Remembering my Uncle Ray

I just arrived home from my Uncle Ray’s funeral. It was a nice service; the reverend said all the right things, familiar faces of seldom seen relations provided some comfort for the grieving; the skies were blameless and blue.

During his eulogy, the minister made note of the ways in which my uncle’s life had touched the lives of those around him, of the “seeds” he had planted during his 80 years on this earth. At one point the reverend asked if anyone in the congregation would like to comment aloud, to recall some contribution my uncle had made in his or her life.

A few folks did; a neighbor, a young woman, one of my uncle’s coworkers from his days at Steelcase. I sat there in silence, wishing I had the courage to stand up in front of such a large gathering and tell everyone just how much my Uncle Ray meant to me, how big a part he played in making me, for better or worse, the man I am today.

But I just sat there, afraid if I spoke up I’d end up breaking down and looking like a big, fat crybaby in front of all those people. Were I braver, this is what I would have said:

My Uncle Ray was my first hero. He was a strapping man, tall, handsome as Elvis with a singing voice to match. He played guitar with a Johnny Cash-like authority.

I can remember the first time I heard him play and sing, in my parents’ kitchen. I was seven, maybe eight at the time and had never heard real, live music before. I was hooked from the first C chord; all I wanted was to be like Uncle Ray.

Being the man he was, he took me under his wing, taught me how to play E, A and B, taught me to count to four and keep passable time. It would be easy to say the “seed” he planted in me was music. But music was just the tip of a very, very large iceberg. 

All the really important lessons I learned just from being around the man, from my too-infrequent moments spent walking in his shadow. He taught me a man can be strong as an oak and gentle as the beating of a swallow’s wing; in fact, that’s the only way a man can ever truly be strong.

He taught me that while life isn’t always fair, a good man does what he can to make it as fair as it can be. My uncle showed me how to be a father, a husband, a man.

His love for his wife, my Aunt Myrtle, for his children, Dawn, Arnold and Ray, and for his God was a rock, unassailable, immutable as the earth itself. I have never known a man more comfortable in his own skin than was my Uncle Ray.

Too often in my own life I have fallen short of the example he set, but because of him, even with all my flaws, I have done my best. I will never be the man he was; hell, I don’t know anyone who could be. But I’m better, far better than I might have been, just for having known him.

The Scriptures tell us there is no perfect man, that we all fall far short of grace. I suppose that’s true. I know my uncle would say it is.

But, for my money, at least, my Uncle Ray came pretty close.

That’s what I would have said, if I’d had the guts to stand up in front of that crowd.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com / (616) 548-8273

Recovering from advice my mother gave me isn’t easy

No Irish kid ever loved his mother more than I did. But through most of my childhood and all my teen years I pushed her, I’m sure, toward thoughts of suicide. Or possibly homicide. To her credit, she never killed either herself or me. That level of restraint couldn’t have been easy to maintain.

Before the Alzheimer’s stole most of her marbles, my mom was a smart, savvy cookie, especially for a woman who came of age during the myopically misogynistic 1940s and ‘50s. Despite giving birth to her first child (me!) while still in her teens — as well as to the four siblings who followed — she still managed to get some college under her belt and help my old man run his restaurants. (And when I say “help,” I mean she did everything that required math skills, managerial talent or book smarts.)

She was a strong, intelligent woman, which is probably why I’m attracted to strong, intelligent women to this day. But I don’t want to get all Freudian here, or Oedipusilian (which is a word I just extracted from the epic tragedy by Sophocles; let’s see if we can’t get it in the next edition, Mr. Webster).

Despite her strength and intelligence, my mother was still very much a woman of her time and as such, she had a store of “wisdom” — passed down from mother to daughter, I assume — that would have sounded more at home coming from the mouth of Golde, Tevye’s provincial wife from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” She had a rich store of sayings, proverbs, maxims, and curses that addressed, though sometimes only elliptically, most any situation.

By the time I was a young adult, I had learned to tune my parents out and replace whatever they were saying with the lyrics from Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” LP. But earlier on, when I was just a kid, I, like most kids, thought everything my mother said was the unadulterated, unfiltered truth.

I was a “believing kid,” as my grandmother used to say. If my mother made a statement, I believed it, regardless of how implausible or irrational that statement might be. You’d think this would have prepared me for a life of watching Fox news, but nope. Eventually, I got smarter.

That’s another story. The point is, I believed whatever tidbits my mother dragged from her maternal lore repository.

One of my favorites was, “If you keep making that face it’ll freeze that way!”

