Recalling a full life

The call came, as they so often do, at dinner time.
News that Uncle Reuben had died.
It came as no real surprise. We calculated his age at 89.
But just the same, it removed another piece of foundation from my own life and made it seem a tad more fragile as a result.
Reuben Clark was married to my father’s sister, Mary Ellen Ronald, who is — I’m pleased to say — alive and well.
She was part of a large brood of Ronalds, eight kids, four girls and four boys.
Of that crew, only a fraction survive: Mary Ellen, Aunt Kay, and Uncle Stu.
As uncles go, Reuben was a bit of an odd fit with the family. Patrician, with roots in the South, he was a Washington, D.C., attorney for most of his professional life.
His visits to the hinterlands of the Midwest and his Hoosier nephews and nieces may have been a little jarring.
As were their descents upon him in Washington or at the Clark family farm in Virginia.
But if he saw us as rubes or hicks or embarrassments, he bit his tongue.
And if my father and his siblings found Reuben a tad much at times, they bit theirs as well.
As a kid, I found Uncle Reuben most interesting for his habit of twisting his hair around his finger as he thought during debates with my father and his siblings.
As an adult, I’ll always remember a visit by our family to the Virginia farm and listening to Reuben and Mary Ellen tease, nag, and playfully bicker with one another over dinner.
It was all in good fun, was wrapped in their love for one another, and was entertaining to the rest of us.
The last time I saw the two of them was back in 1998 when Uncle Stu and Aunt Martha Sue hosted an extraordinary family reunion, the likes of which hadn’t been seen for years.
We found ourselves at a table under a tent with Reuben and Mary Ellen, and before long that playful teasing and bickering had commenced.
Uncle Reuben would start a story, and Aunt Mary Ellen would start correcting him on the details.
Finally, after about three such corrections, Uncle Reuben paused and said, “You know, in the Clark family, we call those Ronald footnotes.”
That drew a laugh.
Then, with the home court advantage, I responded that in the Ronald family, we called it, “Setting the record straight.”
He was, let the record show, a charming uncle. Light-hearted, funny, generous, and forgiving of his Hoosier relatives’ shortcomings.
Eighty-nine, he would probably say, is a good number. Ninety would have been a bit more tidy, but it’s better to live a full life than a tidy one. And he lived a full one.

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