Uncle Leo

I wrote this last spring. Abi suggested it fit in with my "dark" humor I've displayed thus far in my blog. So I conceded. Without further ado, Uncle Leo:

When people ask me what makes my Uncle Leo so singularly strange, I realize the only way to describe him fully is to take it in little steps. Truly, baby steps.

The first thing I must explain is that he talks in a baby voice. This must be first because it immediately discounts him from being normal, and he sure as hell can’t hide it for very long. It is the first thing you notice, other than the erect Hershey Kiss tuft of hair sticking out of his head, easily winning the fight for height dominance over the bald, shiny scalp. But everything about Uncle Leo follows sequentially from the baby talk, rather than the Hershey Kiss.

To be fair, I should amend the earlier statement. He does not always speak in a baby voice. He is a lawyer after all, and he must have a way of presenting some semblance of normalcy in his professional life. His normal voice is simply very nasally, and only somewhat childish. The baby voice enters the picture only when he is infantilizing an object, animal, or human, or making a godawful joke. In other words, he pretty much uses this voice all the time.

Leo also punctuates otherwise comfortable silences with gusty, sighing, “Oh well”s and “Uh-Oh”s. These proclamations aren’t in reference to any particular to defeat, just to a general defeatist attitude for life. He is a true dog lover, and since his Ziggy died, is all the more enamored with our Holly, a manic and myopic border collie whose most recent obsession is a Kong rubber toy. Leo has no issue plopping himself on our dander-infested kitchen floor for hours on end, throwing the Kong, as he becomes covered in her fur and slobber. In fact, I think this may be his favorite hobby at our house, even more so than surfing the net or giving unwanted help on crossword puzzles. He uses every opportunity to talk about Holly’s “binky.” If it isn’t upon seeing her first thing in the morning-“Oh does Holly have her widdle binky to pway wif?”-it’s in some reference to me, in the third person, as always: “Soooo (he manages to give the word “so” about three syllables and an octave’s worth of pitches)…soooooo what does Ms. Tova want for her birthday? Could it be…a binky like Ms. Holly has? Ohhhh well. Uh oh.”

Another thing about Uncle Leo that he shares with many odd relatives is that he lacks certain social etiquettes. Maybe etiquette isn’t the right word, but I’m not sure what is. Inappropriate topics and poor timing are his specialties, but he has a real knack for rejoining a conversation where it has ended in his head, inserting a comment that would have made some sense three topics ago. He is still on Miley Cyrus while we are on New England architecture. In other words, the normal ebb and flow of society seem to have little bearing on his personal tide.

The most recent time I saw Uncle Leo was when I was home on Spring Break from college my sophomore year. Half of the week was spent with the man, because my mom begged and pleaded with him to come out from Denver until he conceded, a real feat on my mom’s part, considering that Uncle Leo is, in my mom’s words, “a perpetual Eeyore.” Read: depressed.

It was my responsibility to preside over Leo while my mom was working. One day she dropped us off at noon at a restaurant downtown and told us she would be back in Providence at four. I said my final prayers and set the alarm on my cell phone. We refrained from speaking for the first ten minutes. Then we talked about Providence’s flailing economy (well, you lost all the industry jobs and now it’s a white collar town), the lack of things to do in D.C. (once you’ve seen the mall, and exhausted the museums, there’s not much else. Oh well), and how awful Baltimore was (beyond the Inner Harbor, there aren’t too many neighborhoods you want to go in that town). I refrained from argument.

After lunch I was ready to walk home, but we went downtown, into a bookstore my mom had recommended. Inside, he hounded me mercilessly around the store, breathing down my neck. I can’t tell if Leo really has an issue with personal space, or if I just feel his proximity more acutely because it irritates me so much. Every time I picked up a book, he would ask me what it was about or if it was any good. I didn’t know. That’s why I was picking it up. After dodging him for a good half an hour (which was difficult in the closet-sized independent bookstore) we left. I told him I was ready to go home. As we passed through the bus travel plaza, I asked if he wanted to take the bus. He asked how far it was and I told him it was pretty far, a little over a mile and a half, hoping he’d take the hint that it was beginning to rain and the wind was gusting and I didn’t want to be walking with him up the hills of Providence for the next hour. Impervious, as always, he said, “If you can hoof it, I can. I’ve got to get back on the walking thing. I haven’t been able to since I hurt my knee. Oh well” I shot death rays at the back of his bald head.

