My Uncle Tommy

Perhaps everyone has an uncle like my Uncle Tommy. Then again, maybe no one has an uncle like my Uncle Tommy. He was one of a kind. Who but Uncle Tommy would leave his farm in Missouri in his 70s to go prospect for gold in Nevada? Who else would come to my Daddy's funeral in 2000 wearing his only suit that he bought when Eisenhower was the president?

Okay, so you don't have my Uncle Tommy. Let me tell you about him or at least what I can remember, maybe the highlights of the times I spent with him before he died in 2004. Of all things, they cut his hair and shaved him and he wore a suit in the casket. I couldn't help but wonder who is this man? I never knew that man at all.

Uncle Tommy was one of those people who from my earliest memories I thought he was unusual or in my child's mind I thought he was really eccentric. He grew bean sprouts on the back porch; he only drank hot tea, not coffee like my mother and daddy; he often spoke in French though he was a farmer deep in the boondocks of SE Missouri. He filled the walls of my grandmother's house with classical paintings of old masters, and he always hung them at eye level to a giant. He lived with my grandparents even though he had his own farm he called "Buckhorn". As I recall it was a farm with a small shack on it, or what I would have thought a shack to be.

He often took me on walks around the farm to the papaw patch, to pick blackberries or grapes from the fence. As a little girls my mom and I lived on the farm while my dad was in Africa during World War II. I called him my big daddy, and my daddy was my "little daddy" because all I knew of him was a photograph my mom showed me frequently. He got me a goat as I was allergic to cow's milk. I was quite a little farm girl back then on the farm.

Over the years, Uncle Tommy continued to look like a prospector farming in Missouri. He had the long beard and looked like he stepped out of a 18th century novel. I never could understand how he seemed to know so much about everything. He was the one that took me into the front yard to watch Sputnik back when I was a young teenager. He was the one that later told me I needed to let my sister make her own decisions instead of telling her what crayon to use to color her picture. Always at Christmas, he would be the one to go out in the woods on the farm and chop down a tree for Christmas. It never looked like a Christmas tree, more like a branch off a tree with no leaves on it.

TO BE CONTINUED