Uncle Frank's Hobby

Uncle Frank had a hobby. Day after day, ever since he came to live in my house, he'd go out into the workshop and bang away.

The workshop was really an old garage where the person that lived in my house before had tinkered away at neighborhood cars when they needed fixed. It was big and aged, but it had the kind of structure that suggested--to my eight-year-old mind anyways--that it would last forever. I had once heard that cockroaches could withstand nuclear bombs, and I thought probably the old garage could too, with it's brick walls, cracked and chipped and coated in fading blue paint. The floor was dirt, packed hard and solid, spattered with oil and other car liquids that I didn't really know the names of.

I had gone inside only once, when we first moved there. That was enough. Everything had been packed away by the people at the bank, who'd reclaimed the house and cleared it out before my dad had bought it in auction. The house wasn't so bad, but the garage-fifty feet away downhill-reeked of dismal emptiness, and something about the place always made me feel like it could suck me into that bleak place and make me one within the walls.

Put simply, I hated it. But the place didn't seem to bother Uncle Frank.

Frank was my dad's brother, and even though I didn't meet him until I was eight, dad had shown me photos. In the photos, he had always looked a lot like my dad: tall, tanned, smiling, clean shaven, with blue eyes--just like mine--that always seemed to have a light behind them. Starry eyed, my mom would say. Dad would explain how Uncle Frank was away, but would be back real soon.

When uncle Frank came to live with us, he had a big fluffy beard, like a pirate. His eyes were different from mine and dad's, like the light had gone out. He didn't smile. His skin had paled, as if he'd been hiding away from the sun. He was still tall, but he had grown slimmer. Almost a starved quality.

Dad said Uncle Frank needed space, so he moved a bunch of stuff in that creepy garage. Wood and tools mostly. A rocking chair, a cot. He started calling it the workshop. Dad had forbid me to go down there (as if I'd been going down there in my spare time anyway), which suddenly made me very curious about the place.

"It's Uncle Frank's personal space now, he was just busy with his hobby," dad told me, and I wasn't to invade.

I was convinced something exciting and top secret was going on there. Being an extremely curious kid, I had to know what was going on. But Uncle Frank seemed to always be down there, banging away. He knew the times my mother habitually served family meals and he would clamber up the hill, shovel food in his mouth without even seeming to taste it, and rush back down to his hobby.

I figured he was shy, like the girl in my class that always sat alone and colored during play time. I heard the teachers talking about her one day and they said somebody had been mean to her. I thought somebody had been mean to Uncle Frank too. Dad said that where he was before, it was hard on him and the workshop helped. I was told not to ask him questions or bother him at all. When I asked where he had been before, dad didn't say. He just went to the old fallback explanation, "Never you mind, it's no business of yours."

That settled it. If dad didn't want to tell me about it, it must be something bad, like what I heard the teachers whispering about the shy girl. And if whatever he did in the workshop was his way of feeling better, I got the weird idea that maybe it could help the shy girl too.

But I couldn't let Uncle Frank see me snooping around. He would tell dad and I'd get in trouble, even if my intentions were good. Since Uncle Frank stayed in the workshop other than during meals, the times when I also had to be present, I couldn't find any time to sneak off and spy on what he was doing.