LITMIR.BIZ

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to work at a public service organization, helping people in need.

      Tootle, our little sister, was born when I was 7. She was such a cute baby; Mom spoiled her, and so did I. All her brothers loved her, but I'm the one who became her protector.

      After Tootle graduated from high school in Atlanta, she moved to Nashville to attend a Christian college, but instead, became a hippie, got caught up in the country music scene, waited tables, and met a cool guitar-playing songwriter from Kentucky.

      They got married, went to work at regular jobs, moved to the suburbs, and have a daughter who graduated from college at the top of her class and is attending law school.

      Tootle and I went in the real estate business together (meaning she did all the work, while I supply the money). She's the worrier of the family, and as a hobby collected tableware from various restaurants if she thought the tab was too high, and sometimes just for the fun of it.

      Being the second son, I got an extra dose of ambition and a strong sense of independence. No one tells Deuce what to do. I've always needed to be in charge, figure things out, make decisions, move ahead. A workplace psychologist once told me I was great at solving problems – and when life didn't give me any, I usually created some to work with.

      Our parents were Charlie and Lucy, and later on I'll give you an idea of what very special people they were. Dad and Mom were such interesting folks that at least one good book could be written about each of them, and they taught us kids a lot.

      Charlie was a poker-playing, war-scarred veteran who could fly an airplane, build a house by himself, do any damn thing better than any one of his sons, take your money playing golf, and sweet-talk a dog off of a meat wagon. And after you shook hands with Charlie, you'd better count your fingers as he walked away smiling.

      Lucy was a tall, stubbornly independent and self-reliant redhead who had more inner strength than most men do, couldn't cook a lick, had the ingenuity of a fox and the patience of a saint, and never lost her cool. Lucy knocked every curve-ball that life threw at her into the upper deck.

      You might have felt a little sorry for them for having to deal with the likes of Wiz, Deuce, Moose, and Tootle, but as you got to know them, you'd have admired them a lot, and probably even envied them a little.

      Beyond the immediate family, my kinfolks include aunts and uncles and cousins who generally were anything but boring, from strippers and presidential candidates to party gals and pig farmers.

      Still trying to be the Southern gentleman Lucy reared me to be, I'll tell you about the ladies first.

      When it comes to colorful characters, Aunt Gladys always springs to mind. Single all her life, she was an Atlanta party gal. She made her living as a landlady who rented out her downstairs rooms to guys, liked her vodka and had a thing for married lawyers.

      When she ended up in a hospital after a drinking binge, they couldn't find an ID in her purse, but they did find my phone number, so they put a Jane Doe toe tag on her and called me.

      When I walked into her room, she asked me who I was. "I'm Deuce, your nephew," I told her, and she asked if I had come to steal her money. When I assured her I hadn't, she turned to the doctor, flung off the sheet covering her naked body, and said, "Do you want some of this?"

      After a stint in rehab, Aunt Gladys soon went back to her old ways.

      Meanwhile, out on the farm, our Aunt Lulu and her husband, Jack, were raising prize-winning hogs in Tennessee. To avoid confusion, they named their kids Big Brother, Brother, and Little Brother.

      Their house had no indoor plumbing, but it did have a bathtub – a big metal one, located conveniently in the front yard, near the water spigot. Aunt Lulu washed the boys out there every day when they were little, and they kept it up until one by one they left for the Army, where they could take a shower even when it wasn't raining.

      If there were a prize for the best nickname in the family, a strong contender would be my Aunt JoJo, who was called Muddy and unchallenged as the toughest girl on the farm.

      Seeming to have it in for one neighbor girl in particular, she'd give her a good whuppin' every time she walked by their house.

      One day, Grandma, maybe feeling sorry for the girl, confined JoJo to the porch. But somehow, Muddy sweetened her tone and persuaded her favorite punching bag to come up on the porch, where she promptly beat her up again.

      Aunt May wasn't known for beating anybody up, but one day in the kitchen she decided that Muddy was way out of line and threw her fork at her. It stuck in Muddy's ear and she had to be taken by bus to the emergency room. If they still use that fork, I hope it's just for eating.

      (May's husband, JB, later divorced her and soon afterward married her sister Lulu, whose kids ended up with an Uncle Daddy, but that was not the first time that had happened in Nashville.)

      When I was 10, I thought my Aunt Sissy had really married well because her husband, Earl, drove a Coca-Cola truck in Nashville. Besides getting paid to drive around town all day, he got to drink all the Cokes he wanted, and I hoped that someday I could land a great job like that.

      Earl once bought a new tractor and drove the 30 miles from the downtown dealership to his farm in rush-hour traffic. Along the way, he was cursed and given the finger by about a thousand drivers who had all the grace and patience of Nashville churchgoers headed home on Sundays.

      By marriage or by blood, each of my uncles was, in his own way, as inspiring as my many aunts.

      While he was no Tee Tee Red, my Uncle Tillman was another family member who went into show business, sort of -- after his stint in the medical profession.

      Working at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, he got word that his brother Charlie was in trouble with the law and needed to leave Georgia in a hurry, so he wrote and told him he could get him a job. Before long the hospital fired them for God knows what and they both skipped town. Tillman headed out West and ended up in L.A., where he built props for movies, he claimed.

      He also became interested in politics and set his sights high. He believed Eisenhower was secretly a commie, so he ran for president, several times. He didn't get many votes, but he never gave up hope.

      After he died, we found out that he'd rented a storage building in which he kept 40 years of daily newspapers, just in case he needed to do some research when he moved into the White House.

      As suspicious as our Uncle Tillman was of the Russians, our Uncle Tim might have gone him one better. He never combed his hair, and spent most days in his basement, hard at work on a universal language based on numbers. He wanted to have an alternative ready when the Ruskies took over. In his spare time, he invented toys.

      In 1955, some 11 years after he came back home from the war, one of his inventions – a battery powered 12-inch toy bus that, amazingly, turned right or left in response to a little whistle that came with it – was marketed in the Sears Catalog.

      Thousands of the buses were sold, but Uncle Tim didn't share in the profits. Sears kept it all, explaining that it cost a lot of money to print the catalog they were ordered from.

      He was laid to rest in a plaid shirt with his hair left uncombed, and everyone talked about how he looked so natural.

      The family's big success story was Uncle Chet, who owned a home-building company on Long Island in New York. On his only visit that I remember, he rolled up in a Cadillac and got out puffing a big cigar and boasting about this and that.

      He married a Russian woman, and they had three daughters, one of whom moved to Alaska, the Last Frontier. (If she was seeking peace and isolation, she should have waited for outer space to open up as the Final Frontier, because Aunt Gladys found her in Alaska and moved in with her for a while.)

      One time at a family reunion, Earl (who, you recall, married Aunt Sissy), was called upon to say grace. "Dear Lord," he said, "We're thankful today that we ain't got no convicted felons in the family -- at least none that I know about."

      We still don't have any, at least none that I know about, and I still have a lot of

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