Word: mothers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...uncle Mark is 12 years younger than my mother, 11 years younger than my aunt Susie and 10 years younger than Peter, my uncle in Greenwich. After his first day of nursery school, Mark came home and announced, somewhat confused, "There are other people my size." He never quite learned to relate to them. He talked Sartre with Susie at six. Peter got him drunk when he was eight. My parents married when he was nine...
...family's not very close. There's some excuse for this on my father's side, since one of his brothers lives in Hong Kong and the other in Barcelona. But my mother's brother lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, and she only has lunch with him once a year. (We live in New York, 45 minutes away.) Still, everyone thought it a bit extreme of my uncle Mark to up and disappear...
...siblings, but he never graduated from college. He moved to Boston and played harmonica at the Cantab Lounge and the Middle East. Sometimes he worked at a music store; sometimes he called my grandmother for money. After she died in 1988, Mark lived off the inheritance. My mother worried about him a little, his being young, motherless and often drunk. She invited him out to Cape Cod one summer; I remember he taught me to do a "Walk the Dog" with a yo-yo. Otherwise, the visit was a bust...
...mother called him when she came up for Parents Weekend in November of my freshman year. He insisted on taking us out for some swanky dinner; he told us he'd just made several million dollars, but he wouldn't tell us how. My father suggested he pull out of whatever he was involved in while he was ahead. Mark ignored him. By last Christmas, he'd lost all his money and was $30,000 in credit card debt...
...father, explaining that I'm never going to have a real job, that I'm going to go pick fruit in Australia for a living. To which he replied, "Good, you can be a deadbeat like your uncle." "Who?" I asked. "Mark--he's disappeared." What? Soon, my mother was on the phone, telling me how the family had cut Mark off a month before, saying they wouldn't give him any more money until he got himself together. Both Peter and Susie had offered to put him up, but he'd declined. No one heard from...