LETTERS FROM HOME: A MAN WHO WAS A MOUNTAIN IN A WORLD WITHOUT END, AMEN

Sept. 23, 1999

Dear Pat

Adults inspire a combination of awe and perplexity in children, especially those adults whose occasional visits offer only clues to who they are.

My uncle was a mountain, well over 6 feet tall with the body of a defensive tackle. He smoked big cigars, drove a big truck, operated big machinery. His eyebrows worked up and down like Groucho Marx's to punctuate his stories.

He wore work boots and work clothes even on weekends and said you could buy cars much cheaper if you paid cash.

WWII formed his generation. He fought in Italy and carried a piece of lead around inside him as a souvenir.

He brought the family over for visits some Sunday afternoons. He and my dad traded news about their jobs and cars. Their rare war stories danced around their youthful trials by fire without ever touching the terror and anguish they must have known.

But in mock German accents, they affectionately called each other "schweinehund." I didn't know what the word meant but they had a good time saying it.

My uncle was a hunter and fisherman. He was often jolly, also stubbornly insistent that life was as he knew it.

Most of all he seemed tough, like someone who could endure anything.

In his youth he was my dad's best friend. Then they met the Erwin sisters, and each married one. First my parents and six months later my aunt and uncle drove to Mississippi because the justice of the peace didn't make you wait and they had nothing to wait for.

They stood up at each other's wedding. The four of them were bonded in ways a child doesn't understand.

When his youngest son, my cousin, died unexpectedly as a teen-ager, the family never got over it. Maybe you don't. A kind of inconsolable sadness lingered.

Now I am uncle to children who have their own views of me as I did my uncle. I am the gray man they see two, three, four times a year. I love to play golf. I write stories. I forget their birthdays.

They know me as I knew my uncle, dimensionlessly. I wish that were not so.

I wish them to know I love them, to make contact with them across the generations, to tell them my own anti-war stories with the blood and guts intact.

I want to read them poetry that reassures them, like Rumi's lines:

"We are as the flute, and the music in us is from thee;

We are as the mountain and the echo in us is from thee."

Late in his life, my uncle began making art out of copper, tooling the bright metal into images that were meaningful to him. It seemed an unusual pursuit for such a rough-hewn man and reminded me that even mountains know the wind's soft sighs.

He gave my parents one of his creations, praying hands. In his own house hung a picture he made of a warrior with a shield.

One of the last times I saw my uncle he was sitting in his car across the street from a funeral home. I was walking down the street, waved and opened his car door. He told me his only brother had died. He was crying. My tough, artistic uncle shocked me.

Now the time has come to go to my uncle's funeral, to fold our hands and pray for his soul's voyage to the reality even mountains can't deny.

Love, Sam