Uncle Doug

Photo of a man wearing a silly antique helmet, with his arms up as if he's being arrested.

My Uncle Doug passed away over the weekend. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that he’s gone. I’m finding that one problem with getting older is that more and more I have to say goodbye to someone before I’m ready to let them go.

Uncle Doug was my Dad’s middle brother, and my godfather. In case that picture above doesn’t make it clear, he was also one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. He was a true character who lived life on his own terms.

In our family he is the stuff of legend. In high school he got in some trouble for publishing a satirical school newspaper The Co-Pilot lampooning his school’s The Navigator newspaper. Then there’s the story about the time he skipped gym class for an entire semester and his grade actually went up. Apparently when he realized the gym teacher had stopped taking attendance, he figured he wouldn’t be missed if he simply stopped going, and he did get away with this for quite awhile. As someone who was never a fan of gym class, this made my uncle an unquestionable hero in my book.

There are more class skipping stories, a story about the time he cheated on an eye exam (like me and many of us on Dad’s side of the family Uncle Doug had atrocious eyesight) to get into the military and one about an early business venture when he and a friend went in together on the purchase of a tow truck. Legend has it that one of their first calls was to rescue a car stuck in mud only for their truck to get mired in the same mud thus ending their brief dabble into entrepreneurship.

From there my uncle would go on to have a wonderfully diverse assortment of jobs over the years. There were a variety of computer programming and tech jobs, but then also completely out of the ordinary gigs like driving a Brinks truck. He was a volunteer firefighter and a member of the Civil Air Patrol.

I remember when we were growing up my cousins wanted to get one of those novelty answering machine tapes. (Remember answering machines?) One or more of their friends had one of those joke tapes that you could purchase from catalogs, and they thought it was hilarious. My uncle listened to the silly message, and determined there was no need to waste money on a novelty tape. He created their own goofy rhyming message that unfortunately I no longer recall, but which was definitely better than anything money could buy.

Photo of three men seated on a couch. — My Uncle Doug sits in the middle with his younger brother, my Uncle Brian, on the left, and his older brother, my dad, on the right.

My uncle was an unflappable sort of guy. I remember one time he came for a visit and made the mistake of parking in what was the most dangerous part of our driveway. (So determined because my dad twice backed into cars parked in this spot, and I once backed into one.) The first time it happened, my dad was backing out of the garage with my uncle in the passenger seat, when there was a sudden thud. “I think you just hit my car,” my uncle calmly said, and sure enough Dad had.

Which reminds me of a time I was driving with my uncle in the passenger seat. My cousin was moving to a new apartment, and I was helping out by transporting a futon that nearly fit into the back of my Cherokee. We stopped at a light, and my uncle looked out the window to see beside us another vehicle with a futon hanging out the back. “Look, at that,” said Uncle Doug, “It’s a futon race.”

Goodbye, Uncle Doug. I miss you.