For years, I’ve used the phrase, “If I live to be a hundred,” to indicate something that is never going to happen. This weekend we celebrated the second family member to reach that milestone with Uncle Leo. I remember quite a bit of unease with his entrance into this family when Aunt Ruth selected him for membership.
Aunt Ruth was closer to my age than my mother’s, and we sometimes referred to her as the “sister aunt.” For her entire life, she felt free to be a sister if we were doing something fun, but she begged off any difficult decisions that had to be made by saying, “I’m only an aunt.”
At the time of her selecting Uncle Leo, Aunt Ruth was a stunning young college freshman who gave beauty tips to young nieces when she was home for the holidays. (Keep your cuticles pushed back now, and you will have pretty nails as you grow up.) I envied her naturally curly chocolate-colored hair as Mama gave up on permanents and resorted to braids for my straight dishwater-colored hair.
On one significant college break, she brought up this Leo Berry guy (also a freshman) that she had just met. Family concern abounded. She was eighteen. He was six years older. He had been in the Navy and was returning to college to get his degree with much life experience behind him. And nobody in the family had met him. This was moving much too fast. Oh, my!
By time for the wedding, concerns had eased considerably. The young man had made a good impression when Aunt Ruth brought him home to meet the family, and she was now nineteen. The only negative left was my sister Beth who got her nose out of joint when the wedding took precedence over her sixth birthday – a grudge she would hold for years.
Looking back, the family owes Aunt Ruth a debt of gratitude. Uncle Leo has been there for all of us when we needed him with a few personal instances standing out. He made the travel arrangements for my parents to come to Germany for Christmas about a year before Daddy died. They wouldn’t have done this for themselves, and it would be the last time I saw my father. The next year when Daddy died at the beginning of an ice storm, causing travel delays all across the South, I had flown in from Germany to Atlanta. Flights west were iffy and might or might not stop in Jackson where Uncle Leo and Aunt Ruth had planned to meet me and take me home. The runway cleared about fifteen minutes before the plane’s touchdown in Jackson. In the luggage area in the time before cell phones, I looked around for the nearest phone to call them and let them know I had arrived. Panning the area, I turned, and there they were standing directly behind me. Uncle Leo had kept the airport line busy all morning checking to see if any plane from Atlanta would land.
So, I thank Aunt Ruth for making such a good choice, and wish a very Happy Hundredth to Uncle Leo.
P. S. Uncle Leo isn’t finished yet as I understand he remains the storyteller of choice in the Blake where he lives.