Uncle Aloysius

Acknowledgements

            My story hasn’t quite ended, but I want to get to the acknowledgements before I forget. I would like to thank Barbara Feldon, known for her role as ‘Agent 99’ in the television spy comedy ‘Get Smart’, for the positive influence she had on my childhood. Constant though it was, my television viewing was usually limited to ten-minute sessions before I darted off to find what trouble I could get into, but when Get Smart was on, I lingered a couple minutes more before the Zenith. Agent 99 was fascinating. ‘Maxwell Smart’, played by Don Adams, was the leading role. He was ‘Agent 86’. I don’t think Agent 99 was ever mentioned by name, and that was genius. The way she called ‘Max’ ‘Max’ made me wish I was ‘Max’, even when I was a full fifteen years away from being able to enlist as a ‘Control Agent’. Some have referred to the role as ‘icy’, and I strongly disagree. Agent 99 was aloof, but engaged. She had a ‘drawing in’ quality with a surprise at every level. Barbara Feldon in a supporting role on television is, I feel, an egregious error. Later, I felt the same way with NBC’s ‘McMillan and Wife’.

Epilogue

            Much later, my sister joined me out in the backyard on the swing set. She had been left with me for when I got hurt while the rest of the family went out shopping.

            “I know something,” I said as we swang. “Uncle Al was bit by a squirrel.”

            “I know something,” she said. “He wasn’t bit by a squirrel, but it was worse!”

            As we put the set through its paces, she told me that Uncle Al wasn’t bitten, but that he had spent a hairy week as a weresquirrel.

            “Wearing squirrel? Like Daniel Boone?”

            “No! He ate a bad apple and became a weresquirrel. Like a werewolf, but smaller.”

            “Lotta bad apples out there.”

            “I wash mine. Always wash apples, because of infected squirrels.”

            I’d heard of tetanus. I’d heard of rabies. Becoming a weresquirrel was a new one. You see, Uncle Al hadn’t noticed a teeny-tiny bite mark on the apple he ate. He didn’t wash it before eating it, and that was pure Uncle Al. It wasn’t pasteurized. He became a weresquirrel, which can be bothersome, and he had to take an entire week off JC Penney's. He almost had to go to the hospital.

            We responded quickly, like the CDC, but unlike the CDC, we invented a game. ‘The Weresquirrel Game’. There were abuncha squirrels beneath us, and we had to keep swinging. We both swung in sync, which made it extra fun, because each side of the set would lift itself a bit out of the ground with each swing, depending on Newton’s law.

            If we got into too much trouble, Uncle Al would save us, since he had immunity. Well. He had recurrences, my sister said, like on Halloween. But that can be convenient, since the costume was ready-made, and no one could tell he was forty. And since he was a grown up, he could check his own candy.

            We swung wildly, with the swing set tilting to and fro, nuzzling dirt from where the legs were planted, crying- “Save us, Uncle Al!”