UNCLE LOVE [T, 8-26-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Family Musings of An Old Man—UNCLE LOVE [T, 8-26-25]

[Continuing my musings about having a brother…]

 

I think I wanted a brother so much because I had seen the way my father and his brothers lived together…quite literally.

Dad had five brothers…and one sister, Helen. When I married Helen Karr, Aunt Helen [Bell] told her, “I enjoyed being Helen McFarland. I hope you will, too.”

Aunt Helen was second in birth order, Glenn was first, and my father, John, was third. After him came David, Bob, Randall, and Mike.

In addition, they had a sister, Bob’s age, who was actually a cousin. Genevieve was four when her mother died and her father married a woman who did not want her. I doubt that Grandma Mac even blinked when her brother asked her to take Genevieve; she just sent her husband, Harry, to fetch her, with my six-year-old father along for the ride in the Model T. My father said she was wearing a pair of overalls, and that was all she brought with her.

That family survived the Great Depression by living with Grandma and Grandpa Mac in a big old farm house on the edge of Oxford, OH. My mother named it Cedar Crest. The younger boys—Robert, Randall, and Mike—could not get jobs, so they couldn’t marry, and thus were still at home. So was Genevieve.

In addition, Glenn and Mable, and their daughters, Joan [Joann] and Patty; and Helen and Harvey Bell, and their daughter, Elizabeth; and John and Mildred, with Mary V and John Robert; all lived at Cedar Crest whenever they were out of a job, which was most of the time.

No, David, and his wife, Ella Mae, were never in that group. He always had a job.

I think that is why my father never liked David much. He liked all his other brothers, and his sister, but not Dave. [My father was the only person, in family or out, who called him Dave instead of David.] I don’t think Uncle David lorded it over his brothers, that he always had a job and could be independent when they could not, but my father was always aware of it. Daddy was the hardest working man in the history of the world.

To him, hard work and supporting your family was the essence of being a man. It seemed wrong to him that an effete office-work kind of guy--whose wife was always so “frail” that she could not participate in family activity--should be able to support his family while he could not.

Don’t worry. I loved my father, and I respected him. But he was human, and so he had flaws. Some were products of his time, like thinking black folks “should stay in their place.” Another was resenting people he felt had an easy time during the Great Depression.

I never saw my father interact with Dave, since Uncle David never lived at Cedar Crest, or later, since he went off to live in Arizona, for Ella Mae’s health. I did see the way he and Glenn and Bob and Randall and Mike talked together, worked together, puffed their pipes together. There was something comforting, something whole, about that.

So, I always wanted a brother.

John Robert McFarland

I am named John not for my father, but for my mother’s youngest brother, and Robert for my father’s brother, Bob. Uncle Randall felt I should be named for him, since he was my primary care-giver at Cedar Crest, and I would have been fine with that. I did honor him by using his name for the hero in my novel, An Ordinary Man.