Uncle Aloysius

Prologue

Back in the day, grass was so green because they put all this crap on it. This began when a big, bald guy with a cigar, in an office with a view of either palm trees or the canyons of Midtown Manhattan, shouted at men in lab coats-

            “They want green? We’ll give ‘em green.”

            “But…”

            The man growled.

            “No buts! Give ‘em green!”

            And we had green. We’d play in this incredibly green green and we’d even put our noses in it. It smelled just like fly paper.

            “Don’t eat it!” Mom would shout from stoop. “It has chemicals!” Who was I to argue. Later, I learned that everything was made of chemicals. So, it smelled like fly paper, but so did American cheese, and I ate that. As a matter of fact, sometimes, we ate the grass, too.

            I suffered no ill effects. I mean, lookit my writing.

            The empty calories in refined sugar probably stunted my growth, though. Back in the day, it wasn’t the video you found the night before. How gauche. It was the color and texture of what you’d eaten for breakfast. We were impressed with Froot Loops, but everyone knew that the different colors didn’t taste different. It was all the same with slightly different dyes. That was science. General Mills said that Cap’n Crunch didn’t cut up the inside of your mouth, and we knew that was a lie. We ate it anyway, despite science failing us. Some parents insisted on “Life”. Life was beige, and not very sweet. Hippies ate “Life”. We lived for the time that we could march into class before school and say-

            “I had Trix, and the milk turned purple.”

            What with the sugar and the dyes, the primary schools were rockin’.

            Late one evening, I rolled my head from the pillow and looked at a Cap’n Crunch poster my brother had put on the wall. The light was dim, but I could see the Captain nodding and blinking. A ship in the middle of the poster was swaying. All of the Cap’n’s friends were running about the deck of the ship. It was quite entertaining. Perhaps I was dreaming. Some might call it “The imagination of a child”. That, or preservative tremens.

            I have a bone to pick with Larry next door. Not next door now, silly. Next door then. The grass was thinner next to the back wall of our carport, what with trees and all. The wall was only five feet tall, and sometimes I would make my way up to the roof of the house from there. I would find the odd pipe that jutted nine inches out of the roof and smelled like poop and I didn’t know why. Then I would go to the chimney, look down into it and ponder Santa theories. (But without considering my current North Pole karma.) But it’s back off the roof in that thin grass that I’m talkin’ about. I dug a hole and put some buried treasure there.

            In a paper bag, I buried:

                        1 beaded belt, purchased on vacation.

                        1 Hot Wheels car.

                        1 Pushmi Pullyu eraser with one head missing.

            I needed no map to know where the treasure was, especially since I went back to dig it up quite soon. The next day, as a matter of fact. I dug and dug. The buried treasure was gone. This cold-case has been re-opened a few times throughout the decades, and it had to have been Larry who was watching from the yard next door. So, if you are reading, Larry, I will now close my eyes, and when I open them again, I want my belt, car and pencil topper returned.

The Middle Bit

            Uncle Al might have been at the family gathering I was taken to way down in Bushnell, since he was a young great uncle on my father’s side. But, that day, I was intrigued by my farmer-uncles who sat around the kitchen table. They were all contenders for the role in “American Gothic,” which I had been exposed to in first grade art. Unlike those on mother’s side, who had some fun, those on my father’s side had no fun. Unless you call pickling watermelon rinds fun. That day, these men were embroiled in a debate about the Book of Revelations. This was another difference between the sides of the family because no Latin was used. One said that he thought that the fire in Armageddon referred to the ‘A-Bomb’. I decided to leave the high-concept conversation and find a fence post to run into or a tree to fall out of. Luckily, I made it through the day ok.

           Many of the relatives on my father’s side were out there in fly-over land making corn, but some lived close enough to make it to Sunday dinners at the smorgasbord across the river. There would be Uncle Al and Aunt Clarice. Al had a cigar that was nearly as wide as it was long, and we kids ran the place from a jumble at a long table near enough but far away.

            “Try the cobbler!” “Try the pudding!” “This pudding tastes funny!” “That’s because that pudding is gravy! Don’t you know what end of the smorgasbord is which?” “Now, you have to eat the gravy all by itself. It’s the rules.” “Well, if it’s the rules…” “EW!”

            There were many tales told among that horde of well-dressed children. Courtesy of Towncraft. That’s how I first got to know my Uncle Al. From a distance.

            It was explained to the younger ones, and I was younger, that adults took multiple choice tests, too. Anchored down by a ramiken-ful of beef gravy, I listened, for once, to the conversation.

            “It happened at a shoe seminar in Nebraska. They found out that Uncle Al would always flunk multiple choice tests, because he always aces them.”

            “Those are two different things!”

            “Well, the computers won’t let you keep acing them. They think you’re cheating. So, they flunk you.”

            “You’re telling me… That Uncle Al knows everything about shoes.”

            “Not quite. They made him take a test, to certify for something. It was a really hard test. And he aced, like, a hundred questions. Then they noticed that he hadn’t taken his question sheet with him.”

            “That’s impossible!”

            “That’s what he did! There was a computer person at the seminar, and he had him take another test. He aced that, too. On that first test, he thought he just had to make a pattern with the dots on the page.”

            “Twilight Zone!”

            “Exactly. They flew some people in on TWA, and they couldn’t stump him.”

            “That’s crazy, man.”

            We looked over and watched Uncle Al, who sat with my dad, eating lime Jello with a fork.

            “Now IBM calls him sometimes for advice. He’s banned from using number two pencils, and he has to take all tests with a short-answer essay.”

            “I hate those!”

            “He can take my tests…”

            We shook our heads. Since people sometimes shook their heads over me, I developed an affinity for Uncle Al.