My sons looked warily at my Uncle Bill. Sitting in his chair, thin and on oxygen, he must have been intimating to them. Add to it that he is difficult to understand when he speaks — well, I guess they just didn’t know what to think of him.
I wish they had met him when I was young.
Uncle Bill is a cool uncle. He’s the one who would tell you your first dirty joke. He has a twinkle in his eye and fears nothing. And he loves my Aunt Shug (my dad’s sister, Lynn). In my book, that’s all that matters.
Time stole his strength from him. A few years before he became immobile, he ran a car wash that he owned. He was frail, hunched, shuffled when he walked and apparently an easy target for two criminals who thought they could rob him.
They thought wrong.
When they came at him, he stabbed one of them in the chest with a screwdriver. The second one charged him and he promptly ran a power drill into his face. As both men lay on the ground screaming in pain, Bill shuffled over their faces and promptly locked them in the closet until the police came.
The police ran their ID’s and found out that men were wanted criminals from Florida who had been responsible for several crimes in the area. They were returned to prison where one of them died. The second is in for life.
My sons hung on every word of my Aunt’s story. As we left that night, they hugged my Uncle in his chair. At that moment, I realized they saw the man who I had come to love when I was a child. They will always know how cool their Uncle Bill truly is. And they learned to judge a man not by his appearance but by the courage in his heart.
