Uncle George

Going to tell about the rich uncle. 

The Looting Begins...

His name was George.  That explains the title.  He was not really rich.  He just had more money than anybody else in town with his good German name.   Not many, but all relatives.  Poor relatives.  Social respectability was very important to Uncle George.  He loved his family and was a good solid citizen.  He died in 1954.  As a very old man, he once carefully installed a transparent window on a box of cornflakes so his very young great-nephew could watch the corn flakes.

George purchased a plot in Lindenwood Cemetery for Aunt Bessie and himself.  He also purchased all the plots around them and specified in his will that no one was ever to be buried there.  It may have had something to do with the Depression and everybody putting the touch, real or imaginary, on the rich uncle.  There was a letter from der Vatterland that arrived in 1947 hinting strongly for help.  It is presumed the letter went unanswered.  It was tut mir leid enschuldegung excuse-me enough to be German in 1918. George was liberty cabbage.

They really renamed sauerkraut “liberty cabbage,” even in a town with more Germans than anybody else.  The Anglos lord their patriotism and piety over the immigrants as usual.  The family is laboring square-headed dutchmen who show up at the morning whistle, decade in decade out.  After the wreck in der Vatterland, this was fucking Valhalla.  Cuss for emphasis.  The girls worked too as domestics or inspectors.  It was the good life.  From 1880 until the rough patch around 1918.

Not to mention the flu pandemic.  Then the depression hit ten years later.  From here on, it’s mostly fiction.  Scan it.  Fast.  Let it flow on by and think about it later. Charlotte worked in Uncle George’s bank, the German-American Bank that changed the name to Lincoln Bank in 1918.  This must have been in the late 30s or early 40s before the war, because this old guy had fought at Verdun as a Strosstruppe.  There is a story about how the old man came to be in the bank.  Words are like children.  Zygotes.

So the bank changed into a surrealistic department store which would have put it in the late 20s so it is stock-market-crash for the old man who fought atVerdun.  He does not have a name but he does have a stroke… perhaps one prior to the one that kills him at the end.  His last 30 conscious minutes of life in 1929 go into some kind of medium where they get played back as a dream.  Or maybe it’s the old man’s Groundhog Day in hell.  The story sucked.  That is how it works.  There is a name for it.

There has to be a name  for it.  In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance.  Her name is Charlotte and she can be a muse as well, dealing with abstractions.  Like a mirror, she can be clue or distraction.  Like any reflection.  Except Charlotte is the reflection of the other.  So this old guy starts handling the toaster but does not seem to know what a toaster is.  Now he wants to see the manager.  This is about the time the old boy is losing it and the story goes out of control.  It is about metaphor.

This is about the Will of God, not in text but in nature.  Will is a cool guy, and when the English screamed, “…fire at Will,” he took it personally. Charlotte was showing him the door when he realized he was dying.  As his good name, he projected the memory into eternity, wherever that is.  His name is still George even if he is dead that is, the uncle and not the guy who died inside something that was turning into a Nickelodeon.  Will younger readers have any idea what that is like?  Who is Teresa Brewer?

Who the fuck cares?  Cuss for emphasis in a juke-box, one of the most art-deco creations of all time that missed it by about twenty years… or a cable channel.  Who cares?  Winter is coming.  There will be dragons and white walkers.  There will be discarded newspapers sweeping the alley driven whorls and vortices in slipspace. Charlotte’s heels click on the brick and she stops to adjust her seam.  A loan wino does not notice.  Maybe it will be a bank, pun intended.  Conjure alchemy euphemisms to deal.

Uncle George sleeps at Lindenwood but wake up them real.  They never had children.