After the positive reaction to my column on Friday about our family reunion and Uncle Bob’s exploits, I decided that I’d tell a few more Uncle Bob stories today, and be back on Wednesday to celebrate some of the happy conservative wins and schadenfreude-drenched tales of Dem losses from the last 10 days.
So after the tractor fire two Thursdays ago and before our family reunion that Saturday, my cousin Darryll and I went out to Uncle Bob’s on Friday afternoon. When we got there we first saw the burned tractor and the burned Miata. The tractor was totaled, and the Miata’s passenger-side taillight assembly looked to be fine…but the rest of it was burnt right down to the frame.
Other than the two roasted front tires, the tractor Bob saved had no other damage.
We found Uncle Bob sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of a huge, old oak tree, with his daughter Lisa’s good dog Lola sitting in the grass beside him. (Yes, I have a cousin named Lisa Simpson. And I swear I’m not making this up: she married a guy named Bart. Fortunately, we live in a patriarchal society where wives take their husbands’ last names, so they were spared the burden of going through life as Bart and Lisa Simpson.)
After Darryll and I put some treats for the reunion in the fridge in Bob’s shelter, we sat down and talked with him for a while.
Bob had a .22 pistol on his lap. Because of course a guy who just drove a burning tractor out of a burning barn would have a pistol close at hand. Maybe the tractor fire had been arson. You can’t be too careful. (And better to have a gun and not need it…)
After he told us the story about Illinois Bob and the Burning Tractor of Doom – he made it sound more like a Three Stooges short, because he’s modest that way – we then went on to other subjects.
He’s a good storyteller in his old age, which is strange, because he was famously taciturn as a young man. I mentioned before that he and my dad were “Irish twins” – dad having been born in January of 1938, and Bob that December – so they were in the same year in school. I remember dad telling me that when one of their teachers read the class roster the first day of high school, her face went pale at the prospect of two more Simpson boys in her class at the same time.
Their two older brothers, Ray and Bill, had done some hell raising in town, so teachers were apparently braced for the worst. (Ray ended up joining the Army and going to the Korean War, apparently as a result of some alcohol-involved incidents that resulted in a “go to jail or join the army” choice. Afterwards he moved out to California, so I didn’t get to know him very well. When I asked my grandma what Ray was like – I was around 9 or 10 at the time – she said that he was a pretty good boy, but “Ray like to tussle.” Which I think is the most grandmotherly way to say that.)
(Fortunately, when Ray did some tussling with some North Koreans and Chicoms, he lived to tell the tale…although he never did much talking about it, as I understand.)
But the teachers had nothing to fear from my dad and Bob, who were thick as thieves, but caused no real trouble. They had polar opposite personalities. Dad was an extreme extrovert, and Bob an introvert, and there was no better proof of that than their senior year school yearbook.
Their pictures were right next to each other, of course. Beside dad’s picture was so much writing it could barely fit: 4-year letterman in track, basketball and football; captain of the football and basketball teams; senior class president; homecoming king; voted “most popular.”
Beside Uncle Bob’s picture? “Bob Simpson.”
Somehow the subject of high school came up when we were talking to Uncle Bob and petting Lola under his oak tree. And he told the story of his final English class, during the spring of his senior year. What follows is as close as I can remember to his exact words.
“I already had enough credits after December to graduate, so I didn’t want to be in school, let alone in that English class. And our teacher told me that everybody in class was going to have to give an oral report on some story we’d read. I told her I didn’t want to, and she said I had to. I said I’ve barely talked in four years of school, and I wasn’t going to get up in front of class and talk about some story.”
Here he added, “Why would I want to talk about a weird story about some old sailor with a bird tied around his neck?”
Darryll looked at me, because I’m the English professor, and I said, “You mean, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?’” (It’s a once-widely-anthologized Coleridge poem, an archetypal Romantic piece filled with the kind of symbolism perfectly designed to be unappealing to a 17-year-old Uncle Bob.)
