My Great Uncle Jim
(Dec 20/05)
My great uncle Jim on my father’s side refused to eat vegetables or anything green or remotely green. That included lettuces, iceberg, romaine or Chinese Boc Chou, beans, waxed or shiny, pickles, be they Dills, Gerkins or bread and butter (he would, however, fish out a piece of cauliflower with a spoon and dry it on a napkin to rid it of that awful briny, green taste) and apples that weren’t red or almost red. His wife, my great aunt Alma, made the most scrumptious raspberry tarts with real butter she got from the neighbor’s cow, and crinkly pastry she made with unbleached flour and salt.
My great uncle Jim on my father’s side refused to eat vegetables or anything green or remotely green. That included lettuces, iceberg, romaine or Chinese Boc Chou, beans, waxed or shiny, pickles, be they Dills, Gerkins or bread and butter (he would, however, fish out a piece of cauliflower with a spoon and dry it on a napkin to rid it of that awful briny, green taste) and apples that weren’t red or almost red. His wife, my great aunt Alma, made the most scrumptious raspberry tarts with real butter she got from the neighbor’s cow, and crinkly pastry she made with unbleached flour and salt.
Their house was in the middle of town, South River, Ontario, so you could go to the general store on your own to buy Indian chewing tobacco or cheap cigarettes with no filters. My great uncle Jim smoked a pipe, sometimes his cob one, other times the heavy briar one he brought back from France after the war was over. He liked to smoke it on the front porch and watch the neighbors on their front porches and the out of town cars go by. He’d make a mental note of their license plates just in case there was some trouble in town, so he could help the sheriff nab the perpetrators and feel like he was contributing to civil obedience.
My great aunt Alma always wore the same apron, the one with ratty tie-ups and flowers on it, and a Sunday bonnet even on weekdays. The house smelled like a mixture of raspberry tarts, tobacco smoke, and old air. At dinnertime my great uncle always sat at the head of the table, next to a photograph of McArthur smoking his famous cob pipe and a grandfather clock that didn’t keep the right time; it was always 7 minutes off, either too early or too late.
Their eldest son, Vern, owned the distribution rights to the Shell gas franchise he shared with his two sons and a friend with a gamy leg and shallow breathing, from smoking Export A’s plain, non-filter for over thirty years non-stop. One time at dinner I tried to hide a green bean under my great uncle Jim’s mashed potatoes, but he sniffed it out with his hound’s nose. Not being able to focus properly with one eye, the one that didn’t get stabbed out by a splinter of wood from the band saw at the lumber mill where he worked when he returned home from the war he would never remember being in.
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