judecorp | R.S.A. 1915-2005

It's kind of surreal that I lived next door to him for 17 years and I don't feel like I really knew him at all. He was the wacky (and therefore slightly scary) old relative who did crazy things like answer the door in his underwear or spy on you out the window with binoculars. He also stowed money away in shoeboxes in his apartment forever, until the vinyl siding dudes got into his house and stole a bunch - then he started putting piles of money in different bank accounts in several different banks. He was quite the eccentric guy, chain-smoking Pall Malls and creeping to the corner bar every day until he hit some sort of health kick and quit smoking, got dentures, and got out of his dark, dingy apartment.

There was a period in my teens where he had this strange obsession with making brownies, though I think he used water instead of milk, eggs, and oil because they were as dry as sand - little brown bricks of paste, individually wrapped in plastic. He would pass them out to all of us if we were unlucky enough to be caught in the driveway together. Actually, no - unlucky was trying to make out with some boy behind the house and seeing those creepy binoculars.

I'll never forget the day we all sat down for Easter dinner and dear old Uncle Ralph made some off-color sex comment about some nun at the supermarket (yeah, I wish I was joking) and followed it up with some sort of diatribe about how his deceased wife never put out. My grandfather turned so purple I honestly worried for his health for several minutes. Good times, good times.

Lots of goofy stories in my head but I feel like I know nothing about the man behind them. When did he become a hermit? When his wife died? Heck, he has a son, a daughter-in-law, two granddaughters (both married) and some great-grandchildren, and I don't really know /any/ of them. And this is the /close/ side of my family. Weird.

I guess I'll be seeing them all soon, bringing random queerness and senseless acts of bizarro.