“That’s it,” he said, and shook his head. “After I said I wouldn’t do it, she sent me to the principal’s office. I asked him why I couldn’t just take shop again, and he said, ‘You can’t take four years of shop!’”
(By then Bob was already a decent carpenter, and he ended up becoming a union carpenter, after stints as a barber – he built his own barber shop – and the proprietor of a small take-out restaurant. When everybody “started growing long hair like a bunch of freaks in the ‘70s,” he quit cutting hair and converted his barber shop to “Fish ‘n’ Chicks,” and ran that for about 8 years. All while he was also doing some carpentry on the side, too.)
A compromise was finally reached. Bob would have to write a book report on any story he wanted, and he wouldn’t have to read it in class. “So I saw a movie about a story where a young couple buy each other gifts that they can’t use, and I wrote about that, so I could graduate.”
I said, “The O’Henry story, ‘The Gift of the Magi?’” (The husband owns a pocket watch but no chain, and the wife has beautiful hair but no comb. So he sells the watch to buy her some combs, and she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain. When I got back to Florida, I looked it up, and found the movie Bob watched: “O’Henry’s Full House,” a 1952 anthology of five stories, which serendipitously offered him a path to graduation in the form of a way to write a book report without reading the book!)
And Uncle Bob looked at me and said, “How many stupid stories do you know?”
And I said, “All of them.”
Afterwards, when Darryll I were heading to a local golf course, I asked him why Bob had a pistol with him. He said that there were some moles in his yard, and on days when the weather is good, he likes to sit in the yard and look for movement, and then fire controlled bursts of two or three shots into the ground.
It won’t surprise you to hear that Bob has worked on other handyman projects over the years. When he was in his mid-60s, he built a duplex that he kept as a rental for about 10 years before selling it. My dad and two other uncles on my grandma’s side pitched in during part of the framing; I was in Florida by then, but I remember hearing how 4 men in their 60s struggled to lift lam beams into place.
Probably to the consternation of the same women who took a dim view of Uncle Bob driving a flaming tractor out of a smoking barn in his mid-80s!
(By the way, if Bob had talked about building that duplex last week, I would have made a reference to J.D. Salinger’s novella “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” And Uncle Bob would have just shaken his head at me.)
His latest projects have involved working on a series of mobile homes in Bradenton, Florida. He started coming down for the winters about 15 years ago. He bought a trailer that was okay, but needed some work done. He worked on it for two winters, got it perfect, and then got itchy and sold it, buying another fixer-upper.
He’s now on his fourth trailer, and he had just finished working on it when Hurricane Debby came through last August, taking off the carport and damaging the roof. My cousin Darryll has a trailer about two blocks away, and he and Bob’s son Bobby came down after the storm and tarped the roof and cleaned up the lot.
(Darryll and Bobby are the two cousins I’ve taken the May trips with in recent years, starting with driving Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica in Darryll’s 1976 Caddy El Dorado in 2021. New CO members can read my journal of that trip at Martinsimpsonwriting.com. Just scroll down the right side until you see “Route 66 Road Trip.”)
When Darryll came down in November, Bob and Aunt Lilly were already in Florida. Darryll called him the night he got in, and said that he’d be over to help Bob with the roof the next day. Does anybody want to guess where Darryll found him when he got to Bob’s trailer?
That’s right. On the roof.
Fun fact: Uncle Bob is 4 years older than Joe Biden. And Bob’s still climbing ladders, while Biden hasn’t climbed a staircase without falling since late last century.
I miss my dad every day, but I’m glad that Uncle Bob is still here, and that he’s already dodged the two leading causes of death for octogenarians: falling off a roof you’re working on, and driving a flaming tractor out of a smoking barn.
Am I saying that America needs a lot more men like my dad and Uncle Bob, and a lot fewer Gavin Newsoms and Beta O’Rourkes?
That’s EXACTLY what I’m saying.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 