On May 29th, 2017, Uncle Kevin came to the game with me. He had been volunteering at the Sacramento Music Festival (née the Jazz Festival). Kevin, my mom’s brother, had been coming to Sacramento for Memorial Day weekend for at least thirty years, and it was pretty much the only time I ever saw him. He had lived in San Diego or Los Angeles for as long as I could remember; we had visited him there once or twice, but aside from a week when he came up to put a new roof on our house, we only saw him on Memorial Day weekends.
By 2017, he had moved to Tonopah, which is way the hell out in the middle of nowhere in Nevada. I’m tempted to cobble together a metaphor about remoteness, but I think the truth was that Kevin just liked to be away from people. He was a quiet man, and from what I could see the only time I visited after he died, Tonopah would have suited him. He still made the drive to Sacramento every year to see my mom and work the Jubilee, though, and for a while when I was going back to visit on those weekends, I’d end up sitting up late at night watching SportsCenter with him.
I asked him, after he’d bought me the tickets, if he’d be interested in coming to a game with me; obviously, Memorial Day weekend was the only feasible time, and we arranged for him to come to Richmond on Amtrak; I met him at the station and escorted him through the BART and MUNI rides to the park.
Mom had been saying that he seemed to have lost a step recently, that he seemed occasionally a little confused, a little less alert and steady than she was used to seeing him. If he had, I wasn’t seeing it; he seemed the same to me, although she knew him better. He was quiet, yes, and we didn’t do a lot of talking, but that wasn’t unusual. I tried to keep him engaged, but conversations with him were rarely lively.
I remember two things clearly, though. When the stadium announcer, as per Memorial Day tradition, asked veterans to stand up by service (“If you served in the Army, please stand; if you served in the Navy…,” et cetera) he declined to rise; I asked him why he wasn’t standing, and he just shook his head a little and said, dismissively “Don’t need to.”
That one moment, I think, told me as much about Kevin as I had gathered in my entire life to that point. He wasn’t a man who lived for show, or did things to be noticed. He did what he did to do what he thought was the right thing, and serving in the Marines was one of those things. That kind of duty to what was right was a thing my mother believed, too, and for all that they were constantly yanking each others’ chains (they were opposite sides of a coin, politically and socially), that duty was always a link between them, although I don’t know if they knew it.
The other thing I remember was that Christine, on finding out that this was the Kevin who had made it possible for me to sit next to her at every game for a season, told him that she was grateful as well – that I had been a good companion. He said, in his laconic way, that he was glad, and that she’d probably be able to sit with me next season, if I wanted the tickets. And that was how I found out I was going to have Giants tickets in 2018 as well.
I escorted Kevin back to the train station after the game; on the way, I asked him what had moved him to offer the tickets in the first place. He said “Well, I helped pay for your sister’s college tuition, and I never gave you anything; I thought maybe this would be nice.” I assured him that it was indeed nice, but also that he had bankrolled my incidentals in my first year at Hayward State, to which he had no real answer. It turned out it was enough just to be nice, I guess.
That was the last time I saw him; he sent me a check for the next year’s tickets on my birthday and we spoke again around Christmas, but he died sometime in early 2018. I would have taken him to more games, but I didn’t have the chance.
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One response to “Memorial Day 2017: A Farewell”
Thank you for that. My eyes got misty. AND yay for all good uncles.
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