{"id":55781,"date":"2013-07-08T16:31:53","date_gmt":"2013-07-08T20:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=55781"},"modified":"2019-01-06T14:12:57","modified_gmt":"2019-01-06T19:12:57","slug":"say-uncle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/07\/08\/say-uncle\/","title":{"rendered":"Say Uncle"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

My average encounter with my eighteen-month-old nephew, Crosby, goes like this: First, I press a button. The boy, who lives in Charlotte, appears on a piece of handheld video technology, wobbling like a sleepy bear cub, eating something that\u2019s not food (a TV remote; a shoe, maybe). Several states away, my wife and I speak into our technology. We say \u201cCrosby-face! There\u2019s<\/i> Crosby-face!\u201d Then my brother-in-law\u2019s unseen voice commands his son, like God or a drive-thru employee, to \u201cgive your aunt and uncle a kiss.\u201d Crosby lunges at his screen, at us<\/i>, toothless, dripping with joy. Like it\u2019s a part of a script, I yell \u201cCrosby\u2019s trying to eat my face!\u201d then my wife yells \u201cWho\u2019s<\/i> trying to eat somebody\u2019s face?\u201d and right on cue our screen goes pink with a toddler\u2019s wet gums. It goes on like this for minutes, my wife and I encouraging our poor nephew\u2014this pure, adorable maniac\u2014to actually ingest a touchscreen device<\/i>. \u201cOh no! Crosby\u2019s eating us!\u201d we say to no one. \u201cHe\u2019s eating our noses! What will we do?!?\u201d we say, until Crosby, cackling wildly, knocks the device from his father\u2019s hands, and like the ill-fated hunters of the Blair Witch ghost, our transmission falls black at once.<\/p>\n

Until seconds later, when we repeat the whole encounter again.<\/p>\n

This interaction, or some version of it, has happened at least three times a week for the last year and a half in my home. As an uncle, I don\u2019t know if I can take much more. But it\u2019s not because I don\u2019t love my nephew (Crosby says \u201chungry\u201d both with words and<\/i> in sign language; his blue eyes go big when you toss him airborne), or because I\u2019m or some fist-shaking curmudgeon, longing for the days when we were linked to one another by strings and soup cans. In my non-uncle life I\u2019m a nonstop texter and G-chatter. I\u2019m as incessant on the social channels as any other needy soul in that shallow ether. My aversion to v-chatting with Crosby has less to do with the means<\/i> than it does with the meaning<\/i>. Crosby\u2019s my first bona fide nephew, my first shot at the job of human uncle, and the thrice-a-week check-ins, the iPad cuddly-cuddly, our faces held apart by a pane of glass\u2014like prison inmates\u2019 to their visiting loved ones\u2019\u2014it\u2019s all cramping my uncle-ing style.<\/p>\n

Or, I should say, what I thought that style might be. I\u2019ve never had a desire to be a father (nor my wife a mother), but I\u2019ve always coveted the idea of unclehood. Unlike the high executive role of parent, to be an uncle is to exist in a family on an ill-defined, lawless plane. You\u2019re bonded to a niece or nephew, but with almost zero obligation to contribute anything productive to that bond. As a result, an uncle (especially a childless one) can be to a kid a kind of approachable chaos: part Falstaff, part Biden, someone who interlopes from a foreign, adult land with noogies and shitty gifts to either give a kid a glimpse into a realm beyond their daily rules (\u201chere, have a sip of this beer\u201d), or to provide a sly reminder of why those rules exist in the first place (\u201chere, have a sip of this beer\u201d). My own uncles had names like Perk, Bo, Whitey, and Spin, each of them their own benign, loveable mess, always armed with some lesson or trick that my own parents, in their roles, couldn\u2019t seem to pull off: nose-steals, coins appearing from my ear, pull-my-finger<\/i>, and so on.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a porousness that often falls more sadly on uncles than it does on the rest of the Extended Family Day Players. Grandparents, for instance, have their majestic infallibility, cousins the close-knit intimacy of near siblings. Then there\u2019s the unconquerable Cool Aunt, who somehow just gets<\/i> a child\u2019s humor, style, and sensibility. The uncle\u2019s most stubborn archetype? The Drunk Uncle, a soul so downtrodden and ingrained in Americana that he\u2019s now a recurring character<\/a> on Saturday Night Live<\/i>. Played with hilarious precision by Bobby Moynihan, Drunk Uncle doesn\u2019t show up on Weekend Update often, just around the holidays. But when he does\u2014sporting a Members Only jacket, gripping a glass of watered-down Crown, slurring on about how kids today vote for elections using Groupons<\/a>\u2014he\u2019s a harbinger of the awkward, true-life encounter to come for all of us. Yet what makes Moynihan\u2019s Drunk Uncle so brilliant isn\u2019t just the inappropriateness or the one-liners (though they certainly help). It\u2019s his ability to tap into something inherently lost<\/i> within the poor guy. Moynihan\u2019s Drunk Uncle, like so many real life uncles, is a man without a time, a symphony of confused identity, raging against his displacement from both parental and youth culture, a failed way station between the two.<\/p>\n

