DIED 1996
THE FIRST WEDDING I ever went to was the marriage of my mother’s much younger half brother to my father’s cousin. Set in a luxuriant Westchester backyard in the spring of 1971, the bride wore embroidered Mexican muslin and flowers in her long, shining hair; the groom, sideburns to his chin. Off they went to their new life running a ski lodge in Stowe, Vermont, leaving my sister and me dazzled by the sheer romance of it all.
Since their parents died before my uncle was grown, my mother and her sisters had helped raise him. He lived with us for a while between semesters at American University in Washington and when he was on leave from the service, bringing textbooks and trophies and the smell of aftershave to the spare room over the garage, in which we would poke around when he was gone. For Halloween, I wore the jacket and cap of my father’s old Marine Corps uniform and my sister got our uncle’s, from the Air Force.
My boisterous, magnetic father commanded quite a bit of attention at home and everywhere else, and my uncle was first among his fans. Even as a little girl I noticed how he started to talk just the way my father did and use his expressions and write in all capital letters and how he loved to say my father’s name, and later he had the businesses, and the busyness, the two daughters and the fond, gruff impatience, the fine house and the fancy car, and then he died just as young in just the same way, from the heart.