The Great Uncle

A man passed recently. He was quite a fellow.

He told me several times that he was good friends with Don Knotts in World War II. He said that one time, they went to a bar, but neither of them drank alcohol, so they got 7-UP. And they sat at the bar in the, uh, bar, and drank their 7-UPs.

He said he had a picture of him and Don Knotts together during the war, but he had misplaced it and hadn’t seen it in several decades.

He also told me that, at one time, he had been good friends with Porter Wagoner. And that Porter Wagoner was the best man at his wedding.

I asked some young people recently if they had ever heard of Porter Wagoner, but they had only heard of the Boulevard that bears his name in Smalltown, USA. They knew nothing of the man.

But this man that passed recently, whom I knew as Uncle Jim, resides in a several of my memories from childhood.

My earliest memory of him was when he would set me on his knee and proceed to count my ribs. He only ever got to about three or four; because the sole purpose of this was to cause me to break into fits of laughter. He got quite the kick out of that. And I remember him wearing a neck brace at some point, but I have no idea why.

Another memory is when my parents were building an addition to their house. Someone had come and dug the footers, but there had been heavy rainfall, and the footers were filled to the brim with water. It didn’t help that we lived at the bottom of a hill. The footers didn’t seem to want to dry out.

One evening, Uncle Jimmy was visiting my grandparents and wanted to see our progress. They were all standing near the edge of the temporary pond, and my parents said they were waiting until it dried up before they started pouring the concrete. And rightly so.

Evidently, it would cost a small fortune to rent a sump pump. Uncle Jim looked at it and said, “I can get that water out of there. I know how to do that.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Simple. Do you have a water hose?”

We handed him the water hose.

He put a wire mesh on one end, stuck it in the shallow pond, and started siphoning on the other.

In short order, the water started flowing. And then Dad called and canceled the truckload of perch he had ordered to stock our little pond. By the next day, the pond was empty and drying up.

What a guy.

to those who knew him,
– Caleb