When my
parents moved out west, I was cut off from my extended family. I sort of knew
my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and my only first cousin, but that was it.
Whenever there were family gatherings, it was with people I didn’t know at all,
and they had no children my age, so it was always a bunch of adults jabbering
away about what adults talk about. I still don’t know what they talk about,
since I still choose to talk about movies, comic books, and video games.
But then
there was my Great Uncle Marvin. We had stopped off in Missouri on our way to
one of these dread family reunions. I was around eight. And the adults were all
talking, and I was bored. But Great Uncle Marvin carried on his conversation
while playing Connect 4 with me. It was one of those travel sets for the car,
and I had beaten Mom at the game so often that she didn’t want to play any more
while Dad drove. But there, in the midst of all of those adults jabbering away,
was my uncle Marvin playing Connect 4 with me.
And he was good. I don’t mean that
he was unbeatable. I mean that he paid attention to the game. I didn’t have to
remind him whose turn it was, and I didn’t win easily because he was too busy conversing
with the adults to have his mind on the game.
The other memory I have about
Marvin is when we returned from another such reunion in Ohio. He and his wife
Bertha let us stay the night. But the real treat was in the morning. The
breakfast was unimaginably good. After spending three weeks living out of a
motorhome, the homemade strawberry jam on toast was heavenly. It was the best
thing I remember tasting all trip. And he and Bertha made sure I had as much as
I wanted, and even sent a jar of the jam with us when we left.
I hadn’t thought about these little
stories in years, but it struck me the other day when I was putting some
strawberry jam on my English muffin, and I thought it worth sharing, or at
least preserving, here.