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The holidays have just rolled past and for most of us that means the carnival of all our extended family have made the rounds as well. And although I don’t want to get into too much personal detail here, I’m positive that every English major has had a similar conversation (at least once) with a member of his or her kin and clan as the one I’m about to describe, so I feel like this might be pertinent.

For me it always comes from my Great Uncle George, who operates in a series of superimposed cycles stretching outwards, so that looking at one’s watch at any point in the day, or checking the calendar on any day of the year, you could guess (by time alone) what exactly Georgie might be doing. His endless repetitions are probably the whispers of some incoming senility, but they are also the product of his divorce, at 58, which pretty much sent him reeling, emotionally speaking, into the safe-track trenches of a world without painful reminders. His advice, and he is a big giver of advice is just as repetitious, every time I see him he always hits me with his cautionary tale: “And Marky-boy, Malarky-boy, remember this, if nothing else: The only thing stupider than getting married is getting divorced. That’s how they getcha’.” Who and why: forever obscure.

Uncle George has spent his life in one long, sustained verbal performance. And he’s picked up conversational tricks from all sorts: the old Jewish men eternally martyred in his retirement home; the Irish boyos, verbally clubbing one another for sport, with whom he’d worked the mills; and not nearly least of all the Newfies he’d met out on an oil rigger. This synthesis of speech patterns not only gave him interesting mixes, but endowed him with the frame of mind necessary to create whole new expressions, personally trademarked Uncle George® (my favorites included, when you asked him if he’d mind doing something for you, the response: “I’d rather be rum running across Hell’s own border”, and when you ask him where he’s been, the answer: “Oh y’know. North of the sea, south of the sun”).

As for the conversation I’ve hinted at up to now, I figure it might be best to just script out a single instance of the more general trend. And so here it goes:
Uncle George: “Now tell me this, and tell me straight, can you name me one great writer who died happy? No. They all crumple up in some garret somewhere, syphilitic and strapped with gout, alone and still growling at the universe. Science. Now that’s a profession! There you have your success on a piece of paper. A decoded the human genome, B cured polio – and on, and on, and if you’re lucky – a Nobel Prize!” Here his eyes got that fresh-minted coin sheen.

Marcus: “There’s a Nobel Prize for literature too, y’know.”

“Bah.” He waved this category away as if it were just an oversight, which had not, but soon would be, correctively deleted. “What’s important here is happiness. A scientist works towards a goal, he can measure all his success and failure against that finish line – and so he keeps his head on square. What’s a writer to do? Work to a word count? But we both know it works in no such way. And when you start to write about your friends (which let me tell you: you inevitably will), they leave out of anger. And guess what, you’re glad to see them go, because they never lived up to your wonderful characters anyhow. And there you are: alone and unhappy. Is this what you want?”

“Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest scientific minds, maybe ever, and he died by himself in a hotel room, talking to pigeons.”

“Well, at least he had friends! What self-respecting pigeon would talk to a dying poet?”

“Will you leave him alone George, it’s his passion.” Why is it that nothing marginalizes the things you care about quite like hearing your mom defend your right to be interested in them?

“What? You’d rather I didn’t care at all about his future? You’d rather I send him a birthday card n’ 20 dollars every year, like some people [I’m not exactly sure who he meant here. It no doubt involved some well-savored family wound that he’d been picking at for years, maybe decades], and we leave it at that? No such luck. I care! So sue me.” This challenge carried with it the implicit threat that Uncle George would mop the floor with you in any courtroom from here to Alaska.

“I’m not even sure if I want to be a writer, I could be a teacher – a professor maybe.”

“Ooo la-la. Professor Marcus. What, you gonna’ need to get yourself a pair of snobby glasses.”

“Uncle George, you wear glasses.”

“Aha! And who’s a bigger prick than me?’’

It’s usually around this point that he’d laugh himself hoarse at his own joke and send me off with a choice liquor order to drown out the itching in his throat. When I was small he’d always give me the slum dog milliliters at the bottom of his glass (to grow hair on my chest). It’d be easy to assume that Uncle George’s recurring lecture series on the folly of my academic path were some kind of working class response to what he perceived to be stuffy high culture. But despite his best efforts to hide it, Uncle George just overflows with good feeling for other people. And deep down inside I know a storyteller like him can’t help but perceive himself as an unrecognized poet. More likely than not his whole spiel relates back to that little dose of alcohol at the bottom of his glass that he’d force on the boy hanging round him at bended knee. It’s all a series of tests, and Uncle George wants to give the vitriol, wants to set the bar higher than anyone who might not know what he knows: that his great-nephew is just that. And that should I make that final leap, that sends me up and over, as he watches smiling from the sidelines, he can say:
“Well I’ll be damned, the sunnabitch did it.”