Sammy

His fingers, some of them stubs, grasped his half emptied thermos of tea - he leaned under the arch of our kitchen entry, "Lets hit the bricks Annie." He’d say that every time they got ready to head home. Behind him, the cabinets he built lined the rear wall of our kitchen. They were freshly repainted bright yellow. The black colonial-looking handles had little faux dings all over them – as if they’d been rendered from raw steel with a ball-peen hammer – they didn’t fool me.

Uncle Sammy was a small-framed guy, patient and quiet. He taught my sister and my brother how to drive – mostly because he was patient and quiet. He died before I was sixteen and I didn’t get the privilege of his tutelage. My driving record, however, remains much better than that of my siblings. And the fact that he was never able to teach Aunt Anna has me considering that he was more willing than (cap)able.

Uncle Sammy worked in the silk mill his entire life. He was the mechanic that repaired the machines as they would break or jam. Over years he lost the tips of several of his fingers to the gears of the looms – some, just a bit – others below the first knuckle. I’m guessing that the losses occurred with little drama – that he was back to work the next day, changing his bandages at break time.

The things Uncle Sammy made in the evenings in his garage – the kitchen cabinets, the toy boxes and lawn ornaments – supplied him with rare opportunities to work beyond the purely functional.

He cut a mother-duck and three duckling shapes from ¾” pine, painted them and extended a metal rod from the base to form the lawn ornaments that I found myself pulling up before mowing many years after his death. I’d replace them carefully - in the same exact spots Aunt Anna placed them - when I finished mowing.