Throwback Thursday -- Uncle Joe

I usually post these old pics on Facebook but not here.  This one's too good to pass up though.  Lori and I have such great memories of Uncle Joe.  He was stationed around the Pacific during the Viet Nam War.  When he'd get just a few days' leave, he'd often drop in, unannounced. 

We came home from a dog show one day to find that he'd spent the day in our backyard, waiting for us to come home.  He left his 10-speed bike at our house and ended up leaving it permanently with my dad.  Hey, back in the early '70s, that was a big deal!  He'd also bring unusual and exotic gifts for me and Lori--the monkey banks carved out of coconuts stand out in my mind.

November 1968

We were shy.  Look at me, standing off a bit to the side, and Lori clutching her dress.  Funny that I'm the one smiling and she's not. Usually that's the other way around in the old pictures.  (She was probably really squinting from the sun.) The back of this pic says November 1968, so we would have been 5 and 3. This was just a few months after we moved into our house on San Tomas Court.

The really weird thing I noticed about this is that Joe appears to be wearing a wedding band. He didn't get married for at least ten more years.  He would have been 20 here.  I briefly wondered if we had any deep, dark family secrets, but I can't remember anything. At all. Besides, our family talks about everything. There's no way they could have kept a secret like this. ;)

Six years later when we spent six weeks in Bethlehem, we still thought he was cool.  He was a paramedic then, and he'd come home and tell us all about any exciting runs he'd had.  Our favorites were the gory motorcycle accidents.  (I still remember the cheek that stuck to the pavement.)  We were 9 and 11; I'm sure he cleaned it up quite a bit for us, but we found it thrilling.

Fast forward to now.  We've been up to PA several times.  Now he's retired, with a long beard that's turned quite gray.  He makes all kinds of cool things, gave Trevor a turkey call and a bow and arrows.  He loves his family, his country, guns and knives, hunting, and dogs. He grows tomatoes and can fix or build about anything.  He tells the best stories you've ever heard.

As a kid, he was the coolest uncle ever.  Now that I'm grown up, I still think he's the coolest.  And my kids think he's pretty cool too.