Flawed and Beloved Flawed and Beloved

      Despite his flaws, I loved my uncle and could tell that he would do anything for the people he loved, even for those in his family that he was not so fond of. He was the guy who set my father up with my mother, and ironically he was also the guy who was there to protect her and pull my father aside to let him know that he really did not cotton to men hitting women. He loved to drive down every year to North Carolina in his Cadillac, speeding the majority of the way. He loved to get away with breaking the law and not get caught by the police. He always tried to beat his best time from Pennsylvania to North Carolina by just a little bit each time. This was before radar detectors. Virginia was the toughest state for him to get through without being ticketed.

      This is why he especially loved the challenge of driving through Virginia. In fact, in all of the years he drove through the state, he was nailed only twice by the Virginia State Police. You would have thought that those tickets were a direct assault on his manhood.

      When we got to North Carolina, my mother's family had kept the home fires burning. They lived a lifestyle, and had a standard of living, that at the time I thought was primitive, rustic, quaint, and kind of cool. I guess that was because

I was essentially a city boy, even though the area of Pennsylvania where we had was close to farms and woodlands. Norristown was always walking distance. For years, Norristown, Pennsylvania, was called the "largest town in the USA."

      Some people liked to say the world. Center City Philadelphia was only twenty miles away, and every outlying burg was really a little city. In my life, there had been indoor plumbing and heat from gas lines or electricity. Paved road were normal, and our houses had siding, insulation, and sheet rock or paneling. 

      My mother’s relatives lived in houses that had one layer of wood separating them from the elements, a tin roof, and instead of a regular foundation, the houses were set up on cinder blocks. The floors were single slat wood planks. The entire house was whitewashed inside and out. Nothing was painted any other color.

The water came from wells, and the heat and gas for cooking came from propane tanks.

         A few short years previous, they had been cooking on wood stoves, and that was also their source of heat. Also previously, their only bathroom was an outhouse on the other side of the cornfield. So, when you had to go, whether rain or snow, night or day, you had to make the trek across the field.

And there was no telling what sort of critters you might find trying to share the toilet with you. I can’t count the times I encountered lizards, snakes, spiders, rats, and others parked in the outhouse, especially at night. On a few occasions, the snakes and spiders were quite deadly and had to be chased out.

      It was especially unnerving to go out there at night. The likelihood that a critter would be in the outhouse at night was very great as it was easy for them to keep warm in there. By the time we moved there, my uncle and aunt had a bathroom right off of their bedroom. Anyone was welcome to use it during the day, but at night everyone other than my uncle and aunt had to go to the outhouse, squat, or stand in the grass to pee.