The Third Uncle

Someone recently told me (approvingly, no doubt) that I was "born for the stage." At first I had to stop and think for a moment what she meant by that (though I never actually asked her, after all). It was a bit like reading cowrie shells for tea leaves. I mean what stage was I born for...infancy...senility?

But then I remembered the time when I fell into a trash basket when I was a child. Well...I remember being told about that...but I have no idea exactly how I got out, other than that it had something to do with my father having been an amateur magician back in East Chicago, long before I was a gleam in his eye.

And then, somehow, suddenly something clicked. It was like a camera. Or my neck.

I realized that I get “it” from my great-great-great Uncle Carbuncle and his cousin, Uncle Fafóofnik (NOT their stage names; connexions of my late father, Blas, so Kirsten R. and Dorothy D. might be interested in this!), who apparently enjoyed about 27 minutes of fame back in '27 with their neo-post-Vaudevillain routine, "One Flew Over the Cormorant's Neck," which apparently consisted of my uncles performing unusual movements never seen on a stage in America before or since (imported, no doubt, from the Old Country, probably without a license — them being Romanian “Hunkies” and such things not being illegal, as such, back then), whilst consuming odd bits of their household (whatever was not nailed down, it would seem) (they were raw-foodists avant la lettre), all to the tune of "That's the Wrong Way to Tip-a-cowie" (they popularized the song in Chicago) performed — get this — on jaws harp and comb-and-tissue...another first! Reviews were mixed, apparently, with some calling it "magic" and others calling it "extraordinary rubbish-eating" and still others wondering Why?

So this particular talent, being both recessive and retentive (and excessive, obviously), seems to skip generations, willy-nilly. My brother Arnold tells me he once overheard my parents hoping aloud that it had skipped me. (They just wanted some peace, which I can understand totally.) But alas...and Leyla seems to have got the gene, as well. God help us all!

Which brings me to the third uncle, Uncle Eǧ (or Iǧ or Iggy, any of which is short for a very long Christian name best left to its own devices, that I heard exactly once when I was a lad but which I never managed to pronounce, much less remember, it being in Romanian or “Hunkie” or Gyeepsee or Cyrillic or maybe all of that together, with diacritics), who despite his moniker was really more of an irritant than an uncle, it seems. In other words, maybe he was adopted. Why, it was never made clear, but apparently Eelohdee, one of my many-greats (around the turn of the century, or before, or after) heard some rustling down by the crick…and the rest is history: She took a liking to him (he spoke the language) and brought him into the hearth, the bosom of the family, the kith and the kin (she let him in the house) and made him one of her own like a brother (her father had something to say about that, and so did her brothers), and he made himself useful. For Uncle Egg would do almost anything you asked him to do, so grateful was he to have a shirt on his back in the company of such obviously talented people (Ilie Nastase and Nadia Comaneci being still many years in the future).

I don’t remember ever hearing about what, if anything, Uncle Ick was actually good at, though it must have been something spectacular, since his memory lived on in the family long after the real events were forgotten in the Great Dispression, which drove half of my father’s family out of Chicagoland and into the Great Pains of North America, never to return, and drove the other half insane. (Maybe it was jaws harp. Or comb-and-tissue. Or “fixing things”. Or bed-springs. Anything’s possible in this best-of-all-possible worlds.)

My father, having been born in Chicagoland, clearly came from the half that stayed off the Pleat Grains (though there are several minutes of Blas’ life that remain obscured by time and hops, so who knows for sure?), and which clearly also has something to do with a) his having been an amateur magician known for pulling infants out of trash baskets, b) my having been born two weeks late on a winter evening in Marion, Indiana, when everyone else was in Logansport, c) why he never once took his shirt off to swim, and d) why no one in my whole childhood ever told me I was brown (except for my baby sitter, who once remarked in a totally Hoosier and amiable way that in the summer I turned “almost black”).

So the stories Dad told me of Uncle Ekk are legion. There were so many of them that I do not recall any at all. One just sort of drives out another, as I’m sure you’ll agree, like good money after bad, until there’s nothing left but loose bits of lumber and broken screw heads.