Now, I was eight, and when mom said this, I took her at her word. Since I was a huge fan of horror movies, horror magazines and all things horror, I practiced for hours in front of the mirror, trying to get my face to fold into a reasonable facsimile of Lon Cheney’s werewolf, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, or the gill-necked Creature from the Black Lagoon. I figured if I could get my face to freeze in some monstrous sneer or snarl, I would be able to keep girls and their cooties away from me for life!

As it turns out, I was able to keep girls away even without making gruesome expressions, a talent I maintain to this very day. My face never did freeze, however. 

“I hope your kids turn out just like you!” This one was usually delivered to my receding back as I stormed from the house following a heated mother-son quarrel. It didn’t bother me at the time because at age 13 the notion of having kids of my own seemed as remote as the rings around Saturn. 

Later in life, though, when I was married and planning a family, my mother’s curse echoed across the years and filled me with dread. I remembered all too well the grief I had brought into her life and feared her long-ago curse might still have enough Mojo to put the whammy on my own parenting experience.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried; my own kids, when they came along, were wonderful and gave me almost no trouble from birth right through to the day they left the nest to pursue their own dreams. Years later I learned my daughter was up to all sorts of crazy, dangerous hijinks during her teen years, but she was smart enough not to let me find out about her nefarious activity. So I was able to go through parenthood blissfully unaware of any wrongdoing.

By the time she ‘fessed up to such things as sneaking out of the house at night to take part in “train dodging,” she was an adult and the statute of limitations had run out. So I lucked out there.

My mom also assured me that: a) The Beatles were a “fad” and not as good as The Monkeys anyway, b) it is impossible to have a physical relationship with a nice, Catholic girl until after a big, church wedding, and c) eating meatloaf will “build character.” 

She was wrong on all counts. And yet, all these years later, I still find myself attracted to nice Catholic girls with lousy taste in music who know how to make meatloaf. 

It’s probably best I don’t know what Freud and Sophocles have to say on the subject.

It’s time to explore the power of negative thinking!

I’ve never been one of those people who get into “self-help” books. The few I’ve actually bothered to look at have been either poorly written, simplistic in the extreme or so treacly that they wind up being, for me, at least, the literary equivalent of ipecac. 

I have little faith in under-accredited, overzealous “experts” who want to tell me how to live a fuller, richer life. I figure anyone who can’t figure this sort of thing out for themselves probably deserves the life they’ve got, me included.

But I will admit I kind of got sucked into that whole Power of Positive Thinking movement back in the ‘70s. Norman Vincent Peale wrote the book of the same name decades earlier, but somehow I discovered it in high school and took its message to heart — for a while.

I honestly believed that if I “visualized” a happy life (which for me, at the time, included a cute girlfriend, a new motorcycle, and an I.D. that would let me buy beer) those things would actually happen. I no longer remember much about the book or even the ideology it advanced, but I was very into it at the time.

So I visualized all the time, particularly with regard to the cute girlfriend issue. Sometimes, I would visualize several cute girlfriends, in fact; the details of those visualizations are none of your business.

But none of that stuff ever actually came to pass, despite my active, hormone-fueled imagination. I did occasionally have a cute girlfriend, but despite my awesome visualization skills, my motorcycle steadfastly refused to be anything other than a decades-old Harley that had to be kicked over for ten minutes every morning just to get ‘er started. The fake I.D. also never materialized, but that was OK since the drinking age was 18 back then and I was more interested in girls and motorcycles than I was in beer, anyway.

Eventually, I figured out I could visualize all day and nothing was going to come of it. It was at this point I began my long descent into curmudgeonliness, which, to my surprise, is actually a real word.

For most of my life, I’ve maintained an attitude best summed up by the following thought: “Well, it probably won’t work out, but I’ll go ahead and give it a try anyway.” The idea behind this attitude is, if I succeed, I get to be pleasantly surprised; if I fail, I’m not terribly disappointed, since I expected to fail from the get-go.

This philosophy helped me live a mostly stress-free life and kept me for the most part off the suicide hotline.

Over the years, not everyone has understood my Eyore-like reasoning. Some folks, especially really “up” people like my last girlfriend, find it annoying and depressing. But it turns out I was right all along and Norman Vincent Peale was not. Or at least that’s what a recent study says.

In that study, social psychologists Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer asked 83 German students to rate the extent to which they “experienced positive thoughts, images, or fantasies on the subject of transition into work life, graduating from university, looking for and finding a job.” 

A couple years later, they checked in with those same students — now adults in the job market — to see how things were going. The students who visualized positive things happening in their lives, it turns out, had not been too diligent when sending out resumes (since good things were just going to “happen” anyway) and consequently had crummier jobs. The kids who predicted a life filled with doom and gloom worked harder to prevent same and wound up in good jobs with higher salaries.

Likewise, the positive thinkers were actually less likely to make the first move, romance-wise, and hence ended up alone and lonely more often than the gloomy Gus’s who figured they’d never get a date but went ahead and asked anyway.

