Uncles Make the Best Fathers

Daily writing prompt

Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.

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We called him Uncle Red, and I never learned why he had that nickname. He was the only one of my father’s siblings that did not drink alcohol. He worked at the train depot behind where we lived with his sister, our aunt, a single mother with three children when she agreed to take my sister and me into her home. Because our father was not in our lives, Aunt Ann would call Uncle Red when we needed anything.

I remember not having shoes and Uncle Red coming and taking us to buy sneakers. He never said no to helping us and made my sister and me feel valued. He was very religious, and when my sister and cousins would see him coming up the street in his red truck, they would run and hide because they knew he would start singing and preaching. But I would listen to him tell me about Jesus and the Bible. I had only attended church one year of my life and had been baptized. I had a small red Bible that I slept with under my pillow, thinking that God and His Son, Jesus, were with me all the time in that way.

Uncle Red taught me several lessons that have stayed with me. He taught me to treat every child as someone of value to the world. He taught me that love is an action word, so when my father would say he loved me but wouldn’t buy me shoes or pay for our food, I knew the difference. When I adopted my sister’s four children at age 21, I knew how to love them as if I gave birth to them because of Uncle Red’s actions for my sister and me. But most of all, Uncle Red taught me that when you say you are a Christian, it comes with a responsibility to care for the least of us, family or strangers. He gave me an appreciation for God’s word that served me well when I was ordained as a Baptist minister in 2005.

I used to dream of being Uncle Red’s daughter because he was so kind and lived in a beautiful home. We lived as six people in three rooms, with five of us sleeping together in the same bed. But the lessons he taught me were as incredible as I learned that to be happy in the world, you must work hard for what you have, share what you have with others, take care of your responsibilities, especially your children, and never stop trusting in God as the source of your hope and substance.

I still live that way today, and I am alcohol-free because I saw both the devastation of alcoholism in my parents and the peace of being free from addiction in Uncle Red. He was a great surrogate father to us; he played the role with love and kindness.