The Red King and the Witch

Memories

I needed a vacation, just a few days of peace.

A point my Uncle Robert argued over for a month.

"You'll not get any peace in that city of yours, there's no green, and the fresh air will do your head some good girl. Come for a visit while I'm still breathing"

Uncle Robert is a seventy year old history professor, who after thirty five years of teaching, decided to retire and move back to Birmingham, England.

Now, he wasn't my biological uncle, nor were we related through marriage, but friendship.

Uncle Robert met my parents in London back in 1989, when they were on a backpacking trip across England for their honeymoon about 2 years before I was born.

My mother, being fed up with wandering around directionless with my father, who wouldn't ask directions, came across Uncle Robert and asked where the best beer in town was.

After giving his recommendation, my mother invited him to eat lunch and the rest as they say was history.

Mom called him her "spiritual uncle" since the two of them bonded rather quickly over British history and the beauty of England.

Dad and Uncle Robert bonded over beer and sports.

My parents had kept in touch with him with weekly phone calls and letters and over the years Uncle Robert became the friend who turned into family.

When my parents had passed, he had been devastated and after I went to live with my grandmother in Chicago, he made sure to still keep in touch.

He continued the weekly phone calls and when I began high school, he started sending letters.

On my fifteenth birthday, he generously sprung for a ticket to England for summer break and he bought a ticket every year until I graduated high school, mostly to give me an escape from the city and to give my grandmother three months of peace.

It was October now, and just like any other day in England, it was raining.

My flight had been long but uneventful and yet my heart rate was going through the roof.

Nine years ago after graduating high school, I secretly joined the Army.

I had only trusted Uncle Robert to understand my reasons for enlisting, and after a long three hour conversation over the phone, he promised to back me fully.

The push back from my grandmother and extended family had been brutal.

Heated arguments that blew up into shouting matches.

Every adult in my life screaming at me that I had done something foolish and without thought.

The arguments went on for weeks before I went to basic.

Through all of it, Uncle Robert and his steady montra of "you have to make your own way in this world" is what allowed me to face all of their criticisms head on and without fear.

Although after everything that's happened, I could admit now that I should have thought it through much more.

Nervousness had been brimming inside of me since I first got back stateside and I couldn't shake it off.

Nine years had passed since I had seen Uncle Robert and although I had been retired for more than a few months, I still had not made time to visit.

Truthfully, I'd have been avoiding him, and the rest of my family, ever since I got back from Iraq.

It wasn't that I couldn't face the inevitable digging comments and 'I told you so's', but the Amanda that had left home at eighteen wasn't the same one in front of them now.