Uncle Jim's Wink at Life

John L. Phillips

I was ten years old, and I'd been caught in a lie. I stubbornly denied breaking a window in Harold Colby's barn, but my parents knew perfectly well that I had done it.

In those days in the little town of Pultneyville, N.Y., a broken window was a big deal, and I was rather miserable.

I suspected, too, that my parents had told Uncle Jim, whom I worshiped. But coming back from a trip to the store, riding beside him on the front seat of his dark-green DeSoto Firedome, I glanced over a time or two, fast. I could see a smile at the corner of his mouth.

"Telling the truth is always easier," he said, straight out of the blue. He took his eyes off the road for a second and grinned at me. "So it's perfect for a lazybones like you and me."

I swallowed, watching the mailboxes go by, waiting. But that was it—no scolding, no moralizing. My uncle began to hum, and I was in relief. Like you and me. My pal was still my pal.

It wasn't long before I got the chance to test Uncle Jim's thesis. One day I spotted a pair of brown leather gloves on the windowsill in the post office. Old Mrs. Jameson had come in wearing them and had left barehanded, struggling with a bulky package. I tried the gloves on. They were perfect.

That night I had a losing bout with my conscience. The truth is easier for a lazybones like you and me. The following day, I returned the gloves and told Mrs. Jameson the truth.

A month later, a small package arrived for me. Inside were the gloves and a note: "I needed another pair, and thought you might like these. Mrs. J."

When my uncle asked where I got the gloves, I told him the story. "See?" he said, delighted. Yes, I did see. I still do.

James Bellows Little would have winced at the idea that he ever taught anybody anything. He had a lifetime dislike to cookie-cutter wisdom. But he always applied a light touch to common sense as it angled through his prism.

He did it almost every time I saw him. His eyebrows would arch invitingly as he waited for me to get it, whatever it was—how to use a thesaurus or operate a Coleman stove, how to measure an opponent across a tennis net or a shift of wind across a mainsail. I listened and watched, and once in a while, I even learned.

Uncle Jim even taught me to see through tears. My father died when I was 12, and as my mother's brother, Uncle Jim must have felt an urge to step in, but he didn't. He stayed in, providing a steady hand and a calm presence.

Only late in the game did I realize how quickly he'd tailored what he did and said to the needs of a kid who hadn't really known he had any. My uncle seemed to think, for instance, that I could stand a little help on gullibility, so he literally used his head.

One day when I was seven, I asked him why his head was bald but his chest was hairy. "Oh," he said breezily, "during World War II I had the hair on my head transplanted. The Army Air Corps did it for free, and that way I'd never have to bother with barbershops. Not a bad deal, huh?" he asked with a wink.

It was a good three years before I began to have serious doubts.

Uncle Jim ran an industrial-rubber-goods company in downtown Rochester, and in those days before major highways, the rush-hour commute to his house on Lake Ontario could be brutal. I was with him one afternoon when, never exceeding the speed limits, he made it without catching a single red light.

"How'd you do that?" I wanted to know.

"Rhythm drive," he said cheerfully. "I don't know why I have it, but I do. So does your mother. Your Uncle Bill doesn't."

He glanced at me with an almost straight face. "Maybe you've got it, but we won't know for a few years."

Rhythm drive! I bought it on the spot, and clung to it until I was old enough to get my driver's license. Eventually I'd see for myself that daily commuters need a notion like rhythm drive.

Rush-hour traffic? Baldness? If you can't beat 'em, celebrate 'em! That was Uncle Jim's way.

Over and over he reminded me that friendship is a currency that never devalues. And he had his own way of showing it. Just back from a trip, for example, he'd stop the first friend he saw and insist on buying him lunch. If the guy didn't have time, he'd offer to buy him a hat. This was how he told his pals he missed them and how good it was to see them again.

To strengthen my self-assurance, every now and then Uncle Jim would offer to bet all the change in his pocket against all the change in mine. No fair checking to see how much I had in my pocket, either. It was a dare, and it made a kid feel like a gun-slinger. He always decided what the bet was about, but I didn't find out until I'd said yes.

"Want to bet?" he'd say, all of a sudden. "Okay." And the game was on.

"What's the capital of ...  Ohio?" "Ummmmmmm. Columbus!"

"Hmm," he'd say, pretending surprise, then reach into his pocket. "Hey, what do you know—27 cents!"

It wasn't the money; it was the reminder that sometimes you just have to jump in—even when you don't know how cold the water is. I can't remember ever losing one of those bets. Somehow Uncle Jim made it work out that way. It was a confidence game in the best sense. Most kids need things like that somewhere along the line. I sure did.

In time my uncle would teach me many manly things—how to knot a bow tie, how to handle a tractor, how to fold a gabardine suit so it doesn't wrinkle, how to look life in the eye—and tell if it's winking back.

He loved beauty, too, and wasn't afraid to show it. Thrusting a pair of gardening gloves and my aunt's rubber boots at me, he'd lead me on a search for wildflowers. Back at the house, he'd put a huge jar on the table, then seek my counsel on how best to arrange our flowers. Be honest, be brave, be kind, look around—the words were never uttered, but the message always got through.

By example, too, Uncle Jim reminded me that men read books and value them for their beauty and inspiration. I was proud to be among those who knew behind which living-room volumes—some well-thumbed works of Dickens—he kept his macadamia nuts.

His encouragement reminded me that my father had been a voracious reader and a good gardener. Would I otherwise have scorned such "sissy" pursuits? Possibly. Uncle Jim wasn't taking chances. He helped me arrive at my dad's conclusion: these were things worth making time for.

Uncle Jim and I hadn't talked much about my father in the years since his death. But that changed one afternoon when we were cutting brush at his place at the lake.

"When Monty died, you lost a father, and your mom lost a husband," he said. "I lost a friend. But your dad lost the chance to see how his hopes would turn out. All of a sudden, it was the end of a life, and it was too soon—he never got to know. That's the tough part."

He looked at me. There was a touch of anger in his face. He, too, resented my father's having drawn so short a straw. I was startled to realize that, independently, I had the same feelings. Maybe I was growing up.

On one August day, on a fishing trip near Henderson Harbor not far from the St. Lawrence River, the two of us were in a battered 12-footer powered by a small outboard. I was a bit hangdog at our slow putt-putting along. Uncle Jim said speed was fine if you wanted to go fast, but slowing down made any journey less of a blur. "It helps you focus," he said.

I thought of that decades later when he was dying, becalmed by a failing heart in his 82nd year. Was he seeing more, even as he slowed?

Jim Little was an observer who touched those he loved by sharing what he saw. I understood some of what he showed me pretty fast, but other things took decades to become clear.

From time to time in his later years, he would send me something I'd sent him 30 or 35 years earlier. A drawing of his house on the bluff. A crayon rendering of a sailboat.

At first, these mementos triggered feelings of affectionate amusement. But as they accumulated, I came to recognize them as the clearest signposts Uncle Jim had set out for me. Time has passed, they gently reminded. You're not a short-pants nephew anymore. Matter of fact, you've got nephews of your own, so hop to it.

Those aging scraps lie flat in a wooden box near my desk. But my mind's eye sees them as my heart knows them to be—tightly rolled into a baton that has finally passed to my hand.

Abridged from Reader's Digest, September 1993, Printed in the U.S.A.