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September 17, 2008Happens to the best…happens to the restAGING IS NOT FOR SISSIESso they say, but despite an expanding waistline and receding hairline, my uncle Nick carried it off pretty well. He retained his roguish Ray Milland good looks right into his 70’s, though his hallmark slicked-back black hair went white. I BEAR UPON MY CHESTthe regal red-gold cross presented to Nick at his Russian Orthodox baptism in 1930 in Lithuania. It was, in turn, presented to me by my grandmother, because Nick was my godfather as well as uncle. The cross, more than 77 years old, now represents his entire life. When I look through his stash of pictures that my mother organized into an album, I realize I didn’t know him all that well. He had a life of his own richer than I’d given him credit for.
The dapper young Nick I left Philadelphia in 1981, and saw the man only once or twice a year when I’d head back east, but when I was growing up, we all lived together—me, my parents, my grandmother, my sister and my two uncles—as one big eastern European extended family in a six-bedroom twin house on Camac Street. It was his habit to utter the mysterious monosyllable, “Voh!”—as far as we can tell an approximation of Voila! Or something like, It’s just as I told you! Or, So there! And that was his final word on any subject. ONE THING IS CLEARfrom the photos—the man loved to raise a glass, and did so often, always with a smile on his face. He was a mischievous rascal right from the start, according to my mother, six years his elder, but with no ill intent. He was looking for fun, not trouble. He went out every day to socialize with friends, to quaff a beer at the Brauhaus or Austrian Village, to experience the day. My favorite uncle Nick story is from back in high school when my sister Cruella and my piano teacher Millie were on the phone singing the Chambers Brothers’ song “Time Has Come Today” in two parts. It was my sister’s role to perform the percussive tick-tock, or click-clock, feature with her tongue, while Millie on the other end recited “Time!” (tick, tock) “Time!” (tick, tock) “Time!” (tick tock) “Time!” (tick, tock) Of course all Nick heard on his end was the incessant clicking and clocking of my sister’s metronomic monotony. Out of the corner of her eye, my sister could detect my uncle growing steadily more irritated ‘til he snapped, sprang from his chair and went for her throat. Well, it’s funny now, anyway. And in their continuing conflict of her making too much noise in her bedroom below his, she once put her fist through the acoustical tile of her ceiling. The sloppy spackle job hardly smoothed the incident over. WELL THE TIME FINALLY CAMEfor Uncle Nick. After two months of struggle to hang on after a major stroke damaged his brain stem, he said goodbye to the world as we know it—but not without protest. Even brain dead, after he was taken off life support, he lingered for another 13 days. He had been a big, strong man, and his heart kept him going till he succumbed to pneumonia. Though Uncle Nick was hardly a model of tolerance—as my mother put it, you tend to forget the not-so-nice things about someone after they are gone—I remember him now, like poor Yorick, as “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy,” and ask, “Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? I IMAGINE HIM NOWin the ghostly company of the gone-but-not-forgotten old Lithuanian lushes he hung around with in the old days, Kastas, “the Burgermeister,” Algimantas, the lot of them singing “Kapitän! Kapitän!” around a table filled with bottles and glasses of heavenly ambrosia. He joins my godmother’s husband “Butchie Butchie” in navigating the new terrain of the flip side, under the guardian eye of his mother. Lord but is she happy to have him back, as sad as we are to lose him. And I can just hear, thundering through the skies as we mourn his passing, the familiar, characteristic, baritone roar of his “Voh!”
The author’s uncle, Nikolojus, 1968 ------------------------------------------------------------ Sweet, the wine we drank
Missed by his sister, brother, nieces, Xena and friends copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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