Short Circuits by Dorien Grey Page B

Fat, Cork, and their families were there when I returned Mom’s body for burial beside my dad. I’m not sure what I would have done without them.
    I don’t think Aunt Thyra graduated from high school, and she wasn’t particularly well-read or worldly, but she more than made up for any lack in the quality of her unconditional love. After the death of my parents, she was my rock—the one remaining sturdy thread connecting me to all the love of my childhood.
    And then one day in 1976 she suffered a heart attack and, rather than calling for an ambulance, called for Jack to come take her to a doctor. He found her dead on the bedroom floor, where she had been putting on a pair of stockings. She would never allow herself to die less than a lady.
    Life is never easy, and as we grow older, we lose more and more of the people who were part of the very foundation of our lives. Most of my foundation is gone now. And to this day, I grieve for Ray, for my father, for Uncle Buck and all my dead relatives, and most especially, I think, for my mother…and Aunt Thyra.
    * * *
    UNCLE BUCK
    Odd, now that I think of it. I told you earlier I always looked on Aunt Thyra as being my second mom…but I just realized that I never thought of Uncle Buck as a second dad. He was just my Uncle Buck, and he had…and has…a special place in my heart like no one else. And yet both Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck treated me as though I were one of their own, and I never had the slightest doubt that I
belonged.
    Uncle Buck was an auto mechanic all his life, and a darned good one, too. He had a definite preference for Ford products and I still can close my eyes and see his four-door 1939 Mercury, which he had all during WWII (they stopped making passenger cars from 1942 to 1946 because of the war).
    At one point he worked for a local dairy as a truck mechanic. Crates of milk were conveyed from the dairy to the trucks by putting them, like train cars, on a long track of metal rollers. He often worked weekends, and on such occasions, I’d go with my cousins Jack, Cork, and Fat to visit him. Those were my favorite times, because one of them would put me in an empty milk crate at one end of the rollers and push me, giddy with delight, down to the other end, where one of the other boys would catch me.
    And I remember the dairy still had an old horse-drawn delivery wagon. It was no longer used, but it was there.
    One of my earliest memories is of standing in the back yard of Aunt Thyra’s and Uncle Buck’s house watching him while he worked on the engine of a car in the driveway. It was the first time in my life that I was aware of the sound of someone
breathing.
And I see him in the coal bin of the basement, shoveling huge mounds of dusty coal into the fiery maw of the house’s furnace.
    Often, when Mom and I were living apart from my dad, Uncle Buck would come by in a dairy truck and pick me up and take me with him wherever he was going.
    Oh, yes…and I was never “Roger” to Uncle Buck. I was “Guggenheimer.”
    But our very special time together was when he would take me down to the train station to watch the trains come in. He would put me up on one of those large, high-wheeled baggage carts that were high enough to be level with the doors on the baggage cars. I’d stand there, lost in wonder as the iron monsters chugged ponderously past, not eight feet away, grinding to a stop in a cacophony of clanging bells and groaning brakes, all wreathed in steam and smoke from the engine’s smokestack. And one time, while Mom was with us, Uncle Buck actually handed me up to the engineer and I got to stand in the cab of a
real train!
And it wasn’t until the engineer went about getting the train ready to move that Uncle Buck took me down. Mom was furious with him, sure that the train was going to pull out with me still in the cab.
    Uncle Buck was probably the quintessential big brother. My mom