It's two quiet hours through small towns and miles and miles of barbed-wire fences to the particular small town of my father, and I prefer to drive it with only the road whine. I lived there for a while as a kid, another stop on the constant journey of restlessness that was the life of our family until my father decided to leave us and travel on alone in search of nothing at all. We were abandoned there, in his small town, when he walked away. We didn't stay long. My mother bundled us all up and moved us into a string of single-parent rent houses in the poorer parts of this bigger city where her parents lived. This is the city I think of as home. That small town is more like a legend, a part of the legend of Dad.
He's been back in the town for a few years now. For almost thirty years from the time he left us there we didn't see him. We heard rumor from time to time. Finally we caught up with him. He was in prison. Narcotics charges. We visited him a couple of times while he was in, sent him some letters and a little money for incidentals. When they let him out he was old and tired of searching, it seems. He went back to the town, moved in with his sister. Now he lives in a tiny travel trailer just off the town square. He works as a welder. We see him on Christmas and Easter, from time to time.
Uncle Ronald was always going to die. Diabetes, which also caught up with my father while he was in prison, had ravaged Uncle Ronald for years. Several of them have it, my father's brothers and sisters, though only Uncle Ronald ever had any trouble with it. He lost most of his foot to rot a few years ago. He had a kidney transplant several months ago. It never really took. Last week the family decided not to fight it any more. The doctor put him on a morphine drip to ease his pain. He passed on Sunday. I never really knew him, though he was one of the few who tried to keep in touch with my sister and me. He always lived at home with his mother, taking care of her when he was well enough himself. In July, when the doctor told me, as I had always feared, that a general restlessness of the soul was not the only thing I had inherited from my father, I thought of my Uncle Ronald. Whenever I think about letting my guard down, forgetting my diet, taking it easy, I always think of my Uncle Ronald.
Today we'll bury him in the little cemetery in Pecan Wells. First we'll have lunch at the little Baptist Church on the edge of town, out on 22, the road that leads to Meridian. We'll see the family again, see my father. My sister is coming up from Bryan. It's a grey, cold day, perfect for a funeral, for the slow, sad decline of small town family.
When you leave the town behind you to head home, the cool mist of legend parts and you are reminded again of the real world outside. On the way home I like to listen to music loud, to feel as alive as I can.
Hello, friends. How are you today?
Later. Love.
