Uncle Jim

My uncle Jim died last week. He was in Panama. He got the travel gene from my grandparents. He seemed a perpetual motion machine his entire life. He fell from his scooter and cut his arm. He didn’t have it looked at, apparently trusting his body to do what it always did – recover. After a few days there was obviously something wrong and a neighbor or the family he was renting from (details are a bit fuzzy) took him to the local clinic. The clinic sent him immediately to the hospital in Chiriquí, but it was already too late. He died of the infection.

One thing everyone agrees on about Uncle Jim – he lived. To learn of his life ending from a simple cut that went septic is strange. I still have not found what feel like the correct words to describe my feelings. They will come in time. I hope.

When he was a kid, he was caught raising a chicken in his bedroom when, one early morning, the chicken revealed itself to be a rooster.

As a teen, he was found to be selling golf balls for twenty-five cents apiece to golfers who had lost theirs on the course. Eventually, someone figured out he was in fact “ransoming” their own balls back to them.

He was shipped out to Viet Nam in 1967. I was born in May of 1968. The winter before I was born our grandmother asked our mother to name me after him. He hadn’t written home in many months. She was certain he wasn’t coming back at all. My mother refused. I think her superstition overcame her great desire to please her parents. She had a deep fear of naming her baby after a newly dead relative. Also, she had a deep, irrational fear that, if she named me James, her baby brother really would be dead. She just couldn’t do it.

So I was christened Dean Ronald and Uncle Jimmy came home a few months later.

We had intermittent contact through the years. When I was ten or so, he brought his speed boat to the family camping trip in Virginia. When I tried to ski behind it, he accelerated like I was one of the teenagers and not the fifty pound wisp I was. The powerful engine pulled me up out of the water and the tips of my skis under. I did a flip and landed on my back, knocking the wind out of me. My family being who we were, I wasn’t allowed out of the water. I skied behind his speed boat, but I don’t remember it.

Was I concussed?  Maybe, I doubt it. If I was, it was not my first or last concussion, so it mattered little in the grand scheme of things.

At another family camping trip at the same campground, I was probably fifteen. I demonstrated I had no concept of discretion or decorum. As he and some of the older cousins sat around the fire, I asked him if I could buy some pot from him. He was visibly shocked. After a few seconds of calculation, he recovered and demonstrated why he was everyone’s favorite uncle. He said, “I won’t sell you any, but I’ll give you some.”

He gave me a little baggie of roaches and dried leaves. One of my cousins and I smoked it all that night. I remember being really high and then going to sleep.

Over the past week I’ve been privileged to learn a few more stories from other cousins. He went home to the Lehigh Valley a few years ago and settled down in the same house he grew up in. I am a little envious of my cousins who got to spend more time with him. Their kids got to know him, as well. Lots of laughter. Plenty more craziness I hadn’t known about.

We only saw each other a couple of times in our lives after that. We were both busy running around this vast country of ours.

Uncle Jim was always thinking outside the box of normal. Even spending winters in Panama because it was warm and inexpensive.

He lived his life as a creative force.

I hope he enjoyed it.

The rest of us did.