Presence

When I finally got around to wrapping last night, I was suddenly jolted into remembering my Uncle Ed.

Uncle Ed was notoriously quiet. He once flew coast-to-coast next to Charlton Heston. The voice of God himself was forced to initiate a conversation with his silent seatmate, a mostly one-sided conversation occasionally answered in disinterested monosyllables. My father, in Boston visting in-laws after a ten year absence, bumped into Ed at a local pizza parlor where my uncle was picking up a take-out. Uncle Ed nodded, grunted a nearly inaudible, "Hi," then left with his pizza.

Uncle Ed was reclusive. We rarely ever saw him. He would come in from work, grab the crossword puzzle from the Boston Herald and head straight upstairs. Dinner was eaten alone in his room. Occasional glimpses of him were caught when we were allowed to enter his inner sanctum, a wierd place with decades of meteorological data methodically written on all the door frames, beer in hand, in response to his shouts of, "QB!" (Quart of Beer) or "QBC!" (Quart of Beer and Cigarettes.) For our efforts were rewarded with The Penny and a Quarter Game, where you chose a hand concealing one or the other coin as your compensation for the beer run. He would stay up watching Carson, The Late Show, reruns of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life. Around 3:00 AM or so, he would trudge downstairs for a final beer and smoke before retiring. Then at 5:00 AM he'd be back up and off to work again.

Uncle Ed was a miser. When the roads were not completely iced over, he would hop on his moped and head down Route 128 to work. He calculated the ride cost him about $.03 in gas. The temperature in their house was just enough to keep the pipes from freezing, and for that reason, the most coveted seat in the house was atop the radiator. It was rare to take your coat off inside before spring.

Uncle Ed was nearly a professional baseball player. He played with one of the major league farm teams. It was not meant to be though, for Uncle Ed had a higher calling.

Uncle Ed was a rocket scientist. He designed the Minuteman Missle for Sylvania. This might explain some of his eccentricities. It certainly explains his lack of patience in trying to help me with my algebra homework; I struggled for years to grasp the concepts while he was born knowing them. It also explains his tight-lipped personality. Last year I happened to meet a retired personnel director for Sylvania, a man who held that position for 30 plus years. He asked which plant my uncle had worked in, and with some surprise, mentioned that he had never had high enough security clearance to step foot in that facility.

Uncle Ed was a gardner who in the spring would escape to his sacred plot of land behind the henhouse where he would transplant his delicate seedlings, nurtured during the long cold winter by a grow light in the dining room. He once tried to persuade us to drag a dead, frozen cat home for his compost pile, explaining that we could tie a string around it and pretend to walk it home. After he died, my aunt visited his burial site to be sure her designs for his plot had been carried out and found a small carrot growing in the center of his grave.

So what does Uncle Ed have to do with Christmas, aside from his obvious Scrooge-like temperament?

Uncle Ed was a beautiful wrapper, who produced the most perfectly finished gifts. That was his sole contribution to the holidays. Edges always neatly folded, finished and tucked, paper patterns always matched to a seamless perfection, it was artwork executed with pure precision. His legendary wrapping excellence has become my benchmark.