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My uncle’s name was Anthony. He was named after his father. But as long as I remember, Uncle Anthony was called “Boot” by everybody else. Sometimes I think I was the only one who called him by his given name.
In a family that included five good-looking brothers, Boot was the best looking one of all. He always had a broad smile on his face. Most times I saw him, he was contentedly puffing on a stogie.
There was always a sense of mystery about Boot. Despite his smiling face, there seemed some underlying sadness at his core. And Boot was intent on not revealing the reason for that sadness. At least that’s how I saw it.
One day I asked my dad how Boot got his name. My father said that the Nazis had captured Uncle Boot during World War II. The facts here get a bit muddled. Dad is gone and so are Boot and his brothers, so there’s probably not much chance that I’ll ever find out the full story. During his capture, Americans opened fire on the Nazis, and Uncle Boot got shot in the foot. He was liberated and was fitted with a special shoe, and the nickname “Boot” was born. Dad showed me a newspaper photo of Uncle Boot on R&R (rest and recuperation). He was wearing a Hawaiian lei and, sure enough, was donning his trademark smile.
Uncle Boot never let his boot get in the way of marching in the annual Mummer’s Day Parade. He was in a comic brigade and one time won a prize for dressing up as The Cisco Kid. I can still remember the excitement of watching him on TV that day. He wore a fancy braided white cowboy suit with matching white western hat. That beautiful smile looked great on a close-up. All that was missing was the stogie cigar.
Uncle Boot had this habit of sleepwalking. There were times he was found wearing pajamas walking on Moyamensing Avenue blocks from his home. Who knows, maybe in his dream he was trying to escape from the Nazis or just strolling down the avenue on New Year’s Day. Luckily, someone from the neighborhood always found him and brought him home. Everybody liked Boot. Even after he was hired by the neighborhood as a watchman, got a little tipsy, and shot out the lights in a pinball machine in a luncheonette one unfortunate night at Ninth and Wolf streets, they still liked him. They took away his licensed weapon, however.
Many folks said Uncle Boot had one great love. He wanted to marry her. My grandmother was a strong-willed woman. No woman ever seemed good enough for her boys. As the family story goes, grandmom didn’t like Uncle Boot’s lady friend (a delicate term all but fallen out of use these days). Boot was very close to his mother. He had continued to live with her after grandpa died. Boot saw himself as her protector. If grandmom didn’t like his lady friend, there would be no marriage. She rejected the marriage, and he accepted his fate. A light went out in Uncle Boot’s life that day. To just about everyone, he looked the same. He still smiled as warmly as ever with that stogie in his mouth. But wherever that spark resides that provides the fuel for what drives us through life, there were only embers left in Uncle Boot.
As the song says, maybe Boot smoked a little too much and he drank a little too much, and that’s the way his life faded into old age. He transformed the little barber shop on the premises into a candy store, the kind that sold licorice sticks and gum drops.
The years went by. Grandma died, leaving Uncle Boot alone in the house that once boasted the voices of five brothers fighting amongst themselves and their sister. The silence must have been deafening. And then Uncle Boot got sick.
I think there must be a kind of built-in warning system in older people. The system tells them that this illness will not be survived. No amount of visits to the doctor and multi-colored pills are going to bring them back from the edge this time. And maybe what separates people is how they react to the news.
In Uncle Boot’s case, I imagine he just lit up another stogie and let the news that he was at the end just percolate down deep. Probably pasted that broad smile on his still-handsome face. Heard his sister Mary tell him he shouldn’t be smoking cigars or drinking whiskey and just smiled at her, maybe even winked. But each time she would visit him, she would find a bottle of whiskey neatly hidden way and the horrific (to her) odor of a recently smoked stogie cigar.
There was no defiance in Uncle Boot, so I imagine his passing like a whisper that can be barely heard in a crowded room. His leaving us was like one of his freshly lit stogies and a sip of good sipping whiskey.
And as for his smile, it was a beautiful thing to see. In a way, he was much like that handsome guy dressed like The Cisco Kid dancing in a Mummer’s Day Parade long ago. ■