My own drunk uncle, a slick LA-type, was married to my cool aunt (for a while, anyway). He inhaled whiskey, collected wind-up toys, and convinced me at age five that the best way to get rid of my loose front tooth was to let him punch the thing out of my mouth. I\u2019m not saying I want to be that<\/i> kind of uncle to Crosby. Not even close. What I\u2019m saying is that the netherland of the uncle can yield useful things, such as a kid\u2019s first real opportunity to flat-out dislike<\/i> a grown-up. Unlike with parents or teachers, there\u2019s no confusing authority-resentment when it comes to uncles. They\u2019re such sideline players in a child\u2019s family that they can be early models for what it\u2019s like to live civilly among people for whom you have, at best, limited affection for (see: classmates, eventual coworkers). This doesn\u2019t apply to all uncles, of course. I\u2019ve found in my adult years that a majority of mine are surprising, fascinating guys. But at even five years old, I was shocked at how unconflicted I felt as I watched my bloody front tooth hit my drunk uncle\u2019s linoleum, thinking something not unlike Wow, this guy: grade-A dickface<\/i>. Yet even if I didn\u2019t realize it then, he proved himself in that moment a helpful primer; a durable example of the type of person I later knew to steer clear of.<\/p>\n

But the key to this kind of clarity and remove in a child, and what I suspect makes me so reluctant to keep up with Crosby every third day, is the magical element of distance<\/i>. And while one might think that speaking through circuitry serves only to highlight exactly how far we are from one another, what I\u2019m talking about here is the threat of the ever-present. There\u2019s a reason it can take years (or sometimes lifetimes) to extract even the simplest meaning from our entanglements with parents and siblings. We\u2019ve been smothered by their presence through whole eras, kept so close to them from such a young age that we can spend much of our adulthoods a-waiting for just a shred of clear perspective on those relationships\u2014and by extension, ourselves\u2014to emerge.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s monumentally hard work, and Crosby, with his big blue eyes and his wet gums, is about to enter the slow process of discovering that for himself. Every time his ringtone chimes on my handheld device I see into the future, to years on end of these virtual check-ins, where I learn every morsel of this child\u2019s life through the window of an iPad or whatever comes after. Gone is my loutish privilege as an uncle to play the color commentator to the passage of time, to spark in Crosby the embarrassment of an \u201cI remember when\u201d moment from his bald, postfetal days, or the indignant shock of hearing me say, when he\u2019s fifteen, \u201cWhat are you, like, twelve now?\u201d At this rate I fear I\u2019ll end up knowing everything<\/i> about the kid, then by virtue of exposure forge earnest investments in what I\u2019ve learned, and soon enough I\u2019ll be on Crosby\u2019s list of \u201cRelatives to Whom I\u2019m Way Too Close to Decipher.\u201d Which is why I\u2019m tempted to stay a one-dimensional character in Crosby\u2019s life, a gimme, someone he\u2019ll know exactly what to expect from at all times. I want to give him the freedom to feel about me however he chooses, and to do that, I wonder if I\u2019ll need to back away from the Web cam if only to make myself as disconnected as an uncle might have to be.<\/p>\n

When I was young my favorite part of Jim Henson\u2019s Fraggle Rock<\/i> was when Gobo, the show\u2019s central Muppet, received postcards from his uncle Traveling Matt, who explored the world and wrote meandering tales of it. A new postcard came at the end of every show, and when I watched Gobo read them, I often imagined my own uncles exploring their worlds, doing things so vastly different than the two loving, exhausted specimens of adulthood who doted on me every day in my own home. That intriguing absence, that distance, allowed me to eventually see myself<\/i> doing things vastly different from my parents, too. It allowed me to become, like my uncles, my own flawed version of a man. Maybe, even with all the face time, I\u2019ll still be that distant template for Crosby. But I can\u2019t help but think there\u2019s a reason we\u2019re told to say uncle when we\u2019re caught in the grips of something. It\u2019s the universal password for letting go.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Mike Scalise\u2019s work has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>Agni,\u00a0<\/em>Ninth Letter,\u00a0<\/em>Post Road,\u00a0<\/em>Press Play, the\u00a0<\/em>Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He\u2019s received fellowships and scholarships from Yaddo and Bread Loaf, and was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University. You can follow him on Twitter\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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