Before we came back on Sunday, I wanted to visit with an uncle. My dad had 4 brothers (2 are now deceased) and we can safely say this was the most likable and probably most like my dad. He is still married to the same lady that bore him his four children, but instead of 3 boys and 1 girl, he had 3 girls and 1 boy. He had a history of being a first class runner in high school, breaking long distance records in the 60's. This transferred to his kids who all managed to go to state and win at both the 1 mile and 2 mile distances, and even in cross country they dominated, although I'm unsure if there were state meets for that. We were all more like my mother's side of the family, born big and beefy, otherwise I am sure he would have recruited us to run and win.
My dad has always been the type to stay out of the limelight, just going to events to see us required him to prepare. His brother, a total opposite, never hid from his popularity. He was always around his kids and everyone knows him as who he is when they were in school. After graduation, he gave me my first job. We spent that first summer (1989) building a house in the nice part of Crystal City and it was a trip. We had always been kind of coddled, never had to work just focus on our schoolwork and suddenly I was allowed to hang out with other men all day long. I was in fairly good hands as these were dad's brothers and friends, this being a small town and everyone knows everybody.
I have always loved the honesty of this man. My mom sometimes cringed hearing him talk, he might say a granddaughter was kind of fat if she was heavy, or like my lawyer brother when he was working with us building the house, "este guy is no bueno at work." Kind of like a coach to my mom "Letty, make sure he stays in school, he is no good at working outside." He always praised me. He took us in the first week not knowing what to expect and said the first week he would pay me and my brother $3 an hour. After the first week, he told my brother to go home, and he would pay me $5 an hour to continue because even though I knew nothing, I was always willing to work hard and do as I was told. I worked with him for the three summers I kept coming home, mostly putting up roofs the following two summers. Roofing in south Texas in the summer is no joke, 100+ degrees and humid.
After college, he has always praised me as a good guy and I love that, but being who he is, I might visit and he would not hesitate looking at me and doing the hand gesture of at the same time looking scared at how big/fat I was getting and doing the hands like my waist was expanding but laughing about it in a joking way. He is funny that way, not really trying to hurt your feelings, just a very matter of fact type of man. As the kids say, he keeps it 100.
I know this is a long way to get there, but as men who get to their 70s+, he got cancer in his prostate a year or so ago, beat it, was looking good at my niece's quinceanera, but my mom was concerned that the last time she saw him, he had been bleeding from his kidneys and had a catheter and things weren't looking good. We stopped because my mom said "just in case you don't want to have regrets of not seeing him one last time." Wife, Javalina and I visited with him, he answered the door himself, which I took as a good sign. He sat there in the living room and told us the doctors had checked him and there was no cancer, it was just the kidneys got an infection and the doctors thought they could salvage them, he had a catheter going straight from the kidneys to a bag on his leg. He said he had been given 3 bags of IV but they screwed up not including the right amount of calcium which was making his fingers lock up like tetanus. Once the doctors figured out their mistake, they doubled his calcium intake and fixed his hands. He seemed weak but ok to my eyes.
In an effort to make him smile, I told him about Javalina running the 100 and 200 meter dash (we all know Javalina is a big lineman type and has no business running those races) and showed him the videos on my phone. From those few seconds, he looked at his gait and got up to show him things to fix. He had already asked to see him run when I had told him he ran funny at the quinceanera. He went through a five minute show and tell of what to do with my boy, which I thought was amazing. Here he is all sick, but he loves talking and explaining running stuff.
He then went and told us a great story of when he introduced his son to running. He offered him a dollar at age 9 to run in some meet with a bunch of high schoolers and he ended up beating most if not all the 9th and 10th graders, kids 14-16 years old. He said once he saw that his son was doing the fundamentals he showed Javalina correctly, he never really got in his way. He just let him train to build stamina. His son was a beautiful specimen when you think of a runner. He was just muscle and bone back in the day. Now he is as barrel shaped as me and my brothers, which is somehow humorous, but he is a chef. We left his house after an hour maybe and the funny part was he might be sick and my mom was worried enough to prompt me to go and visit but he walked us out into the hot weather to sit outside and smoke a cigarette. Wife told him that wasn't a good idea and he said he would just smoke one a little bit, not a whole one. He actually put his new cigarette down and picked one up that was stabbed in the ashes and halfway done and lit that one up instead.
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