I remember my niece asking if she could use my wrist roller. It was a round bar attached to a rope attached to a weight. It was very important to my niece to have strong wrists and forearms. She was 5. I watched her struggle mightily to raise that weight.
My nephew, younger by two years, was a bit shy, his big eyes sucking in my bedroom in all its disarray. They would scramble upstairs to spend quality time with their uncle because they knew I’d let them roam through my spacious apartment and fool with anything they wanted. I was usually too tired to care.
Jump ahead lots of years.
Recently my brother and his kids treated me to dinner to celebrate my 62nd birthday. My niece sat across from me looking very sophisticated. She produces for Fox TV. Next year she plans to marry her boyfriend. All her friends are getting married. Her mother is getting remarried. Her father recently retired. He chain smokes and is overweight. Try talking to him. Too damn fast, all of it accelerating past, a newsreel on speed.
My nephew is graduating from a good university and already has an internship lined up, with possibly another in the works. He has a goatee that barely qualifies as wispy. I doubt he weighs 120 pounds. But he can troubleshoot my laptop like a geek octopus, uninstall and reinstall my virus protection, not panic when strange messages pop up demanding a response.
I’m proud of them, but as we sit around my brother’s house later playing Wii, feelings of powerlessness hit me. Though they mean well, their concern over my eating habits makes me feel like a little boy. When my niece drives me somewhere on the highway because I no longer trust my skills, I cringe when the speedometer goes over 60. She has more responsibility in her job than I ever had in any of mine. She meets famous people all the time. I’ve never met anyone really famous. I did know the wife of a reality star viewers hated, if that counts. Alright, damn it, it doesn’t count.
I can’t help but compare futures and be jealous. I take out my feelings by competing way too hard in Frisbee Wii and Basketball Wii. Sometimes I beat them; sometimes I lose and grind my teeth. I’m not ready to admit I’ve peaked. I am still, in my mind, the all-knowing uncle who provided them with a haven for discovery, even if most of their finds were junk I should have thrown out.
After dinner, as we were leaving, I remember some geezer in his 80s evidently overheard the waitress offer to sing Happy Birthday, which I vociferously refused.
“Happy birthday, young fella,” he chuckled, and I thanked him. How many grandkids did he have looking after him? Could he get home by himself?
“I saw you put those bread sticks in your pocket, Uncle Joe,” my niece scolded me. She misses nothing.
I still use my wrist roller, although the rope is seriously frayed. If all else is lost, I want stronger forearms than those two brats.
In my defense, they were tiny bread sticks. – Joe Del Priore