Uncle Boo and Brautigan, Too

Just about two years ago now my Uncle Bob passed away after battling his life and demons for almost forty years. The official cause of death was complications as a result of cancer, but I know it was his life. A hedonistic Peter Pan, my favorite uncle in the end succumbed to excess: drinking, smoking, f***ing, and like most of his ilk, I guess the world was too much in him to ever live a normal life.

My uncle did, fortunately, have the chance to know and love my own children before he died. To them he was "Uncle Boo", and very much, I believe, the same type of great uncle to them that he was uncle to me: you know the type, the relative who you rarely see, but whose gregarious carefree spirit is alwasy present at family gatherings, even in the occassional absence. The relative all the other relatives complain about and call "no good." That was my uncle. To my children he was "Uncle Boo," just as to my brother and I, he would always be simply "Uncle Bob."

Maybe the only material things he ever gave me (and whether he really gave them to me or, more likely, lent them and forgot, is debatable) were a set of books by sixties author Richard Brautigan. I remember being an undergraduate English major in the early nineties and proudly, calculatedly, mentioning to Uncle Bob how I had come across an excerpt from Trout Fishing in America.

"No s**t," he said, taking a drag off his cigarette. I forget the location but we were probably in my grandparent's basement, which served as his base of operations--he lived with them until their deaths and his then his own wasting of any inheritance he received. Uncle Bob handed me a stack of well preserved volumes wrapped in a single rubber band. "Check these out."

I had an early appreciation for old books, especially those that smelled and felt of age and had been loved. I never asked where Uncle Bob had obtained these books, but I gladly accepted them from him, nonetheless. I like to think that he read them, although we never talked about what was in them, but when I think of how Richard's (Brautigan) own sadness and depression late in life is reflected in the life my Uncle lived, I like to believe that the books spoke to his own experience. That's what good books do.

Just as some of Richard's poems and anecdotes take me back to places, even now, I sense in retrospect that the feelings of sunshine and connectedness Trout Fishing returns me, too, were experienced through a much more rosie lense than those corners and shadows of experience that Uncle Boo visited and in some ways never came home from.

"Boo, Forever" by Richard Brautigan

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.

Breathe in, breathe out... YOU AND I ARE ALIVE!