Florida town my father grew up in with my maternal grandmother and three of my father’s older brothers.

My grandmother was amazing; she was beautiful and handy and read exhaustively. She could talk about everything from football to gardening to biblical theory. Like I said, amazing. My uncle Harry, a perpetual bachelor, lived with her. A mountain of a man at what seemed to be 500 plus pounds, he would talk to me in the cartoon voices of Disney characters and perform ventriloquism acts with the family pets. My uncle John lived across town; he was a ringer for Barry White: massive, long hair and deep bass voice. Uncle John replaced his dining room with what I can only describe as a stage that raised him and his myriad instruments above me by a foot or so – at the time, he may as well have been floating in the clouds. The man was literally larger than life.

When I was younger, Uncle John was married and I had cousins there I would visit, building memories in a home filled with jazz. But it was my Uncle Art who was the career family man. He and my Aunt Octovene had 3 children, one of which was a daughter almost my age, and this was where I spent much of my time.

There’s a man (I think he may be an ex-drill sergeant) who is often on television. He’s got that commercial where he’s got a guy on a therapist couch complaining and he throws a box of Kleenex at him while he suggest that they head over to mamby-pamby land. I crack up every time. Partly because I love that guy – he’s a hoot! But also because he reminds me so much of my Uncle Art.

Art was an advocate of manning up before anyone ever even coined the phrase. A career veteran, he always kept his hair high and tight, his clothes tidy, and wasn’t one for trips to “mamby-pamby” land. Of course, this is why I loved him, because he embodied the idea of being a tough guy who had the capacity for gentleness. Whatever it was you were considering – and over the years I’ve made some flat out whacky choices – he’d call you on it, period. There would always be accountability, but there was also always love. I watched this “tough guy” care for his wife through illness, watched him get down on all fours with his grandchild and nameless other tender moments. He was the equivalent of Clint Eastwood holding a fluffy kitten, inspiring trepidation and sentimentality all at once.

It was during my time with Art & his family that I ventured outside in to the country (allergy laden) air all around the town. My cousins and I got into more trouble than you can shake a stick at, and I learned to just get out there. Heck, if you get sick you do; deal with it then. Today, live – get outside and get on an ATV or walk for what turned out to be miles and spy on neighbors or run from rustles in the woods. That’s what childhood is about. That’s what life is about.

I credit much of who I am with the influences of my large and diverse family – particularly now that I’ve made so many recent life changes and been forced to identify (and champion) who I really am at the core. So many of them touched my life in ways that pushed and challenged me to be stronger, prouder, gentler, and more loving than I was the day before. This is truly one my greatest blessings.

It is probably selfishness now, more than anything that makes me weep with loss. You see, death has taken my grandmother, my Uncle John, my Uncle Harry, and yesterday, it took my Uncle Art.

A chapter of my childhood feels like it is fading softly from the pages of my personal history and it hurts like heck. So today, and every day on, I’ve decided to honor my uncle in the same way I’ve honored those before. By committing to and perpetuating the very traits that they embodied and that I so adored. I will continue to strive for strength, grace, love, creativity, laughter, and personal accountability. This is their legacy they have given to me and this is the legacy I hope to provide for the generation that follows.

My hope for you today is that you will find a way to tap into and to cherish that which is most valuable in the people you love so that regardless of what life has in store you can always claim that beauty as your own.

Until next,