Was I close?
My Uncle Eb passed away last week.
Standard statements of the week:
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
(We all were.)
People who never knew my uncle or any of my family circumstances sent me sympathy cards. I found that peculiar.
The other statement, I got a lot, directly following the apology, “Where you close?”
Was I close? That question stumps me. No matter how many times it gets asked. I can’t quantify closeness. It’s like asking if I’m close to my mother or father. Thoughts on the question revolve around: “Close relative to what?” Amount of interaction? Times I visited? Hugs? Did I gel with his sense of being? Was I a member of his political party? --I don’t know, I don’t know if he was a member the Poets against Bush party. But I would guess not.
I hadn’t actually talked to my Uncle in three years. Last time I saw him was at a family reunion in Topeka. Eb covered the usual conversations with me he had over the previous forty three years. He started with: “What’s up Jesse-George?” He called me that because just after I learned to walk, he was watching me one day while planting tomaders. (Tomatoes for those of you not on the plains) He proceeded down the row in his garden, on his hands and knees, planting seedlings, carefully sprouted indoors weeks before. I followed behind pulling them up one by one. When he got to the end of the row he stood up to take a look at his work, and he saw mine. He apparently looked at me and said, “Jesse-George you and I are going to have words.”
I’m sure, not yet familiar with complex sentences in the Kansas vernacular, the words were somewhat one sided and involved the word tomaders a lot. Eb never tired of telling the story of the day Jesse-George pulled up all his tomaders. The result was he called me Jesse-George for the rest of his life. Its one of those names you only let the familiar call you, because there is a history behind it. Like my relatives calling me “Jay”, when everyone else calls me “Stan”. (We won’t go into the history of that.)
“Eb”, was in similar circumstance. He’s real name was Edwin Lee Dunn, but most relatives called him “Ebby”, or “Eb.” --At least, back in Burlingame, Kansas when he was a kid. In 1970 he took a job with the Farmer’s Cooperative and moved to Quinter and then to Brewster to manage grain elevators. When he became the grain middleman of the plains, he started going by his given name, Ed. The only time I ever referred to Eb, as Ed was on Christmas Cards when I mailed them out each year. So in the familiar, he was my Uncle Ebby.
Eb, like my other Uncle’s, was associated with the small town adventure. In the Spring of 1970 my father was stationed in England my mother, brother and I spent a few months living with my Grandmother in Burlingame Kansas. We made a few trips out to Quinter to visit Eb, my Aunt Glenda, and my cousins Lee and Earl. On one of the trips, Quinter was in the peak of a chinch bug invasion. They were climbing up the walls of my Uncles house, and probably across the stalks of Eb’s garage sprouted tomaders. At eight, I was intrigued by the near endless supply of arthropods I could crunch. That was, until that evening, when lying in bed, downstairs in the basement, the arthropods took revenge and climbed all over me. I came running out of the basement declaring to my mother, aunt and uncle I couldn’t sleep down there. My uncle just tapped on his cigarette while watching TV. “What’s wrong Jesse-George, a few bugs a botherin ya?”
It was at Eb’s house or with Eb’s kids that I had the greatest fire works adventures at. Our family trip back to Burlingame in the summer of 1969 and Eb had bought was seemed an endless supply of firecrackers and other explosives for his kids. We spent the better part of a week trying to blow up every bug within reach of a seven, eight and nine year old. In 1974 we made a similar trip where my cousins and I spent the weekend trying to drill holes through telephone poles with firecrackers. (Stories like this scare people from big cities BTW, we won’t get into what I did with fire as scout.) It was a story I wrote in college based on the trip of 1969 that led my father to tell me one day when he was sneaking a peak at my writing, “If it weren’t for your brother and I, you wouldn’t have anything to write about.” Emm, maybe. But a lot of the stuff that happened at Eb’s house ends up in my stories and poems at one time or another.
