The Uncle Who Showed Me Something Nobody Else Did

Uncles have a particular kind of influence that does not get named often enough.

They are not responsible for you. They have no obligation to shape you. They just show up at family things and sometimes, if you are lucky, they notice something about you that the people who are responsible for you are too close to see clearly.

My uncle Desmond noticed that I liked to build things.

Not with construction toys. With words. With arguments. I was twelve and I would write long, detailed cases for positions nobody had asked me to defend. Why a particular baseball player was underrated. Why a certain movie was better than the one everyone preferred. My parents thought it was a phase. Desmond thought it was a thing.

He gave me a book. A collection of essays by writers who argued for positions. Who made cases with language and evidence and a particular kind of confident specificity. He handed it to me without ceremony and said: you do this. You might as well see what it looks like when it is done well.

That book changed how I thought about what I was doing when I wrote. It named something in me I had not had a name for.

I was thirty-four when I finally gave him something that matched that gift.

He had spent forty years as an engineer and was retiring. He had built things his whole career, literal structures, bridges and buildings, and he had never once, in all those years, written any of it down. He had stories about every project. Problems that required solutions nobody had tried before. Moments of near-failure and the thinking that pulled it back.

I got him a bookbinding kit and a beautiful blank notebook and I included a note that said: you noticed what I could build with words. Now build something with yours. I want to read it.

He called me. He said: I did not think anyone wanted to hear any of it.

I said: I have been waiting twenty years to hear it.