{"id":1009,"date":"2013-06-14T17:22:13","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T23:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/?p=1009"},"modified":"2016-05-02T11:19:10","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T17:19:10","slug":"saying-goodbye-to-our-favorite-uncle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2013\/06\/saying-goodbye-to-our-favorite-uncle.html","title":{"rendered":"Saying Goodbye to Our Favorite Uncle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>My sister and I lost the last of our mother\u2019s generation this month. Uncle Fred, born in 1918, was the eldest of our mother\u2019s 5 brothers; at going-on-95, he outlived her and his younger brothers\u2014as well as two wives\u2014by years, even decades.<\/p>\n

His memorial service at the First Congregational Church in Eugene, OR, where he offered to God his glorious bass baritone every Sunday morning until he was too weak to stand, is going on right now. We aren\u2019t there, for reasons of expense and work and (in my case, anyway) denial. I don\u2019t want to admit he\u2019s gone, this penultimate family member standing between us and geezerhood. (Our Aunt Win, the last of my father\u2019s 5 sisters and 1 brother, is still holding down the New England side, but we were never as close to Dad\u2019s family as to Mom\u2019s once we left Boston.)<\/p>\n

Fred was the only one of his Jesuit-educated, head acolyte brothers to Leave The Church as a young man and not go back except for family funerals, a source of much grief and prayer to my mother and grandmother. I asked him about it when I was in my teens, and wondered why this most culturally Catholic of the bunch, who loved Gregorian chant and the Latin Mass even as he read liberation theology, didn\u2019t just follow the course of his brothers\u2014putting in time, disagreeing with the Church on mostly everything but not riled up enough about it jump ship. Fred was shocked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love the Church too much to do that!\u201d he snapped. \u201cI argued with my Jesuit friends for years over questions I had, things I absolutely could not find it in myself to believe and assent to. When it became clear to me that I could not be a faithful Catholic, I left. It would have been dishonest to do otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fred\u2019s politics would have put him with the Nuns on the Bus if he hadn\u2019t been so faithful to his conscience. Instead, in an ironic twist, he ended up a Congregationalist, in the church that had been my grandfather\u2019s before he converted to marry my Irish grandmother, the same church that had been our rock-ribbed Massachusetts Puritan ancestors\u2019 back to the arrival of Robert Kinsman on the Mary and John<\/em> in 1634.<\/p>\n

I know that Fred would be written up in a lot of people\u2019s books as an apostate. I hope and pray God\u2019s accounting differs\u2014or at least that He\u2019ll let Fred engage in a good judgment day argument about it, preferably over some of that great wine Jesus saves for last. He was by no means a saint, and his sons, our much younger cousins (who have with God\u2019s grace long made their peace with each other and with him), would probably describe his fathering skills as unique and complicated. But there was no better uncle, ever. I hope every kid has at least one who comes close.<\/p>\n

For Fred\u2019s 90th birthday party almost 5 years ago I wrote a tribute. I couldn\u2019t be there, either, so my sister read it through laughter and tears. Fred is being well eulogized today by his longtime best friend, but if I had been there I would have retooled the 90th birthday tribute just a little to say this:<\/p>\n

Funny came first.<\/p>\n

Before we knew much about anything, we knew Unca Fred was good for a belly laugh\u2014a tall, gangly scarecrow of a visitor with a bristly crewcut, a dead-on Yiddish accent for retelling the tale of Leetle Red from the Riding Hood<\/em>, and the astounding ability to shoot a full set of dentures out through his lips and back again, like some kind of wind-up Halloween novelty. \u201cStickoutcherteeth<\/em>!\u201d we\u2019d squeal, over and over, and he never got tired of it. It\u2019s not, obviously, an image Fred\u2019s more sophisticated pals can groove with, and maybe you had to be there\u2014but we were <\/em>there, hopping up and down in our chenille bathrobes, long after bedtime, and trust us, it was priceless.<\/p>\n

Then he was Mr. San Francisco, lord of the vacation kingdom that was, for us, more magical than anything Disney could conjure. With Fred and Mary as guides, we learned to swing up onto a cable car, eat spicy soy crackers with green tea in the Japanese Tea Garden, play hide and seek among the fog-wrapped giants of Muir Woods, and make an endless line of baloney sandwiches on corner bakery bread with Jack cheese and Gulden\u2019s brown mustard\u2014still, we think, what heaven\u2019s going to taste like. Later, at home, we called it all up again when we dressed in our incense-scented Chinese pajamas and our tabi slippers, and opened our tinkling Chinatown music boxes, and dreamed of next summer.<\/p>\n

