I was 12 years old when my mom first took me to see my Uncle Bud. Bud - who's given name was Joe Smith, and which possibly explains why he went by 'Bud' - was the sole male role model of my youth. He had been a merchant seaman all his life, and told stories about his experiences in South America that made me howl with laughter. He had a dry, deadpan wit my Mom shared, and I have inherited to some extent, and he sent wonderful, oversized, illustrated books when I was born : Aesop's Fables, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and Just So Stories, a collection of A. A. Milne's Pooh books, and Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel. (Mehitabel would become the name of my first five cats.) My first encounter with my uncle was a letter from India he sent two months prior, and must have been delivered by overland tortoise. Mom had not heard from him in five years, at this particular point in time. Typically laconic, it read "Have you ever tried Harvey's Bristol Cream? Take the advice of your worldly wise brother and don't." The PS hit me like a thunderbolt: "I am sending you a table with elephants dancing around the rim. Look for it in another 5 months." In a prescient version of The Secret Life of James Thurber, I tried unsuccessfully to imagine how they could deliver a table AND elephants waltzing around the periphery. I waited in a panic of anticipation, and the realization that the elephants were embossed on the table prepared me for further exposés concerning the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

I remember sitting on the sofa with him, watching the Chicago White Sox play. A commercial advertisement appeared onscreen, exhorting us to "Drink Canada Dry!"

"Hell," he grunted. "I haven't finished with this country yet. "

Bud had one eye, one lung, and was missing two ribs and two fingers, which always made me think of Mark Twain's story about a man who lost various parts of his body. (In the words of Groucho Marx: "Excuse me while I have a strange interlude." In Twain's parody of an advice column, he pens a letter purportedly from a woman engaged to a hapless man who has lost in separate accidents: one eye, one arm, one ear, his nose and his scalp. Distraught, she asks: "Should I still marry him?" Twain's response begins "This is a serious question. It involves the lifelong happiness of a woman and nearly two thirds of a man." ) Bud's fingers were gnawed off by rats when he was muddy drunk on shipboard; the ribs were shattered and the eye lost in a barroom brawl in India; lung cancer took the rest. When he was recuperating from the removal of said lung he applied for the position of chief engineer, as the only tasks required to perform that office were to deal with extraordinary emergencies. The interview progressed without incident until the captain asked "Do you drink?"

"Is that an academic question or an invitation?" responded Bud.

The operation that removed the lung increased the use of his bladder to such an extent he once told me "The only emergency I could have handled would have been putting out a small fire." It would be no exaggeration to say I worshipped him, and thought him fearless and godlike in all respects. He lived half a mile from the Gulf of Mexico in Crystal Beach, Texas, east and across the bay from Galveston.

But back to my original trip to see him, age twelve: Mom and I headed headed south down Highway 41, which would become I-75 many years later. The plan was to visit relatives along the way: my maternal grandmother was living on top of Lookout Mountain with her oldest daughter and two further generations of Smiths, including my cousin Denice. Looking back I realize my grandmother was not well at all, and would die within a year's time. Not that my mother would ever allow that to enter my consciousness.

As we left Indiana and entered Kentucky, Route 41 cut through massive cliffs of red clay, leaving bloodstained scars in it's swath. Mom would hand me the road map and tell me to navigate, which may explain the attraction I have to maps even today. As I watched my hand fly out the open window like Superman, I would catch glimpses of deer in the woods on either side of the road. Other than that, the only thing I clearly recall is a roadside stop where they sold swirled, multi- colored lollipops the size of panda bear heads. Armed with one of these, I turned everything in the car into sucrose adhesives.

We entered Texas from the northeast and entered the barrier islands of the coast, turning southeast and following the highway toward the spit of land that borders the northeast side of Galveston Bay. Relying on luck as much as any map-reading ability, we found the road next to the rural post office, just as Bud had promised. Half a mile down we turned in and saw Bud's house, surrounded by twenty foot oleanders. He had built the house himself for his second and final wife: a square building with only the bathroom enclosed. This was a concession to my Aunt Myrtice when she moved there after she retired. When she pleaded for separate rooms, Bud had growled "Jesus! I fenced in the bathroom - what more do you want from me?"

Mom and I were coming slowly down the canal road that Bud lived on, talking about the chances of me seeing a snake. Male children go through an attraction to reptiles about age ten, soon after they realize they have no chance of seeing a living dinosaur. As we approached Bud's house, there! - stretched out across the highway with it's neck cocked at an abrupt angle, as though it had been run over - was the biggest snake I had ever seen. Much longer than I was tall, bigger around than my thigh, it was covered from head to tail with large, irregularly shaped rectangles. At the tail - had I taken time to notice - were ten sets of rattles. I leaped out of the car and was within three feet of the huge pit viper when Mom called my name.

"Wait, Cal! - are you sure it's dead?"

I waved my hand in a dismissive gesture. "Aw sure, mom. It's dead." Suddenly, perhaps aroused by the sound of my voice, the snake reared it's triangular head and rapidly tested the dank Texas air with it's tongue. Big brave me actually did knock my mother down wriggling back in the car, ignoring the door entirely and diving through the window. For her part, Mom was almost unable to get back in the car from laughter.

At length, when I had finished shaking, I peered furtively out the near window. No snake in sight. So I opened the door and sprinted to the house, to petition my fearless Uncle Bud to come kill the big evil snake. Avuncular Bud was just barely dragged out of his abode by a small twelve year old whirlwind. Expending more calories than I currently ingest in a day, he was finally coerced within missile range of the road where the reptile was leisurely slithering into the undergrowth west of the road. We must have looked like the Three Stooges: Mom bent over in front ; me, looking over her shoulder from behind ; Bud in the back, facing away and peering over his, mine and Mom's shoulders, ready to run like hell if any change in direction was indicated by the serpent.

Finally finding my voice, I called encouragingly "Kill it, Uncle Bud!"

With an affected nonchalance that was almost painful to behold, he drawled "Well, sure, Cal. You wouldn't happen to have a hand grenade on you?"


"I don't mind if a man shits on my head and rubs it in. But don't laugh at me for smelling funny!" JS/ 1908 - 1974 file:///C|/My%20Documents/Moondoggie/Home.htm