There are few people in this world that I really find to be truly genuine. I mean in a way that cannot be more perfectly refined. This is tough to find because you need to be able to define the person over the course of their lifetime.
The most pure form of this is a relative named Uncle Norm. He is a great-uncle on my mother's side whom has resided in Santa Barbara, California for the vast majority of his life. Negating his time at an art institute in Los Angeles, his service in the Army Air Corps during World War II in New Mexico, and the various retirement travels across the country with his now deceased wife, the man has rarely left this town. He's the kind of man who is recognized and greeted with a handshake whenever he takes us out to dinner by the owner of the establishment. He speaks in a soft deliberate manner. He shares that endearing quality most old men share of having a slight conservative tint and a preference of interrupting your insight on a topic to explain either another side tangent discussion or an (kind of) amusing story (likely involving a domesticated animal). It really is a one-sided conversation every time, but it's the only time you wouldn't be annoyed by it. He just really wants to show that he cares.
His life revolves around quiet. The only thing that interrupts this silence in the six years since his wife passed away is the new arrival of a constantly running oxygen tank generator that runs much like an air compressor would (and sounds equally as obnoxious). Even as I type this I'm watching him watch the Dodgers play, and he has deliberately chosen to mute the television in exchange for subtitles.
-He makes a casual old man comment asserting that with all the money that Manny Ramirez makes, he could afford himself a "decent" haircut (as most men over 80 believe that dreadlocks are neither stylish nor respectable). I (despite my disposition that dreadlocks are both disgusting and sophomoric, mostly because I see mostly white college students wearing them) counterpoint politely in saying that it probably costs a lot of money to maintain such a fashion statement (although with Ramirez's ability, I would imagine it might impede his ability to perform on the field). He kind of ignores me, or didn't hear me. I suspect he uses his hearing aide to ignore people who disagree with him or don't find him funny.-
The worst thing about Uncle Norm is how quickly I can have an existential crisis when I have a conversation with this man. In the last couple of years he has developed an increasingly severe case of pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that will eventually take him to the end. He is the brother of my grandfather who died a week ago, and he carries with him oxygen that keeps him from going into insane coughing fits that could, essentially, collapse his lungs. He shows the signs of a man who was once incredibly mobile, but now is leashed to the top story of his beautiful home (built in the 1940s for $11,000, which is now estimated, due to it's property value and amazing view, to be easily in the million dollar range).
His home carries many photographs of him and his wife in their later years. In fact, the greater amount of photographs in his home are of him and his wife.
He took us to a restaurant tonight as I watched him eat his lampchops and merlot very quietly. Hearing the occasional "pssst" breaking in intervals to shoot oxygen into his nostrils. It was the most intense silence I've felt in a long time.
When I was 9 years old I had a very intense existential crisis. Not in a philosophical way, but in the summer of 1997 I very abruptly realized that I will die. It would not be something that I could control, and it could, quite literally, happen at any time. I suspect it might have had something to do with the media coverage that year the followed the release of the film Armageddon.
Watching Uncle Norm put this fear back into my body. A nervous hot rushing wave of mortality that feels like a borderline panic attack. Only today I realized that it isn't necessarily the fact that I would die that scared the living shit out me, but rather the idea of being that old.
Since my grandfather passed away last Friday, a mass collection of archival footage has resurfaced in the form of decades and decades of old photographs. One specifically had "UN [Uncle Norm], 1944" written on the back of it. It was of him dressed in a pilot's uniform in front of a small airplane. After quickly calculating the numbers mentally, I realized that this photograph was taken when he was 21 (my age). I looked up from this picture to see the same man in his late 80s with a plastic tube wrapped behind his ears and into his nostrils as he talks about a neighbor's dog whom he gives a treat to every time they stop by to visit.
The man has probably never harmed anyone in his life. I'm unable to see a flawed bone in this man's body, and yet he is subjected to a life that does not seem fair in a society that expects karma. I look at him staring intently Manny Rameriez's dreadlocks, and I can't seem to tell if he's happy or not.
He may be hiding things so well that perhaps he is as unhappy as I suspect, but then again he may be living the life of total contentment. Occasionally he will mention how deeply frustrated he is that he can no longer garden, but yet can never seem to speak ill of any of the cards he has been dealt. This leaves me with a suspicion that he is one of three things:
A. Miserable and waiting
B. Incredibly well adjusted to life
C. Purely an optimistic character
After coming home to stare at the Santa Barbara sunset and work off the buzz I obtained at the restaurant we ate at, my mother very sadly says "I just really wish Uncle Norm could live forever." He is a man tortured by the involuntary reactions of his own body, and yet I can't seem to tell whether the look of malaise he wears during commercial breaks is really that or him just trying to decipher the difference between the Cadillac and Buick commercials (a topic he has many opinions on, although we both agree they are all essentially the same 30 seconds).
To jump into this existential discussion with him regarding happiness in the bottom of the 7th inning of the game is ill-advised as he is clearly going to be too tired to answer cohesively, but I also fear that I may create a tear in time and space if I actually knew the question to the paradox that I have been fearing since the 3rd grade.
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