And though you would not guess it of that skinny guy, who was more likely to dress up in cynicism than in ermine-trimmed red velvet, there was a Santa Claus, and he was Fred. For decades, it was Uncle Fred who distributed our gifts on Christmas morning, more excited than anyone of any age, more a believer than even our Mom, who had once heard reindeer hooves<\/em>. And it was Fred, looking around Mom\u2019s Christmas dinner table that grew ever wider as it added his kids and our spouses, our kids and his kids\u2019 kids, who would hold the last glass of Christmas wine to the candlelight and begin to sing \u201cO Holy Night,\u201d tears rolling down his face, without apology. We never stopped believing in Santa Claus, because there he sat.<\/p>\n

This does not even begin to tell you of the wisdom Uncle Fred imparted. He made up for that thing with the teeth by sophisticating our whole family. He introduced Mom to the bitter tang of a gin and tonic (we\u2019ve got a picture to prove it, of her wincing at the first sip, out on the deck at the Alta Mira in Sausalito) and now it\u2019s our cocktail of choice, too. He ruined us, to the third generation, for wine coolers and white Zin, educating our palates in spite of themselves, so that now, when any of us is out for dinner in a group, it\u2019s to us that the wine list is passed. His teaching, like Danny\u2019s memorable first attempt at using the language of wine tasting, has always been \u201clight, but not heavy.\u201d With Fred we learned to order unforgettable meals at Ernie\u2019s and savor hamburgers on sourdough at Sam\u2019s in Tiburon, to send back the sherry if it\u2019s Paul Masson in a La Ina bottle, to eat the salad last, to make scintillating small talk at grown-up dinner parties, to appreciate Peter, Paul & Mary and Bach\u2019s Goldberg Variations and Dave Brubeck (all of which we heard first on Fred\u2019s vinyl, from the stack of albums stored in the teak sideboard in the dining room on 23rd Avenue between Clement and Geary), to get the bittersweet humor of Peanuts<\/em> cartoons, long before they were animated, to devour Jane Eyre<\/em> and J. D. Salinger and Bulfinch\u2019s Mythology<\/em> and Regency romances and, in one memorable Christmas package, One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em> (which we had to rescue from the trash where Mom threw it when she saw it had \u201cthe F-word\u201d on the first page), and to argue\u2014with eloquence, logic, and biting wit\u2014our position on absolutely anything.<\/p>\n

Fred\u2019s taught us a bit about loss, too, having had to let go of Mary, of Lucy, of our grandparents, of his brothers, all, and of our parents. No more than 5 minutes after our Mom died, we were on the hospital pay phone to Uncle Fred. \u201cCan you come, now?\u201d we begged. In his own grief, he was confused. \u201cIsn\u2019t your Dad there?\u201d he asked. \u201cYes,\u201d we said, \u201cbut we need a grown-up<\/em>.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re 40 and 37,\u201d he countered, laughing in spite of the loss. \u201cWe know,\u201d we said. \u201cBut we need Unca Fred.\u201d He was on a plane that afternoon.<\/p>\n

Who will be our grown-up now?<\/p>\n

We can say it again, because he has gone, as Nana would say, to his reward, and we don\u2019t care if the others overhear and are jealous: he was always our Favorite Uncle. And 94 was way, way too young.<\/p>\n

Requiescat in pace<\/em>, Frederick William Kinsman<\/strong><\/a>, though resting in peace was never your style. May God reward you 100 times over with the love and laughter you\u2019ve given us our whole lives long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My sister and I lost the last of our mother\u2019s generation this month. Uncle Fred, born in 1918, was the eldest of our mother\u2019s 5 brothers; at going-on-95, he outlived her and his younger brothers\u2014as well as two wives\u2014by years, even decades. His memorial service at the First Congregational Church in Eugene, OR, where he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":1010,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,1],"tags":[339,337,338],"class_list":["post-1009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-staying-catholic","category-uncategorized","tag-eulogies","tag-fred-kinsman","tag-uncles"],"yoast_head":"\nSaying Goodbye to Our Favorite Uncle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My sister and I lost the last of our mother's generation this month. 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