18 Uncles - An Introduction

Embarking on a new adventure... home

Sitting around the glow of a summer fire six years ago, I heard an uncle talk about how my young father taught him how to drive a car when he was fifteen. A few off-hand sentences opened the door to a new perspective, and it finally hit me that most of my aunts and uncles knew the man I called “dad” better than I did. 

Some had over a decade more time with him. That’s ten more summers of camping on the lake, untold numbers of softball at-bats witnessed, countless cigars smoked and handfuls of rice tossed on newly married couples hurrying out of the church, and ten Christmas lunches at Grammie and Grandpa’s, everyone opening gifts and shouting over one another through the humidity of dozens of bodies and the smell of roasted ham, gravy, and Grandpa’s cigarettes. 

They lost a friend of twenty years; I lost a father of eleven. Of course, they knew him better than I did. I never had the opportunity to learn how to drive a stick shift, change a tire, or file my taxes from him. 

All of these years, we were lucky to have a large familial support network, but it’s something I’ve never appreciated. 

And so, I am starting this project I’m calling “18 Uncles,” and I’m heading home to reconnect and learn something about my father, my family, life, and the rural America I left a long time ago.

Close to a decade has passed since I packed my bags and came to Europe, where I’ve lived, loved, wandered, and looked across the ocean at my home country talking sh*t at the sorry state of affairs. I’ve been thinking about how I could contribute something positive to the nation that raised me, and I think being an example of respectful dialogue in a divided America is something I’m uniquely positioned to do.

I don’t know where all my uncles stand on all issues. I’m sure we have our disagreements, and that is okay. We don’t need to agree on everything to love and respect one another. 

I’m sure they have disagreements amongst themselves. They’re eighteen individuals, but the broad profile is that they’re mostly Christians who have big trucks, hunt, don’t drink alcohol, and are very comfortable in rural Trump country. I’m a millennial lefty with long hair who hasn’t eaten meat in nine years and feels at home walking the cobblestones, admiring gothic cathedrals, and immersing in multi-lingual cities of Europe. 

But I’m sure my 18 uncles and I have some surprising areas of agreement. I want to find that common ground, but more importantly, I want to know them better as humans. Having such a large family, holiday parties often take place in hotel conference rooms or school gyms and can have the feeling of a regional paper company convention. There are often too many people rushing around for meaningful connection with the blood relative sitting next to you, especially when everyone is a stoic Finn. 

I want to know what music the uncles listened to growing up, which posters they had on the wall, if they ever got in trouble at school, how they met my aunties, where they went on their first date, what it was like to have children, and how they cope with the roller coaster that is life. 

I want to know them better as humans. 

From this distance, they all seem so normal with the job, the wife, the house, the children, and the pickup truck in the driveway. Building a life like that, for most of my existence, has felt akin to constructing a prison: suffocating, permanent, and freedom-limiting. Although, that has been shifting, and maybe some sage Protestant-work-ethic advice could help me better prepare for a future I’m envisioning that more and more resembles their lives than the nomadic searching I’ve been doing the last decade. 

Maybe they have some words of wisdom. Maybe they don’t. Either way, I want to go and find out. 

The part that worries me most is keeping my insecurities in check because, by every one of their metrics, I feel like a gargantuan 32-year-old loser with no wife, no house, and no four-wheel-drive diesel to tow the boat I don’t own to the lake property I don’t have. And their casual digs and sarcasm can sting if one isn’t in the proper headspace. 

The worst-case scenario is being chased out of town after six months, realizing my uncles don’t like me and think I’m an irresponsible mooch, and finding out I don’t have the talent or work ethic to pull off the book I can so clearly see now from an ocean away and having not yet started the hard part. At least I’ll have tried.

But, despite the seven-month-long winters, record snowfall, and show-no-emotion Finnish masculinity, there’s a lot more warmth there than I realize. One doesn’t raise ten children or become a grandfather without a heart the size of Lake Superior. 

An open mind, realistic expectations, and an open heart are prerequisites I’m trying my best to bring to the project. 

I want to learn. 

I want to learn about my uncles’ friendship with my father, hear some classic stories, and I want to find out more about the man that isn’t much more than some old photos and a few faded memories, most of which I’m unsure came from the depths of my own hippocampus or home videos and pictures that have cloaked themselves as first-hand experiences. 

There are some I know are my own: the smell of his truck, always guessing what temperature would be showing on the bank sign, counting his pull-ups at the park on the way to the beach, a surprise ice cream hidden under the passenger seat, and his exaggerated shouting laugh as he acrobatically twisted and kicked his boots playing goalie on the backyard ice rink, stopping shot after shot as my young brothers and I got increasingly frustrated, his taunting laughter growing louder with each save. 

Those I remember well. And I want more.

So I’m going home in the hope of reconnecting with the rural Michigan I love and the family I’ve been away from for too long. I want to break bread with everyone, have tea with my eighteen aunties, run around barefoot with my cousins, and hopefully get yelled at for walking on the carpet with dirty green-bottomed feet, then made to rush back outside and rinse them off with the hose, lifting up our pant legs and laughing while we use the concrete of the driveway as a pumice stone to scrape our soles clean. 

And ultimately, I want to listen, learn, and get quality time with my 18 Uncles.

Welcome to the project.

And thank you for reading.

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