MEMORIES OF EMME

Never heard an unkind word pass his lips.  So patient,  yet stood for no nonsense. Born on Christmas Day, he was my great-uncle, and a bloody-blooming Scotsman with a silly laugh.
 
He was a virtuous man who hated liars, opera, and my father.  He did not trust left-handed people or "Philadelphia Lawyers".  Fought in WW 1, and was a sergeant in the Signal Corp.  He would say ne ran so fast, that he ran between the bullets.  Froze his nose while on top of telephone poles, stringing wire behind enemy lines in France.  My father unkindly referred to him as Reddy Kilowatt.

"Ten Hut! Stomach in, and chest out!"   Showed me how to wind up for the pitch.  He died before the Pirates won the pennant. They were his favorite team.
He died the same year as Gary Cooper, his favorite actor.  They both died of cancer.  He smoked too much.
A Muriel cigar, a pipe- full of Prince Albert tobacco, and Mail Pouch chewing tobacco in a brass spitoon on the front porch
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He liked to tell everyone I was a good kid when I was sleeping.  He also said I needed a girdle.  I wasn't sure what that meant, I just knew I did not like it.   He gave me the knickname of  "Honey."

Taught me to spell Punxsutawney, Tidioute, Tyrone and Tionesta from Pennsylvania, and how to count to five in French.
Emme lived in New Mexico for a while , and he had a six-shooter with a holster.  Said he shot a bad guy every morning before breakfast.   Ate peas off a knife "like the cowboys do", went rabbit hunting with a ferrett, and pheasant hunting out of season.

Wheeling, West Virginia was his home, and where his beloved mother Emma was.  As a child, he would sell her the same chicken for fifty-cents, everytime he needed money. He slept in the loft of their farmhouse, and in the winter, the snow would fall in on him from the cracks in the roof.

He walked two miles to church one night, in the dark and the snow.  Uphill all the way, he would point out.  Opened the door of the church, and the sermon had already begun.  The preacher glared at him and thundered  "You"re late, you'll never get to heaven like this.!"  To which Emme replied, "If you're going to be there, I don't want to go!"  He turned and left the church, and walked back home in the dark and the snow, two miles, uphill all the way, he would point out.  He never went to church again.

He sat in his rocking chair with his pipe.  Put some white crystals in the bowl of the pipe on top of the Prince Albert tobacco.  Kept the crystals in a special tin.   "Menthol. Cools the smoke"  he would say. 
At night we listened to his floor model radio.  It was made of beautiful wood, and had a yellow lighted dial. 
The Whistler, The Shadow Knows, and Gene Autry crying, "Lets ride boys, to the Bar Twenty!" The horses hooves I could hear as they ran, and in my minds, eye, I could see it all.
We listened to ball games, too.  'IT'S THE PITCH!  STEERIKE ONE!" 

Old Maids, and checkers, Authors, Louisa Mae Alcott, and Little Women.
I would sit on his lap while he read me books my great-aunt would buy for me. "Anyone who buys these books, aughta have to read them,"  he would grumble.  He read through the book so fast, I really could'nt understand him, but I loved it anyway. 

I remember coming down the stair case one day with his dentures in my hair.  I thought I was pretty.  "Get that kid" he sputtered, before she breaks the things." I must have been a real brat.  I can remember walking up to him so innocently, in my hard soled toddlers shoes.  He'd fall for it every time.  I would then kick him in his poor vericosed-vein legs, and then run, laughing all the way.  I would run to my great-aunt, who I called "Ma"
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Ma would be sitting in the dark dinning room smoking one Lucky Strike, and drinking something out of a cup.  Told me it was coffee, but would not let me have a sip.
''EMMET EARL!  she would sternly say,  "leave that baby alone"!, as he chased me in anger.  "Do something with that damned kid" he would growl.
What a grand game!

We used to to to Pennsylavnia in Emme's '36 Chrysler.  I remember Emme starting the engine with a crank.  The car was sleek, and black and square.  The water in the engine would boil over before we went four blocks.  I would watch him roll back the hood from the side.  There was a silver hood ornament of a lady with wings on the tip of the  hood.  He then replaced the water from a large metal  can; slam the hood shut, and we would putt-putt our way to Sharon, Pennsylvania.  The wind would gently whistle thorough a partly opened window, and  the fringe around the inside of the windshield would merrily blow about.  And the spokes of the wheels of the car turning and spinning at fourty miles an hour.

I can remember Emme walking home in the rain in his one good 3-piece suit, and his grey stetson, carrying a child's table and chair set he had bought for me.  He would buy me Wonder Woman comic books and penny valentines, and bring me red paper Poppy flowers on Veteran's Day.

He was sitting in his rocking chair, looking at himself in a small hand mirror.  "See the monkey in the mirror"? I would  tease.  He laughed, and put the small mirror away.  And rocked, and smoked that damned pipe.  Lost  in his thoughts, staring out the large picture window.
And me, unaware of the meaning of his thoughtful mood.  He knew that the cancer on his mouth had returned.  He smoked too much
.
The mouth cancer had indeed returned in early  '57, just as it had first appeared in 1947.
He was gone all summer at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.  And Ma at his bedside all the while. 
I would go into the large, three story brick house, now so empty and hauntingly quiet.  I would kneel at the front of his rocking chair and tearfuly pray that he would get better and come home, again.
I did not know what I was asking, for he was dying,dying.
The most vicious mouth cancer I have ever seen"  the doctor told my great aunt.

I was not allowed to go to the hospital and see him.  "I don't want you to see him like that', my great -aunt told me.  She never mentioned the word "cancer".  One did not  mention that evil word.

I waited for the phone to ring, for my great-aunt was to call me that day. 
The phone rang.  ''Hello?"  "Honey, it's Ma.  Emme died this morning.  I don't know how else to tell you."  What could I say?  My buddy was gone.  I was not allowed to see him, could not see him that way.

They told me he would hear a young girls voice in the hospital hallway.  He would lift his head off the pillow and ask, "Is that Honey"?
It was not.  I was not allowed to see him that way. 

The 21 gun salute rang out through the gently rolling hills of the cemetery.  The mournful sound of Taps that rips so painfully at your heart.   Through the years, I came to hate the sound of Taps, after two more military funerals and the loss of two of my brothers.
A military funeral and we put him to rest, September 30, 19 and 57. 
Ma let me pick out the headstone.  Large and impressive, his birthdate December 25, 1888.
A poppy, his favorite flower, carved on the headstone. 

His favorite hymn, Silent Night should have been played for his funeral that day.  Why didn't I think of that before just now?
Maybe next time I go to his grave, I will sit and sing that for him, the way he used to sing it for me every Christmas Eve. when I was a child.
He'd like that, I think.