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| Uncle Herm, the elder brother, and Uncle Tab, now gone to Glory (photo March 2018) |
Pardon me, dear Reader, for this hurried
letter. You see, my beloved Uncle Tab, the baby of Floyd and Ollie McCoy’s children,
passed away last Sunday at age eighty-nine. His funeral is in two days in
Lexington, Kentucky.
My four sisters
and I now have one older surviving hero on my mother’s side. Uncle Herm. I’ve
introduced you to these brothers and Appalachian coal miners before.
I hope I didn’t
neglect to tell you that when I was a child, they took turns bouncing me on
their knee and recited, “Ars Lee caught a flea sitting on her daddy’s knee.”
The root of my
love for stories, I believe.
For there’s more
to the tale than that. When my mother, the eldest in her family, was a child,
her daddy bounced her on his knee and said, “Sadie Lee caught a flea sitting on
her daddy’s knee.”
Imagine how such
affection and inheritance bonds an uncle and niece.
Our summer vacation
surrogate fathers, Uncles Tab and Herm ran leg races with us around the
Homeplace in the McCoy Bottom, a flatland between the bosoms of surrounding
mountains. The first to touch the snowball bush from where we started, won the
race.
Uncle Tab would
insist I beat him and Uncle Herm the summer of my twelfth year. I think they rigged
the race.
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| Uncle Tab makes chicken and dumplings for dinner (photo 2017) |
Meanwhile, our daddy,
an O’Brien, barbered in his shop on Seven Mile Road and Joann Street in Detroit
as Mommy helped Granny put up her garden in canning jars at her house in
Phelps.
As they wiped
sweat from their brows, my sisters and I played in Phelps’ alleys with the
Charles children. A lady named Beulah who wore too much makeup owned a store
and roller rink that Granny forbad us to enter.
The baby of ten
children, our father’s brothers were older and played baseball instead of
running races. After the mine fell in on Uncle Ed and crippled him, the men
stopped playing baseball in the Bottom.
My sisters and I
called Uncle Ed our Uncle Daddy because they looked so much alike. Sadly,
there’s not one O’Brien alive of their generation to say good-bye to Uncle Tab.
Since my sisters and I are half O’Brien, we’ll stand in for them.
After we received
the expected news about Uncle Tab, my husband and I celebrated the forty-fifth
birthday of our baby, Ruth. After she read the birthday letters we wrote, she
said, “If I live to ninety, I’ve spent half my life.”
Milestones such as
this cause a mother to linger in the moment. “If I live to be ninety, I’m in
the last quarter of my life,” I replied.
Last night, our
daughter Kelly called from California. “Mom, was it Uncle Tab or Herm who paid
all us kids $20 for standing on our heads in Nana’s family room?”
“Uncle Herm. So,
you remember?”
“Who could forget
an uncle shelling out twenty-dollar bills to his nieces and nephews for
standing on their heads?”
