At some point I knew that my family was different.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment in the mind of a child when he realizes his life isn’t the same as everyone else.  In a lot of ways, we seemed exactly like every family on the block.  One father, one mother, and four children.  Sure we struggled on our bills, but that wasn’t so unusual, particularly in Uncle Sam’s army, was it?  Sure enough though, things were different.

There were clues along the way that made me start to see the differences.  Sometimes they were little clues – like how I never sat in my dad’s lap, because I was too scared of him even when he was smiling.  Or always seeing my mom cry, holding me like I was supposed to make things better.  I always thought that little kids weren’t supposed to see their parents cry, particularly the heart shudder sobbing that my mom did.

Sometimes the clues were big, too big to ignore.  Standing at the doors of our bedrooms, my siblings and I looking at each other silently as our parents shouted and broke things in the living room.  Or living in a human waste with millions upon millions of roaches infesting, eating, and crawling over everything.  Or wetting the bed and having no one that cared enough to change the sheets.

Perhaps it was when I first started going to school and the stories that I told in the innocence of childhood didn’t mesh with the other kids or my home-taught rough housing got a judgmental eyebrow from a teacher.  Perhaps it was having neighbors stand on their porch and watch as our family disintegrated for the fifteenth time on our lawn, fighting over the car keys to escape.  I knew we were different.

What I didn’t know was that it could better.

At least until I met Uncle Frank.

There is a silent commiseration that goes on with the broken people of the world.  I think of it as learning to think poor, rather than just be poor. Being around poor people, hearing their tales of woe and regret, numbs the pain of a bad life in a way.  It’s an opiate that removes the accountability for bad decisions.  These things just happen, uncontrollable, man.  Bad things happen to the bottom rung, no escaping it.

The problem with this thinking, as convenient and easy as it is to dull a fractured spirit, is that it never teaches the next generation a way out.  It never teaches how to struggle, fight, claw your way back to some type of God damned life worth living.  It’s the only inheritance that poor-minded people give to their children.  I can’t think of what is worse – to have a decent upbringing and to live in failure with the knowledge that life could be pretty nice … or to never even know that happy times are even possible.

For most of my childhood, particularly when my dad abandoned my mom to heatstroke and near death in the desert, we lived in squalor, dirt poor, disregarded, and unseen.  I remember walking through the halls of my school, hiding behind long hair and black T-shirts in self loathing, listening to teachers make fun of me as I passed.  That kid’s a bad seed.  A no hoper.

Sometimes kids just need a little push.

As I said there was this guy, my Uncle Frank.  He was my dad’s brother, which mean he came from the same tough as shit, grandfather Curtis.  My dad always used grandpa’s harsh ways as a crutch, my mom even helped with the excuses when we were little.  Oh, yes, he was beaten with a belt til welts rose off his legs … that’s why your daddy has so much anger.  That’s why he seems to enjoy the whuppings he gives you.  He just doesn’t know any better.

But here was Frank, came from the same place, but a different sorta guy.  Not different like my family, but rather more importantly, different FROM us.  He spoke softly, kindly.  Had a disarming, shy type of smile.  Always spent time playing with us when he visited on his breaks from the Air Force.  He was such a contrast from my own father.  He was reserved, thoughtful, restrained.  Seemed like Frank put every spare penny into savings, kept every thought on future plans.

For instance, he was my dad’s younger brother, yet he outranked him in the service.  Can you imagine?  Hell, my dad was embarrassed.  I could tell in the way he acted around Frank, kinda too eager to prove he was worth something.  You see he was too insecure to be proud of his little brother, I guess, always some excuse that held him back.  Often times nowadays his excuses are my mom or us.

Uncle Frank had a wife from Thailand, Thim.  She was so nice.  Whenever we drove to visit them or they came to see us, Thim nearly adopted all of us kids while she was there.  She seemed to know which one of us had the worst of it and just picked us up to give us some proper hugs.  I heard stories later how Thim would sneak us out one by one to give us baths and wash our clothes, because we looked like street urchins covered in grim and in dirty clothes.  Little things that parents are supposed to take pleasure in doing for their kids.

Their house was different, too.  It was so clean, orderly.  My dad had his streak of “tidy-ness” but really only when we were on an Army base.  Also, the house was fun, pleasant.  Thim’s food would radiant out from the kitchen, delicious and exotic to our naive, little noses from Oklahoma.  The way they spoke to each other in passing, brief conspiratorial whispers in the short husband-wife code like they were members of a football team sharing the secret play.  Like they knew each other, like they loved each other.

It was from my Uncle Frank that I saw a little keyhole to the outside.  It was like my life was underneath a gray blanket and I couldn’t see the sun or the grass or the clouds.  Being under that blanket with the rest of my family was the only thing I had ever known.  And then one day, Frank pokes a whole in this heavy quilt and I start to see the first little ray of sunshine past the gloom of my present.  There’s no doubt that too many words have been wasted on cliches and such, but I swear to you HOPE is a very powerful thing indeed.  I could see a way out.  I could see a life like the one’s on TV.  I could see.

I started to study my Uncle Frank whenever he visited, everything that he did.  I wanted to be just like him.  I wanted to talk in the careful, measured way he had where everything he said was something important.  I wanted to be responsible and save up every dollar, so I’d never have to worry about money again.  I wanted to do the responsible deed every time so that I could earn good luck.  I wanted.

Life is a funny thing.  Some people have it easy and others have it hard.  Those that make it can always count the people that helped them through.  No one ever gets out on their own, doesn’t matter what they tell you.  The funniest thing is that sometimes the people that help you the most may not even realize that they are doing it.  People in my life like Thim, like Frank.

I’m 32 years old now.  I’ve got a wife and a son.  Sometimes I take my son to swim lessons and watch how he reaches out into the deep water without a moment of fear because his daddy is holding him up.  Sometimes we run around and play chase with bales of giggles.  Sometimes I have secret, short-hand conversations with my wife in passing because I know her so well that a single word or an expression is enough to convey what we mean.  Sometimes we walk in the park together and we can see the sun, the grass, and the clouds.

I look back at the memories that sometimes come back to me when I was just a little kid and they are as distant to me as they are strange.  It’s hard to see myself back then, to remember all the things that happened, to remember how I felt.  Sometimes I want to pick up the little boy still lingering at the back of my mind with the sad, brown eyes, a little boy that looks a lot like my own son, and I want to hug him, to tell him to be strong, kiddo, because things will get better.  They will, I promise, you just have to hope.

But I guess I don’t have to.  Because I had Uncle Frank.