Say Uncle

My uncle who lives in Las Vegas came to visit this week. I've got an uncle who lives here in town, who I lived with until he got married and got his own house. I've complained about him before. So, this Vegas uncle, Len, is his older brother.

Anyway, the strangest thing happened yesterday--well, it's not actually the strangest thing, as Len was telling stories about his house being haunted and his daughter seeing faces reflected in second floor windows and going to a black mass and his wife seeing a man standing at the foot of their bed in the middle of the night--but Len was telling us stories, and he told this tale about something that happened to his little brother John when he was a teenager.

It was a traumatic event in his life, where John felt like he was totally screwed, and it ended up working out great in the end, but everyone was worried for a while. You know, one of those kinds of stories.

So, after John gets off work, we all got together and ate food and hung out with my mom (who is their older sister) and cousins and the many kids that people except me tend to have. And then John says, "That reminds me of something that happened to me when I was nineteen," he proceeds to tell us the exact same story (of something that happened over twenty years ago).

But what's interesting, really, is that the two stories were different, and Len's version was actually better, because he made John sound way more human in his tale. John was worried, John was nervous, John was crying, John didn't know what he was going to do. But in John's version, a bunch of people were worried, he knew folks were nervous, his family was crying, his friends didn't know what he should do . . . John, however, was a rock. And a superhero. And a benchmark of stability and confidence. And a god fresh down from Mount Olympus.

Hmmm. Now that I've written this, I'm wondering if I shouldn't have talked about Len's experiences with the occult, and demons, and hauntings throughout his life. I meant to chat about that with my cousin last night, but instead, we talked about time travel.*

I really ought to talk about my uncle Len, and his multiple encounters with the supernatural. Uncle John says that Len makes those stories up, my mom says that Len is spiritually hypersensitive, my uncle George says that that's all figments of his imagination, my uncle Ali says that it's aliens (it's always aliens with him), my uncle Blackie says "Where's the weed?"

I don't know what to think. All I know is that it's allergy season once again, and my world continues to revolve around me, so that's all that's important.

Rish Outfield

*Time travel DOES exist, folks. I know this because my cousin and I started talking about time travel at just after midnight, and when we looked at the clock, it was two-thirty.