Moleskin 4.6: My Life As A Kid

  Don’s sister, his only sibling, lived with her husband halfway between our old townhome and our old apartment. Their daughter, an only child, was the apple of her uncle’s eye. The balance of his attention was sure to change in the years ahead, but I wasn’t sensing it that summer. All I saw was an old habit-worn bachelor stubbornly set in his ways, and whatever care he had for kids and family was obscured by caricature. He kept stacks of Playboys in a basement file cabinet. He had regular poker nights with the guys. He brandished a heavy sassage accent and gave my mother a monosyllabic nickname. He showed a humorous type-A charm to everyone in the rooms he entered —everyone, that is, except for kids. As if to prove the point, he kept a W. C. Fields poster on one of the walls of his house long after stepsons intruded, telling us in the clearest terms: “I never met a kid I liked.” Our new cousin, it seems, had been an exception, but we were given the rule.