The Year We All Cried “UNCLE”

I imagine I was around six to eight years old when I had the satisfaction of beating my Daddy in arm wrestling.

Fifty-some years later I can string a composite memory of various images in my mind, still…though all these moments may lack exact sequence.

I think some of our memories – especially the mundane, everyday recollections from long ago – exist in a composite event – a very real and summary synopsis.

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I remember winter nights after dinner at our small little white formica kitchen table, no bigger than 30 x 42 inches. I still have that table, I measured it. Fifty years later I am placing my tiny $5 clearance Christmas tree-in-a-tub on it, with my single 2020 Christmas ornament with John 1:5 painted in the Star of Bethlehem.

In those long ago winter nights of the late sixties and early seventies, I can visualize the early darkness, the closed kitchen curtains and the coldness of all that was outside.

Those late fall weekends were when my father might be gone hunting on a Saturday, returning with squirrels or rabbits or pheasants or geese or quail if he had taken his English setter and gone “bird hunting”….or….at times, word of a Big Buck during deer season.

He would return in his hunting attire, and I would be curious to see the various dead animals. I treasured being given long pheasant feathers he would turn into quills for me to write with and I can remember taking one to school for show and tell.

I remember him standing at the sink in our tiny, tiny kitchen using a match to “cinch” the skins of wild game that lay in the sink to remove the little stubs left after plucking feathers…and the smell of this.

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After dinner my Daddy would sit with a cup of coffee and light up a Marlboro at our little formica table. This was a frequent ritual, sacred in retrospect, on this small-altar-of-a-kitchen-table… before he might go to the basement to work in his shop for the remainder of a winter’s evening…and no doubt I’d be following him.

Being an only child, I’m sure I wore him out! I am now 57…and when he was 57, I was just eight years old.

Some nights we would play checkers at the little table while he smoked his Marlboros and drank his coffee.

And sometimes, we would arm wrestle.
I can remember being taught the proper grip and the rules of “elbows can’t leave the table”…and the “on your mark, get set…GO!”

I can remember the times my Daddy made my little arm go flat down in just five seconds after the word “Go!” and then his loving amusement and playfully calling me a “weakling”…and the times he put up such a struggle against my little arm until I gleefully brought him down!

I can remember us comparing our muscles…maybe he even told me I needed to eat more spinach, like Popeye!

I suppose, after establishing me as a weakling, he then let me beat him after building up my muscles! Who knows if there was any intentional lesson in that…

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There is so much I could say about this year, in my life.

It started with my necessary mantra of being a BADASS….and like a soldier throwing up and crapping their pants in the Higgins boat headed for Omaha Beach, I was in the fight of my life and determined to survive and fight my way forward in a personal-apocalypse-of-a-war on every front.

Little did I know – nor any of us – that all of our personal battles were soon to be engulfed in the unique assault of 2020.

I don’t think any of us saw this coming.
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I think most of us are worn down from fighting many unseen battles this year – battles that I hope all of us have at least one close human who is bearing witness and strengthening and comforting us through.

It has been a year of tremendous losses and grief, on many fronts, for all of us.

I am grateful for those humans closest to me during this past year.

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As I reflect this morning on the last day of this unforgettable year, I think of Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie…a priest writing a sermon that no one will hear…for no one comes near…and I think of how strong I thought I was and could be…cloaked as Eleanor Rigby…and now I know.

I think of many things….and like part of a podcast I listened to several days ago, finding myself internally railing against the message at first, lost in a dark place of fear and despair….I now, days later, embrace it and get it:

I BOW to 2020 (reference this podcast and the eastern religious symbol of “bowing” to something as your teacher) …to the Universe and to its lessons….I am small…so very small….and in my smallest, smallest BADASS voice I say, “UNCLE.”

I am a firm believer in honestly naming the realities of our inner world experience…I see it has the true way forward.

May each of you be strengthened and hopeful, even when the moments are so dark, and may light shine again on us all in 2021. Happy New Year.

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REFERENCES

Say ‘UNCLE‘Posted by Bruce Kahl on January 25, 2001In Reply to: Say ‘UNCLE’ posted by John Hoeksema on January 25, 2001: Anyone know where the phrase ‘Say Uncle’ meaning ‘I give up’ came from?

It seems that while “crying uncle” is today regarded as an Americanism, its origins go all the way back to the Roman Empire. Roman children, when beset by a bully, would be forced to say “Patrue, mi Patruissimo,” or “Uncle, my best Uncle,” in order to surrender and be freed.
As to precisely “why” bullies force their victims to “cry uncle,” opinions vary. It may be that the ritual is simply a way of making the victim call out for help from a grownup, thus proving his or her helplessness. Alternatively, it may have started as a way of forcing the victim to grant the bully a title of respect — in Roman times, your father’s brother was accorded nearly the same power and status as your father. The form of “uncle” used in the Latin phrase (“patrue”) tends to support this theory, inasmuch as it specifically denoted your paternal uncle, as opposed to the brother of your mother (“avunculus”), who occupied a somewhat lower rung in patrilineal Roman society.from the Word Detective.com
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“Light, Fog, Bow” – Podcast by Rob and Kristen Bell, December 23, 2020

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The Beatles: What really inspired Eleanor Rigby?

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
Father McKenzie
Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near
Look at him working
Darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there
What does he care?
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby
Died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father McKenzie
Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved
All the lonely people (ah, look at all the lonely people)
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people (ah, look at all the lonely people)
Where do they all belong?