IN THE CAREFREE IDYLL of my youth, when Appletons twenty strong gathered at my grandparents' house each Thanksgiving Day, Uncle Buck always drank too much and never failed to do something that would embarrass Aunt Betty. He would return from the bathroom with his fly open, or belch during grace, or tell a very dirty story, or dribble giblet gravy on the tie he wore only on holidays, before grumbling, "I knew the goddamn thing was good for something. Kept the shirt clean, didn't it?"
Aunt Betty, who was my mother's sister, would begin the process of coaxing him home then, and she usually succeeded before the pumpkin and mincemeat and apple and pecan pies were passed around the table.
A bit later, after grandfather began to fidget prior to suggesting that the men retire to the basement, where whiskey and cigars awaited them, the loud backfiring of Uncle Buck's ancient pickup could be heard outside and soon thereafter the slamming of the pickup door in the driveway and then the idiosyncratic howling that was my uncle's habit whenever he had too much to drink, which was often:
"Do you really knoooooooooow?," he howled.
Everyone knew that Uncle Buck was back.
After shooting a stern glance at me and my cousins, daring us to laugh out loud (though cousin Judy, Buck's daughter, always looked close to tears), grandfather would ask grandmother if there were clean sheets in the guest room, knowing full well that she never let anyone in the front door unless there were fresh sheets in all the bedrooms and fresh towels in all the bathrooms.
As Uncle Buck continued to howl outside, grandfather would make the habitual suggestion to retire, and so the men would rise in unison to head for the stairs to the basement, where they would let Uncle Buck in through the outside entrance.
Before long Uncle Buck wouldn't be the only intoxicated relative in the house, nor the only one howling.
This routine was so attached to Thanksgiving that I looked forward to it and was disappointed to learn, the holiday of my freshman year in high school, that Uncle Buck had stopped drinking.
The uncle was modeled after a relative of my best friend, an ex-logger, who indeed would howl "Do you really knoooooooooow?" whenever he got drunk, which was daily.
Dick, my friend, appreciated the story and after that "the epistemological uncle" became a kind of codeword between us whenever arguments we'd overhear would deteriorate into matters of semantics, as almost all arguments do. Either of us saying this, or "do you really knooooooooooooow?," could crack us up. To observers, we often were cracking up without any apparent reason, the advantage of knowing one another so well and being so often on the same wave length. We laughed one hell of a lot when no one else was.
No comments:
Post a Comment