Why? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because, he had two sons like my parents. Maybe it was because he was my mother’s next oldest brother. Maybe it was because he married one of the girls my mother ran around with in high school. Maybe it was because his kids and my parents kids fought like the dickens and were both about as opposite as could be. Maybe it’s because my grandmother loved comparing the two families. I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s as simple as the fact he had a black car just like my grandmothers that he drove me around in once when I was six. I asked him how come it was so dirty compared to Grandma’s. He just Eb’d in his Ebby way, “Its my fishin car.” He had the curt Kansas one liner down. Maybe it was cause he had what I considered such a cool name for an uncle. Uncle Ebby. One thing about it, at some point when I was in high school my bother and I asked our parents to change their will so Ebby and Glenda would be our guardians if anything happened to them.
When I was in college, Eb and Glenda divorced. The particulars are not that important to this story, but he remarried, to Sharon, and he raised her kids as his own. I hadn’t been back to Brewster, or Colby the next town over, where he lived with Sharon since I was in High School, so the adventures in Kansas at Eb’s house were over. My cousins Lee and Earl have grown married and had kids of their own. Their kids are in college and married having kids. There goings on had been reported to me in the twenty five years hence though visits to my Grandmother, or when Eb was in Burlingame or some other place I was in Kansas I was.
Last week, I made the trip from California to Denver by plane, rented a car and drove out across the freshly sprouting wheat fields of Eastern Colorado to Kansas. Noticing un-melted snow drifts beside I-70 as I progressed from Byers, to Agate, to Genoa, to Burlington and then into Kansas. I followed the soil of my childhood to Goodland, past Brewster to Colby Kansas. There I found my uncles, aunt’s cousins, Lee and Earl. We did the kind of things you do at funerals. Tell stories, drink and sob a bit, get lost in small town of five thousand on way to the only graveyard. Then we buried the person we’d come for.
The day after the funeral, when most of relatives had left town, I drove back out to the gravesite, not getting lost this time, and stood over the freshly turned soil. I looked at the bouquets of flowers. In the movies at scenes like that, the character pours out their heart to the dead. I left it to the curt Kansas one liner:
“Eb, just one more time call me Jesse George.”
Standard statements of the week:
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
(We all were.)
People who never knew my uncle or any of my family circumstances sent me sympathy cards. I found that peculiar.
The other statement, I got a lot, directly following the apology, “Where you close?”
Was I close? That question stumps me. No matter how many times it gets asked. I can’t quantify closeness. It’s like asking if I’m close to my mother or father. Thoughts on the question revolve around: “Close relative to what?” Amount of interaction? Times I visited? Hugs? Did I gel with his sense of being? Was I a member of his political party? --I don’t know, I don’t know if he was a member the Poets against Bush party. But I would guess not.
I hadn’t actually talked to my Uncle in three years. Last time I saw him was at a family reunion in Topeka. Eb covered the usual conversations with me he had over the previous forty three years. He started with: “What’s up Jesse-George?” He called me that because just after I learned to walk, he was watching me one day while planting tomaders. (Tomatoes for those of you not on the plains) He proceeded down the row in his garden, on his hands and knees, planting seedlings, carefully sprouted indoors weeks before. I followed behind pulling them up one by one. When he got to the end of the row he stood up to take a look at his work, and he saw mine. He apparently looked at me and said, “Jesse-George you and I are going to have words.”
I’m sure, not yet familiar with complex sentences in the Kansas vernacular, the words were somewhat one sided and involved the word tomaders a lot. Eb never tired of telling the story of the day Jesse-George pulled up all his tomaders. The result was he called me Jesse-George for the rest of his life. Its one of those names you only let the familiar call you, because there is a history behind it. Like my relatives calling me “Jay”, when everyone else calls me “Stan”. (We won’t go into the history of that.)
“Eb”, was in similar circumstance. He’s real name was Edwin Lee Dunn, but most relatives called him “Ebby”, or “Eb.” --At least, back in Burlingame, Kansas when he was a kid. In 1970 he took a job with the Farmer’s Cooperative and moved to Quinter and then to Brewster to manage grain elevators. When he became the grain middleman of the plains, he started going by his given name, Ed. The only time I ever referred to Eb, as Ed was on Christmas Cards when I mailed them out each year. So in the familiar, he was my Uncle Ebby.
