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The "crazy uncle" is something of a cliche, but I suspect most people have some relative who could fit the description. I had such a relative, an uncle in fact, and he had a profound influence on my life. |
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My Uncle Stewart has been dead for a number of years, and he never knew how he affected my life. You see Uncle Stewart was crazy. Or at least they said he was, and he was locked up in the Rusk State Hospital for most of his life. When I was a kid, my father was in the service, and we were far away from the extended family until I was halfway through the fifth grade. The extended family was centered in East Texas, except for a few outliers who had gone off to seek their way elsewhere, but for all of them, East Texas was home. When my family visited, in-between my father's far-flung military assignments, we had a list of people we had to see, and we would dutifully drive around to each, spending several hours at each stop. The adults would talk, and I would find something to do to fight boredom. One of the people we had to visit was Uncle Stewart. Since Rusk was over an hour away, we would usually travel with other relatives, going to visit as a mob rather than a few at a time. It was a duty that had to be performed at some frequency, and everyone could fulfill the obligation for awhile if they climbed aboard before the tour group left. There are a lot of things I don't remember clearly from my childhood, but images of those visits to see Uncle Stewart are still sharp. Driving into a place with tall chain-link fences, barbed wire, and guards at the gates was so far outside my other experiences, it put my senses on high alert. I knew this was a special place. Inside the buildings, the hallways were too empty. There was nothing, except for the polished floors, drab painted walls, and high ceilings. Occasionally, someone in a white coat would pass by. I wasn't sure what they did, but they acted as if it were something important. We always met Uncle Stewart in what must have been a cafeteria, a large room with a very high ceiling and a number of simple, square chromed steel and laminate tables with vinyl-cushioned chairs. When I think of the word "institutional" today, I conjure up this place. He would be sitting there too calmly, waiting for us to arrive. Sometimes, we were the only people in the room. I never saw Uncle Stewart without a cigarette. He smoked Lucky Strikes with no filters, and we always brought him a couple of cartons as a gift. As he and the adults would talk, he spoke softly between drags, never displaying much emotion. I would watch his cigarette get shorter and shorter, ashes falling on the floor or in his lap. His fingernails were stained dark brown from the heat and the nicotine. He only discarded the butt when it was too hot to hold. Then, when he remembered the other one had gone out, he would start up another cigarette. I can remember asking the adults why Uncle Stewart was in that place, since he seemed to be a nice enough person. About all I can recall is the phrase "nervous breakdown". There was something about an accident when he was a young man, and I got the impression someone had been hurt, maybe seriously. But it was all so vague, like people were embarrassed to talk about it. They had tried to bring him home from the hospital a couple of times, to live with my grandmother, but they said it just didn't work out. Uncle Stewart finally died of lung cancer, and I was one of the pallbearers at his funeral. I had never taken the time to know him, and he never knew me, except as a kid to whom he could give a smile as he tousled my hair on those occasional visits. When I began to have very serious doubts about my expected gender role, I thought of Uncle Stewart and decided to keep my thoughts to myself. I knew how crazy people ended up. As young as I was, I could feel the tragedy of that wasted life, drugged into lethargy in the Rusk State Hospital, because he didn't fit into the normal world. I knew that I would have to pretend to be like everyone else.
12/2/97 |
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Last Update 4/5/04 |