Sean Tarjoto

Prose Comp I

Prof. Cleveland

Sept. 14, 1999

"I have an idea," my uncle Walt once said, shortly before walking into the street with only a pair of sandals and a golf cap.

I compare Uncle Walt to an extinct animal, perhaps the dodo, trying to survive the tyranny of common sense.

In the pool of my family’s genes, Uncle Walt was an unshorn ball of black wool, meandering among our fluffy white herd of businessmen and doctors. My mother once told me how when he was eight, he opened up a confessional on the corner of her old neighborhood. He would charge twenty-five cents per confession, and an additional ten for absolutions. Within the week, Father Ron had been assigned by the local (Catholic) church to shut down Walt’s fledgling entrepreneurship.

I loved to have him visit our doily-laid suburban house filled with plastic piping and latex walls. He would move things quietly, making sure only I saw him. He nudged picture frames into a better light and untangled cords behind desks. And then, he would leave some new mysterious object with meaning and history and karma under our pearl-white, plastic-wrapped sofa. I imagined how many of them might’ve come from some island on the other side of the world. After he left, I would hurry to intercept them before the vacuum of my mother, who always cleaned the house after his visits, did.

I vividly remember a discussion with him concerning the pointlessness of the serving clasps and scoop spoons that lay resting in the self-serve cookie trays of hospital cafeterias. We were sitting next to a window with a beautiful view of the parking lot, and had just finished lunch. My mother stood to get more cookies, when he blurted out, "You risk a greater chance of infection by using the same cookie scoop as the rest of the hospital than by simply picking up the cookie itself with your own fingers."

"What, Walt?" she asked, half exasperated, half hungry.

"Everyone uses that scoop with their hands. You’re going to eat that cookie. With your hands. Just pick up the cookie. No clasp, no germs."

"I’ll try, Walt." my mother said, as she simultaneously rolled her eyes. Before she could walk away enough to appear unassociated with us, Walt yelled, "Germ warfare!"

That day we were in the hospital because my grandfather had suffered a heart attack. Uncle Walt referred to it as a myocardial infarction. He would say it, eyes cast downward for only the briefest of moments, before perking up immediately. Perhaps he felt the clinical nature of such an overtly technical term would allow him to possess the businesslike bedside manner which doctors, having to do their job and tell a terminally diagnosed patient just how many months they had to live, used to psychologically protect themselves. Except, the American Medical Association ensured that no doctor would have to give such grim information to any patient that was a relative. Uncle Walt wasn’t even a doctor.

At times, I didn’t know who to empathize with more. Lying stricken, with IV tubes and wires between his veins and an ugly collection of computers was my grandfather, who up until that point was always powerful and strict in his ways. He was struggling to understand his apparently insane son before the future ensured he couldn’t. Beside my grandfather’s deathbed between my mother and three brothers, with my father and his family littered randomly around the room, was my uncle, the bohemian, in his velvet pants and pink t-shirt.

"Death is a cycle of life, one where your dimensions will become elevated and your soul grow greater," Walt stated. He was met by the silence, tears, and sobbing, as we all looked at him.

To a child, adults are giant lumbering creatures of domineering perfection. They are what you believe you will eventually become. As you grow, this image is systematically shattered, and soon there are only a few adults you consider superior. After hearing uncle Walt speak about death I was exposed to the death of one of these illusions -- adults are never afraid. I noticed all the adults suddenly become unsettled. Some walked away, muttering to themselves. Others simply ignored him, consoling my grandfather with overkill assurances. My grandmother sat quietly in shock; years of suppressed emotion having glued her need to show despair flat on the desert of her immovable lips. My mother could only stare obtusely and crush my shoulders slowly. I told her it hurt, and she apologized and continued to squeeze.

What happened next was unnecessarily violent and tragic, and oddly I hardly remember it. It is a distinct blur, perhaps because I chose to subconsciously suppress it. My father suddenly called Walt an irresponsible bastard, an accident, a half-brother out of wedlock with an insane woman who was now spending her days in a nameless mental hospital no one in the family either cared to remember or visit. My mother swung around to my father, I think, to hit him, or say something, or avenge her brother. Then, the sound of pulse stopping squealed from the heart monitor, following by the commotion of a room of too many visitors; too much family.

The doctors had to push everyone aside and out of the room before they difribulated my grandfather to life. Under the trampled shoving of hands and knees I still managed to see my grandfather’s body lurch and crumble, lurch and crumble.

The next day Uncle Walt had a new idea; he would leave, and find his mother. He came the next night while I was pretending to be asleep, the images of the hospital room echoing in my child’s mind with both the awe and fear of adults not knowing what to do. If I had been sleeping, Uncle Walt would never have managed to slip the small black box under the pillow, the box I spent that whole night trying to open, and the one I’m spending my whole life keeping to myself.

Twenty-four hours later my mother filed a missing person’s report and began to wait. I am also waiting for him. I am waiting for him to come with the key to the box I cannot open, and see what new mysterious objects are waiting for me. Not until he is there with me, will I be able to open and decipher his secret for him, while the rest of family remains in their own boxes. I can only guard it, and keep it safe, for later.