My Uncle Dale

 By Linda Carter

I don’t know how to explain it. I doubt my cousins or siblings would be able to describe the feeling either. But there was something special about our Uncle Dale.

In my littlest years, he was one of the biggest figures. A tall, strong furry man with a bald head and enough hair on his chest and back to cover many men. He didn’t shy from taking his shirt off, so we have a racy picture of him resting his head in the lap of Aunt Bernice.

She was a family legend. The brightest red hair on top of a fair, freckled face. She was hopelessly devoted to her tiny Chihuahua named Missy Chico. Missy Chico was fed baby food and coddled beyond description. But I would fight anyone who tried to take away my Aunt Bernice stories.

I look at it this way; my Uncle Dale loved her, he slept with her and she didn’t kill me when I threw up on her leg in the car on the way home from my brother Gary’s funeral.

Just a few years ago, I learned the story of how Uncle Dale almost died. He was in a bar in St. Paul Minnesota and as my mother describes it, my uncle could be, well, an asshole when he was drinking. He got into a fight and was knifed. Knifed badly, his guts hanging out of the cut made by another bar patron, probably an asshole too.

Aunt Bernice held his insides as they rode to the hospital in an ambulance.

My mother left her five children in the care of her mother and oldest kids and drove to the Twin Cities with my Aunt Fern from Sioux Falls. Uncle Dale survived.

It wasn’t the first time. My Uncle Dale served in the Army during World War II and my mother said he was deeply disturbed by some of the things he had witnessed.

To us, he was a bright star in our lives who always brought laughter and light to our childhoods.

My sister Kathy tells the most wonderful story. She and cousin Janell got to stay overnight with Grandma Coy. During the visit, my Uncle Dale arrived. He brought with him brand new mittens for Kathy and Janell.  They were thrilled, not just with the mittens, but with the fact that a favorite uncle remembered them at Christmas.

This reminds me of a story my Mother once told me. As a little girl during the Depression, she received a plastic doll for Christmas. It was just a little doll, but she could hold it, she could make up stories about it, she could make clothes for it.  And she knew that her parents had to scrape and scratch to give their seven kids any kind of a Christmas morning.

The special gifts we are given in life vary in size and in meaning. I am so glad I have the memories of a big bear of a man who always smiled at me and made me laugh.

Linda Carter

© 2014