He wore a tight crewcut colored a khaki blonde that turned white through the years. He kept it short and clean and mean.
That look could have had him playing a mean master sergeant in any military movie you’ve ever seen, except he couldn’t have pulled it off. Way too sweet. He had the bark, but not the bite.
Uncle Alfred could never master angry. Had trouble getting in the same ballpark with irate, this pleasant, easy-going, blue-collar, American-made uncle of my mom’s.
Usually there was a work cap perched up there on his rectangle of a noggin, not a ball cap, but instead something advertising Pennzoil or Quaker State or John Deere, a freebie he’d picked up on the job or from a customer.
His face didn’t draw attention, but if you looked you saw bright blue eyes, thin lips that formed quick smiles, cheeks and neck always shaved tight. He protected pale skin from the sun with long-sleeved work shirts that almost always had an oval and his name over his heart.
No telling how many different places he worked in his life, but the one I remember is his job at a Gulf station that was once on North Seventh Street in West Monroe. He wore navy work pants and the Gulf shirt with the oval and the Pennzoil hat and brown work boots. A couple of red oil rags hung out his back pockets. I remember because he took me to work with him one day.
What was I, maybe 8? Pumped gas. Checked oil. Aired up tires. He gave me a red rag to put in my back pocket. Shocked he didn’t give me a pack of Larks and a lighter.
The best thing was I got to eat breakfast with him that morning in his and Aunt Opal’s trailer. Each day it was the same thing at 5 a.m.: two eggs over easy, two pieces of bacon, two pieces of toast. Aunt Opal doubled her work load that day and sent us off full to “the fillin’ station.”
They didn’t have any children. Just two weenie dogs. Saphire was the mom. Her son? Teddy. True story.
None of us get to choose our uncles and aunts. And they don’t get to choose us.
Sometimes we’re stuck with each other.
But sometimes it all works out, a lucky accident from Mother Nature.
And so it’s gone for me, and so it went for me and Uncle Alfred, who always gave off the lightest scent of menthol and gasoline.
I saw him young only in pictures, and again in an oval, this time framed, he on one side, my Aunt Opal on the other.
But for me, he was always the perfect age.
He was a great great-uncle.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu
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