I got an e-mail from my mother last night about my uncle. Apparently last month he had brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor that was had grown there and they are asking for people to pray for him.
I have very mixed feelings about this news. On the one hand he is family and I do care about him and his kids, but on the other hand, this is a man who for reasons that apparently are only known to him has avoided contact with most of the family for as long as I can remember. I can in fact only remember seeing him on 3 occasions during my entire life and the last time was over 2 decades ago when I was in high school.
I was visiting my grandparents who only lived about 10 min. from his house, and I had called them because I wanted to see them while I was there. It took 3 days for me to get any response and when I did, it was my older cousin who responded. He was 18 at the time and was thrilled to get a chance to see me like me, he considers family to be important but since his parents tended to change the subject whenever the extended family was mentioned, he had had no way to contact us, but he had accidentally intercepted my message on the answering machine and decided to take it upon himself to come see me.
He and I spent most of that day together. He took me to his parent's house where I got to briefly see my aunt and uncle, neither of which said more than 3 words to me before leaving the house on an "errand", but I also got to see my other cousin and he joined his brother and I for the rest of the day.
We went to the mall for a while and about mid-afternoon, we decided that were hungry and they took me to one of their favorite hang-outs, The Pink Cadillac Cafe. Situated right in the middle of downtown, it was 50's style diner with the largest booth in the place being a bright pink colored Cadillac convertible who's front seats had been reversed to face the back and a table was embedded in the center. (Kind of like the car booths at the restaurant in the movie Pulp Fiction when John Travolta's character takes his boss's wife to dinner) A few of my cousins' friends met us there and we had a great time just visiting and joking around while we ate. And after we ate they all took me to a nearby video arcade where we goofed around for a few more hours before they gave me a ride home.
That is my most vivid memory of any of them. I never saw any of them again and though I did send my cousin a letter about a month later, and again a few months after that, he never responded and I am not even sure if he ever got them. It's always been one of my greatest frustrations that I didn't get to know them better, but after more than 20 years without any of them even acknowledging my existence, there is a small pouting child in the back corner of my mind that is still angry at my uncle for basically rejecting his little sister and all of her children, though I know that she tried repeatedly to establish a relationship with him and that kid thinks he has a lot of nerve expecting us to offer any kind of support now that something is going wrong in his little world that he never wanted us to be a part of.
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