Eb, like my other Uncle’s, was associated with the small town adventure. In the Spring of 1970 my father was stationed in England my mother, brother and I spent a few months living with my Grandmother in Burlingame Kansas. We made a few trips out to Quinter to visit Eb, my Aunt Glenda, and my cousins Lee and Earl. On one of the trips, Quinter was in the peak of a chinch bug invasion. They were climbing up the walls of my Uncles house, and probably across the stalks of Eb’s garage sprouted tomaders. At eight, I was intrigued by the near endless supply of arthropods I could crunch. That was, until that evening, when lying in bed, downstairs in the basement, the arthropods took revenge and climbed all over me. I came running out of the basement declaring to my mother, aunt and uncle I couldn’t sleep down there. My uncle just tapped on his cigarette while watching TV. “What’s wrong Jesse-George, a few bugs a botherin ya?”
It was at Eb’s house or with Eb’s kids that I had the greatest fire works adventures at. Our family trip back to Burlingame in the summer of 1969 and Eb had bought was seemed an endless supply of firecrackers and other explosives for his kids. We spent the better part of a week trying to blow up every bug within reach of a seven, eight and nine year old. In 1974 we made a similar trip where my cousins and I spent the weekend trying to drill holes through telephone poles with firecrackers. (Stories like this scare people from big cities BTW, we won’t get into what I did with fire as scout.) It was a story I wrote in college based on the trip of 1969 that led my father to tell me one day when he was sneaking a peak at my writing, “If it weren’t for your brother and I, you wouldn’t have anything to write about.” Emm, maybe. But a lot of the stuff that happened at Eb’s house ends up in my stories and poems at one time or another.
Why? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because, he had two sons like my parents. Maybe it was because he was my mother’s next oldest brother. Maybe it was because he married one of the girls my mother ran around with in high school. Maybe it was because his kids and my parents kids fought like the dickens and were both about as opposite as could be. Maybe it’s because my grandmother loved comparing the two families. I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s as simple as the fact he had a black car just like my grandmothers that he drove me around in once when I was six. I asked him how come it was so dirty compared to Grandma’s. He just Eb’d in his Ebby way, “Its my fishin car.” He had the curt Kansas one liner down. Maybe it was cause he had what I considered such a cool name for an uncle. Uncle Ebby. One thing about it, at some point when I was in high school my bother and I asked our parents to change their will so Ebby and Glenda would be our guardians if anything happened to them.
When I was in college, Eb and Glenda divorced. The particulars are not that important to this story, but he remarried, to Sharon, and he raised her kids as his own. I hadn’t been back to Brewster, or Colby the next town over, where he lived with Sharon since I was in High School, so the adventures in Kansas at Eb’s house were over. My cousins Lee and Earl have grown married and had kids of their own. Their kids are in college and married having kids. There goings on had been reported to me in the twenty five years hence though visits to my Grandmother, or when Eb was in Burlingame or some other place I was in Kansas I was.
Last week, I made the trip from California to Denver by plane, rented a car and drove out across the freshly sprouting wheat fields of Eastern Colorado to Kansas. Noticing un-melted snow drifts beside I-70 as I progressed from Byers, to Agate, to Genoa, to Burlington and then into Kansas. I followed the soil of my childhood to Goodland, past Brewster to Colby Kansas. There I found my uncles, aunt’s cousins, Lee and Earl. We did the kind of things you do at funerals. Tell stories, drink and sob a bit, get lost in small town of five thousand on way to the only graveyard. Then we buried the person we’d come for.
The day after the funeral, when most of relatives had left town, I drove back out to the gravesite, not getting lost this time, and stood over the freshly turned soil. I looked at the bouquets of flowers. In the movies at scenes like that, the character pours out their heart to the dead. I left it to the curt Kansas one liner:
“Eb, just one more time call me Jesse George.”
posted by Stan at 3:12 PM
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