Similar research has been done at various institutes and universities around the world; all studies produced similar results. Positive thinkers, it turns out, expect more but achieve less.

So, with that in mind, I’ve decided to redouble my efforts to be negative and curmudgeonly as much as possible. With any luck, I’ll be rich and famous in no time.

Although, I don’t really expect that to happen.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com (616) 548-8273

Now THIS is how all my reader mail should be!

I get a lot of reader mail; seems like a lot to me, anyway, since I'm more or less a nobody, or at least nobody special (it's only false modesty if it ain't true, folks).  I love hearing from readers who see my column either here or in the various newspapers in which it appears.  I even like hearing from readers who think I'm an idiot and they are, perhaps not surprisingly, legion.

But I received this letter last week, on a day I was questioning my life choices -- those myriad blunders that have lead me to my current, lowly situation -- and wondering if I should just chuck it all and get a good job, Walmart greeter, maybe, or French fry engineer at McDonald's.

This letter, should you be wondering, is exactly the right way to communicate with -- not just me -- but any local author struggling to make a buck in an industry that is slowly suffocating beneath the weight of the ponderous monstrosity that is the Internet.  Writing in general and print journalism in particular, while not yet dead , are slowly fading to black.  A letter like the one that follows is a ray of sunshine into any writer's drab existence and certainly better than the messages that read simply, "You stink!" or "You're a no-talent hack!" or "The white powder on this envelope is anthrax and I will no longer have to see your crummy column hogging space on the op-ed page, space that could otherwise have been filled by George Will's brilliant prose!"

I've changed the name of the author here, in order to protect her identity.  So without further preamble, I'll turn the floor over to "Flo."

---

Mike,

I do it every Thursday...and I do it on the floor...it's the only place that's safe.  

I was talking about reading your column...what were you thinking?  (Oh, perish the thought of what the nuns at St. Isadore would say!)

Seriously, I have wanted to write and thank you for a very long time for writing your column and giving me at least one laugh each week.  You see, I am now an empty-nester (really empty...divorced, too).  Both of my boys are in college, and that's a good thing.  However, my youngest, ****, made me laugh every day of my life.  I miss that tremendously!  So, when I discovered your column in the Daily News on Thursdays, it started to fill the humor hole that I had had for 18 plus years of my life.  Now, if you could only write it every day that would be even better.  But these days, I will take what I can get in the humor category.

And since I talk about you incessantly to anyone who will listen, I also declare that I am your biggest fan.  Not the guy who tacks your column to the refrigerator.  My favorite columns of yours are not out for public display or to have the edges wrinkle, the page turn yellow, or get battered-up by the mixer.  Nope.  My favorite columns of yours are safely tucked away in a Rubbermaid tub, and you know how safe things are in those.  And, since you asked, the reason I have to read your column on the floor has become a safety issue.  While reading about ramen noodles, I literally laughed so hard that I fell off the kitchen chair!  That may have also been funny, however, there were no witnesses.  So after that episode, I moved into the living room to the couch.  Sounded like a pretty safe place to read.  Oh, but then you had to write about cats and extension ladders, and again I fell off the furniture.  So now I have moved to the floor.  And there is no eating allowed while reading either due to a potential choking hazard.  (And, no, I am not looking to sue you for damages...thankfully there were none.  Sigh of relief?  I heard that!) 

My boys know what a big fan I am of yours, so this Christmas I was presented with a gift certificate to Robbins Book Store so that I could purchase your book.  I did.  I went on and on about you to the owner, who says he's your friend, and he claims that all this is going to go to your head.  Just so you know, I have been warned.  I enjoyed the book immensely, and read it all while sitting on the floor.  Safety first, Mr. Taylor!  

I would be thrilled to meet you and have you sign my book.  I do think that I was in line behind you at the credit union one day last summer.  It was one of those moments where you open your mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.  I wanted to tell you so badly how much I love your column and the way you write (it's the way I think btw).  But I was momentarily star struck and couldn't speak.

I am not certain whether you are at the Daily News every day, but I would love to stop on a day that you are there to have my book signed.  That in and of itself may take a day or two, because I currently work 3 part time jobs and that should answer your question about whether or not I may be a stalker.  Sadly, I have no time for that.  I just appreciate your humor and your writing, and I wanted to finally let you know.

Thank you,

Flo 

--- 

See what I mean?  My own mother never said so many nice things about me!  So thank you, "Flo," for your wonderful letter.  It may be the nicest letter I've ever received in my life. I'm going out right now to buy a Rubbermaid tub to keep it in! And by the way, Kevin was right; your letter did, indeed, go to my head, which was two or three sizes too big to begin with. - Mike