After this, I made the mistake of taking the route that passed by the RISD museum, another place my mom had suggested we go. I told Uncle Leo I had already been, and he said, ”Welll, it’s a museum, right? Don’t they, uh, change their exhibits from time to time? If you haven’t been there in a few years, I’m sure you missed something.” Damn. He knew the secrets of museums. He dragged me through the classics pieces where he read over my shoulder as I stared the plaques, unblinking. I was careful not to look at the penises on the male figures because Leo was scanning my face as I took in each piece. In the old New England farmhouse attached to the museum, he made some comment about how the dining room table sure had warped a lot. Finally, in the textiles exhibit featuring dresses made by edgy stitching fiends, he pointed out a few of the skimpier dresses with a “Soooo, would Ms. Tova like that one there to take to Brazil? It might have a little too much fabric. Uh oh. Oh well.”

Though Leo has many topics of interest, I began to notice just two that continually sprang up on his side of the conversation. The first was Brazilian bikinis and the second was Miley Cyrus. Sometimes the second was Hannah Montana. Apparently they’re the same person. Throughout the five days, he inserted these two bits into at least a dozen conversations, mostly in the form of jokes, and sometimes in the form of what I needed to take to Brazil with me. One night I had my Christian friend Mike over, and I was telling him the story of Purim. I could only get about two sentences in each time, however, before my Father made some correction or remembered another one of the reasons that this new book he had informed him that Elvis A. Presley was, in fact, Jesus. When, on every other sentence that my dad did not comment, Leo would comment. When Mike, the ever inquisitive mind, asked what it was the Jews were doing in Persia in the first place, Leo said, “Because they couldn’t get tickets to the Miley Cyrus concert.” Of course, the Israelites must also have been pretty hot in the desert. A little bird told me they were wearing Brazilian bikinis at the time.

The worst, is of course, when he references these topics to me. He must have said about three times that what Ms. Tova really wanted for her birthday was a Brazilian bikini. My gag reflex didn’t really kick in, however, until he made some mention that my mom could save money by buying two bandaids and a piece of duct tape.
About ready to burst, I mentioned this pattern to Abi and Gabe when arrived, stating that I’d be quite intoxicated if I’d bothered to take a shot at every mention of the ubiquitous skimpy swimsuit or the teen sensation. However, although there was much subtle and no-so-subltle goading, he seemed to have forgotten about these topics for much of the day. It was at dinner that he finally popped. I can’t remember that topic of table conversation, but rest assured, it wasn’t about the names of the different Disney stars.

I can’t imagine what relevance either of these topics must have in Leo’s life. He is single, never married, no kids, not even a single real girlfriend to his name. Ever. He lived with his mother his entire life until she died last year, excluding the six months he tried to take a job in Michigan. But that is all just folklore, urban legend of a time long gone in his life. He just couldn’t muster it. He moved back home and has been there ever since.

We are not supposed to make fun of his eccentricities nor to dread our time with him, just as we are supposed to love and respect our other crazy relatives without ridicule or comment. It just hurts my mom too much. In all honesty I feel very sorry for Leo, and that’s really not the best. I’m sure it’s not what he wants and I doubt it’s what my mom would want me to feel. But I do.

I pity the life that he has and his unwillingness to change it. Most of all, I fear that little bit of myself that I see in him. Sometimes I too don’t want to change things. I get stuck in the status quo. I only see the bad neighborhoods in the beautiful cities, the knee that has kept me from walking. Yet I also see in Leo all the things I will never be. Living at home into my fifties, still expecting my mom to make my sandwich for lunch every day. A lack of personal relationships, which must be replaced by inane commentary, the minutiae of trivia, and baby talk. Baby talk most of all is where I cannot see myself. Just as his baby talk is a defense mechanism and substitution for real interactions, my making fun of him is a mechanism to be sure I will never be him. God help me if I can’t talk about more than Miley Cyrus and a damned Brazilian bikini. Oh well.