This is especially hard for the baby of the family. You tend to remember being people not taking you seriously and never treating you like an adult. Suddenly this weekend, I realized that my parent and aunts an uncles were about the age I am now (44) when I was born. They asked me questions about my family, my travels, my work and it dawned on me that they weren�t talking to me as a child, but as an adult.

This was one of those �Duh!� moments. Though I value the life experiences I have had over the years living abroad and in different cities, I now realize there was a price to pay. I realized that having been away so long that I�d been carrying this notion of the �baby� inside for all that time. Had I been around interacting with these people on a more regular basis, I would have grown into my role as a responsible member of the family. Instead, I nurtured the misconception that no one understood me, took me seriously, or respected my ideas.

Of course, I did do things that try most people�s patience.

On Saturday, I went to visit my Uncle Walt. He was the only boy (and the second oldest child) in my mother�s family. He served in South America in the Second World War and was an air force photographer I believe. When he returned home from the service, he stayed with his parents. My mother once told me that he had a girl friend after the war, but my grandmother would hide her letters when they arrived. Another story she told was how he had once decided to become a priest, but my grandmother had dissuaded him. My mother felt that was a mortal sin.

As it turned out, all of his sisters got married and he didn�t. So when my grandfather died (I think the year I was born) the job of taking care of grandmother fell to him. He was a fairly good natured but quiet guy. He worked in a factory a few blocks from his house. He hunted and fished and loved camping. His house was on about an acre and a half of land and he had a huge garden. He learned to swim and filled up many 50 mile cards over the years. Everyone thought grandma only had a few more years left (she almost died from a heart attack in the early 1960s) and once she did, he�d be free to marry. Grandma, however, ended up living until the ripe old age of 104, and when she died in 1990, Uncle Walt was in his 80s.

When I showed up at his house, I was a bit taken back. The concrete sidewalk was cracked and uneven from the roots growing under them. The cement base of the old hand-pump outside was cracked and had sunken down about 6 inches. The old shed where he had once raised pigeons and canaries and where he had a great woodworking shop now looked old and rickety, its roof sagging sadly in the middle. The flowerbeds had a few volunteer but for the most part were choked with weeds. You�ve probably heard this before, but everything looked smaller than when I was a child.

Uncle Walt shuffled to the door when I rang the doorbell. The interior of the house looked pretty much as I remembered it, though, everything seemed fuzzier around the edges. That was due to years and years of accumulation of things-books, calendars, boxes, glasses-which had been placed on almost every surface and then forgotten. That happened during one of the many life-threatening illness Walt had suffered. My brother, Ken said the latest one had to do with him not being able to eat. According to Ken, Walt had bought a set of false teeth at a drug store rather than having a dentist fit a pair for him. The teeth hurt so Walt went without them. But he didn�t watch his diet and became malnourished. He had to be hospitalized. Last year when I saw him, he seemed fairly self-sufficient. This year, however, he seemed much more frail. Mentally he is still there; it just takes him a little longer to answer. And now his jaw quavers sometimes before he speaks. I wonder if it is Parkinson�s disease.

I had come because Uncle Walt had a wedding picture of mom and dad, for which he served as one of the grooms in 1939. He gave it to me and then I asked how the garden was. He took me out show me. He had not put in any vegetables this year; instead he had just planted flowers. Most everything had bloomed out, but there were still a few blue flax, dianthus, and sweet William. He showed me a few of the sweet Williams whose color he really liked-they were an intense dark, velvety red. Most of the plants had seed pods that were just bursting so he grabbed a few handfuls from each and gave them to me. There was a small wire fence that ran in an L shape and divided his flower garden from the lawn. Along this, the concord grape vines I remembered still grew, and I was heartened to see that along one section the rhubarb plants still flourished. As kids we used to pick the stalks and chew on them and my grandmother used to stew them with sugar and the red raspberries that grew in another section of the garden. Walt obviously didn�t have the time or strength to prune back low hanging limbs, weed the flowerbeds, or mow the grass frequently. I wonder who checks in on him on a regular basis and what my role in his life would be had I never left the area.

In the summer of 1968, when I was 13, Uncle Walt took me and my cousin, Thom, on a fishing trip. Thom was two years older than me, and was in the throes of a hormonal revolution. He could not keep his mind on fishing, instead spending most of the time eyeing and trying to talk to the girls in the camp where we stayed. He also taught me a ton of new swear words and obscene concepts of which I had been ignorant theretofore. I was easily distracted from fishing as well, which I used to find extremely boring, and so I must confess that we were a bit of a handful for poor Uncle Walt. At one point he exploded at us and told us that he would never take us fishing again. Over the years I regretted the way I behaved.

After we got done looking at Uncle Walt�s garden, I felt a rush of tenderness for him. Every year he still sends me a sum of money at Christmas and types a greeting on an old typewriter. I blurted out that I was sorry for how I behaved during that trip. He stopped. I could see him trying to remember. He said, �I�m sorry I don�t remember that at all. But that�s OK.� Once again, I realized what a large part of life I had missed having moved away. That is why we have culture and families and traditions. That is how you avoid having to spend so much time working things out for yourself. I chose to work it out for myself and found out that the answers were all around me. (This is what psychologist call the �Wizard of Oz� moment.)

I spent another half an hour talking to Walt and then returned to my brother�s house to get ready for the party that evening. We were going to take all the uncles, aunts children, grand children and great, great grand children out to dinner to celebrate my parents� 60th wedding anniversary. Walt showed up that evening and ordered the Walleye for dinner. After the party was over, I walked him out to his car so that no one would take advantage of him. I felt suddenly protective, like I was escorting a precious charge with me. Which in fact he was.

There is nothing in my story of Uncle Walt that relates back to today�s piece, Arnold Schoenber�s Pierrot Lunnaire-except that it relates to my earlier comment about how I tried many people�s patience. In the summer of 1976, I was listening to music like this. I hung around with Thom Klem, who was very well-read in art, literature and history, and Eric Tollar, who was mathematically gifted. I developed a disdain for most conventional manners and customs, thinking that all intellectual pursuits were more important than archaic and bourgeois values like family, emotions and tradition. So it was logical that I would start listening to atonal and twelve-tone music.

Schoenberg came from Vienna and he began his career as a composer as the heir to the hyper-romanticism of Wagner and Mahler. Wanting to make music even more intellectual, he came up with the idea of making �atonal� or �antitonal� music. In that type of music the composer rejects all notions of key, meter, and traditional harmony. One of the best example of this is Pierrot Lunnaire in which Schoenberg made strict notations that the singer was supposed to utter each syllable at the appropriate pitch, but not string them together as a song. The words for the �songs� come from seven poems about madness by a French symbolist poet. Fun stuff. But at the time, it suited my mood perfectly.

Tonight I put on a copy of Pierrot Lunnaire after dinner while we were sitting around having dessert. In about 2 minutes everyone had cleared away and I found myself alone. This music is challenging at best but I could see it somehow summing up the zeitgeist of a continent poised to rush off into that most insane waste of human life, World War I. Still, there seemed to be a lesson here. I found myself alone listening to this piece of music. What an un-human thing to do to music-make it so intellectually remote that it serves to separate rather than bring people together.

Still, I think it is interesting exercise to listen to it once. (Check it out of the library if you can.)

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