I'd like to think that every family has a "unique character" in it.
Ours is Uncle Sonny.
I haven't seen him in 10 years or so.
I send him a Christmas card each year and a letter updating him on my family....
.
He calls at my mother's house -- every Christmas day.
He sounds exactly the same as he did when I was a child...and when I hear his voice, I am instantly transported to those days....
He was the youngest of 10 children.
He was quiet and shy.
He was very good looking and the stories told by my aunts and even my mother's neighbors were that the girls were crazy for him.
He never married.
I've never heard him speak of anyone special. Never.
He loved us kids.
He would spend hours and hours teaching us games and playing games with us inside and outside.
And he loved the library, reading, and the movies.
He was great with trivia, and so many of his games had to do with trivia.
He made his living being a professional golf caddy. In the summers he would live in NJ, and every winter, he went off to Florida.
For a few summers he lived with us -- at my mother's house.
Room was scare there. We were 7, and the house only had 3 bedrooms.
Uncle Sonny took the basement.
My mother set up a small military-style cot down there, and that's where he'd sleep.
Everything he owned, he kept in a small suitcase that would go with him from place to place....
We never thought anything of it.
My cousins would often come on the weekends to our house.
Uncle Sonny loved to play Kick the Can and Dodgeball. We had many a good softball game in street in front of the house....
But his favorite outdoor game was 'Are You Afraid of the Bogeyman?'.
I'm sure this game was unique to our family.
You have to play it at night, at dusk, or after dark.
It's best played outside, but since the basement at my mothers was really an old cellar, there was access from outside....
That basement was a pretty scary place - being comprised of a labyrinth of small cement rooms with low ceilings, lit only with single lightbulbs.
Anyway....to play 'Who's Afraid of the Bogeyman', all of the kids would sit on the deck and count to 60 with our eyes closed.
Uncle Sonny was always the Bogeyman.
It was his job to hide, armed with only a flashlight, either somewhere in the yard, the neighbor's yard, or our basement.
After the minute, we'd all go, as a group, to find him. We'd never separate, because we were all too afraid. You see, at any moment, Uncle Sonny might pop out from the inside of one of the tool sheds in our yard, or from behind the big old outdoor oven in the neighbor's yard, or even from around the corner of a narrow doorway in the basement. And it wasn't just jumping out that scared us. Oh noooooooo. It was the fact that when he jumped out, he'd have the flashlight aimed under his chin, which caused his whole face to light up like a jack-o-lantern's. That, coupled with his low "Bwwwwwwwaaaassaahhhhhhhh", would make most every one of us scream. Anyone that screamed, of course, was 'out' of the game!
So we'd make our slow search of the yard, hearts thudding in our chests, always on guard for a tall, dark figure lurking....most times getting scared to death when he pounced!
Fun game, huh?
I don't know why we always always begged to play again....
Believe me, my sister, to this day, is afraid to go into my mother's basement.
Another game we'd play with Uncle Sonny was geography trivia. He was great at geography. He'd give us a capital -- of a state, or a country....and we'd have to say what it was capital of. Sometimes he'd give us a river or a mountain range, and we'd have to say where it was located. If you got the question wrong, you'd pay with 'knuckles'. if you got the question right, Uncle Sony would get 'knuckles'...
Knuckles? you ask...
Yes. A deck of cards was used to dole out this punishment. With the cards, you slap the other's knuckles.
Uncle Sonny would never hurt us.
I wish I could say the same for us when he lost...
We'd always thrash his knuckles with that deck of cards.....waiting for him to say "uncle"...which he never did....
So the "character" in my family is Uncle Sonny. He was the loner with no family of his own, no real home of his own, who would drift in and out of our lives each summer, bringing with him great fun and games for all of his nieces and nephews.
Do you have one in yours??
