For Uncle Leon
My Great Uncle Leon was a lion of a man. I was glad to live close by his ranch-style home in Douglasville when I was young. Aunt Lynn was solid-form magic when she met the kitchen everyday. I would sit at the table with dominoes piled high before me while she cooked silver-dollar pancakes in the early morning light. I would lay across the blue carpeted living room floor and look through old books and photo albums, dreaming long thoughts of what life was before I was born.
My cousins and I would play for hours in the backyard. They would make up little stories to tell my younger and naive self. Katie once said that photos used to be black and white because the world was black and white up until about 1950. Who knew that this little fib would one day be the premise for a film called, “Pleasantville’. They were teasing, but they were affectionate as well.
Those early childhood days were something out of a postcard for the American Dream. We played baseball and Uncle Leon would take turns with my grandfather showing me how to choke up on the bat; he would demonstrate the proper technique for sliding into third.
These autumnal years for Uncle Leon didn’t slow him from showing me the creek in the thick woods behind the house or the vast corn field that was just beyond the woods somewhere barely shy of the edge of the world. All of this was on scale with a national park in my mind. I didn’t know it then, but Uncle Leon was showing me a Middle Earth for my young heart.
Uncle Leon served in the Army in Europe during World War II and survived to light up my imagination years later. He supplied me with a full artillery of German vocabulary that is completely lost in me now. He taught me how to march around a living a room as if I were a private freshly enlisted. He made me want to live adventures. Honestly, Uncle Leon played a crucial role in this wanderlust; forming in me a sojourning spirit. From my small room in the English midlands I am finishing up a booking to London in two weeks and co-ordinating Thanksgiving travel to Germany. I hope I can remember some of those words he taught me.
We played baseball and we ate watermelon and ran through sprinklers in that backyard. The screen door would slap shut behind us as we canvased the grass looking for fireflies flickering in the summer dusk.
Uncle Leon, who died on Halloween at the age of 92, helped to provided a soul to my early life that keeps on flickering light like those old fireflies. Gosh, how I miss that man.
