uncle walter.

Your Uncle Walter's going on and on.
Where did you go that you were gone so long?
How could you leave me here so long with Uncle Walter?
-Ben Folds Five, "Uncle Walter"


The cool kids think I'm cool because I have an Uncle Walter. Nevermind that he goes by his middle name, and we all call him Uncle Freeman. Come to think of it, Uncle Freeman's a pretty cool name, too.

I associated Uncle Freeman with several things, but most of all, I associated him with fishin'. Uncle Freeman lived down on the North Carolina coast, where my dad would take us kids to visit him and Aunt Esther and Aunt Jane and Grandmother Dolly before she died. We usually stayed with Aunt Esther and all of her cats. One morning of our visit, usually Saturday, we'd get up at the crack of dawn and go to Freeman's house after a breakfast of slightly frozen Eggo waffles and skim milk. Freeman would be waiting with his boat hooked up to his pickup. We'd all pile into the truck and drive a couple of miles to some local access area, where we'd push the boat into the Bogue Sound. Uncle Freeman's dog, Blacky, would come, too. Blacky was a black lab, a constant fixture in all those years of visits. I remember wondering the last time I was there if it was even the same dog, or if perhaps Uncle Freeman kept getting black labs and naming them the same name. Either seemed likely.

We never went pole fishin'. I've been pole fishin' only a few times in my life, but I've been net fishin' a lot. It seems to me now that net fishin' is cheating, though. You basically make a big circle with a net that extends from the surface of the water to the ground, trapping all the fish that happen to be in the area at the time. Then you walk around and scare them into the net. When you see a splash, you know some poor fish is thrashing around, trying to get out of its nylon prison, and you go and untangle it and put it in the bucket. I was never really brave enough to try and extract the fish from the net, so I was in charge of the bucket, which was this big metal basin with a piece of twine tied to one handle. I would drag it around to wherever Freeman or my dad had caught a fish and they would throw it in. Sometimes I couldn't get there quick enough and I'd see Freeman walking around with two or three fish hanging off his fingers like slimy shoes.

Sometimes we'd catch a big haul, sometimes not. Blacky was a big help - he was much better at running around, scaring all the fish into the net than we were. After we stopped getting hits, we'd climb back into the boat and start bringing in the net. We'd often find a bunch of fish caught in this last haul, sometimes crabs, too. Either we'd missed their desparate efforts to get free, or they'd just not made much of an effort. Either way, we had them now. All the fish we'd caught would go into a cooler, their eyes staring ahead, their little gills pumping back and forth, unable to extract air from air. Some of the more stubborn ones would still flop around for a while, but after a few minutes, they all fell still with their eyes still open, but their gills not moving. Uncle Freeman would drive the boat to some other spot and we'd do it all again. I guess he knew the layout of the sound pretty well; to me, it all just looked like water, water, and more water. I never tried to pay attention to where we went or how we'd ever get back. Mostly, I'd dangle my hand over the side of the boat and feel the spray as I looked around at the birds and the other boats out on the sound that day.

Mostly we caught mullet, which I didn't even know was a hairstyle for a long time. But sometimes there were flounder or bluefish or hogfish - they always delighted me with their little grunts. It never occurred to me to doubt my dad's accuracy in identifying each fish, because my dad taught high school chemistry, and he was a scientist.

Once the sun starting getting up high enough in the sky, we'd head back to where we'd parked the truck. Back at Freeman's house, my dad and Freeman would go out in the backyard and clean fish. I might have watched this process a couple of times, but mostly I stayed away. It was smelly, nasty work, and if you hung around too much, you'd be enlisted to help. So I'd play outside with Blacky or maybe go inside and watch the Ray Stevens video Uncle Freeman had. If Uncle Freeman didn't already have a half-finished game of solitaire going on his coffee table, I'd start one up with the battered deck of cards he kept on the accent table next to the couch. Uncle Freeman and Aunt Sally's house never changed. It always was laid out the same, with the same lava lamp that only got used when kids like me who were born in the 80s came over and asked to see what it did, the same old exercise bike gathering dust in the dining room, the same old carpet. It even smelled the same, a smell that I could never recall when I wasn't there, but as soon as I walked in the door, went, "Oh yeah, that's it."

I never really knew Uncle Freeman as an adult. I hadn't been out to see him in several years, ever since Aunt Sally died. I probably haven't been fishin' in a decade. If I had the opportunity, I'd go again in the heartbeat. There are few things in this world that are worth getting up at dawn for, but fishin' with Uncle Freeman is one of them.

We buried Uncle Freeman last month. It was cold and rainy and no one cried much. Uncle Freeman was old, and his health had been declining for a long time. After the family had potluck lunch at the church after the funeral, we all sat around and told Freeman stories. For me, that was the saddest part, because my father and aunts and cousins were telling stories about a man I didn't even know. Older relatives slip away before I'm adult enough to know them as anything but another grown-up that shared a family name. The only time I could even see that the Freeman they talked about was the same one that I knew was when they told fishin' stories. True, there were a lot of those, because Uncle Freeman liked to fish. But he also liked to help out his neighbor and garden and tell stories that he'd read in the Reader's Digest as if they had happened to him. I heard tales about a man who told stories that were always entertaining, but that you couldn't always quite trust, and I was surprised at how it reminded me of my brothers and sisters - a new generation in the same family. I knew Freeman and I were relatives in the blood sense, but I don't think I ever got before how much we were related.

I suppose that is the way at funerals for people that you knew in a limited sense - you come out not saddened by what has been lost, but by what you missed out on by not knowing the person more completely. You didn't lose it, you never had it. It was the same at my grandmother's funeral, and at my grandfather's, my aunt's, my other aunt. Maybe you have to be an adult to see the older generations as anything but old. It is only the stories that keep people young and illustrate how they were before time started to catch up with them. I worry that my children will never get to know my parents, that I will tell them stories later to have them respond with surprise because the person in the story didn't sound like the grandma or grandpa they knew.

Even though I came out feeling like I has missed out by not knowing Freeman outside his old boat, I came out saddened by the fact that the younger kids in my family were missing out on even that much. There was a lot more to my uncle than going out on the sound with an old black lab and some netting, but even that much was pretty good.