I met my uncle for the first time when I was twenty-five years old.  He called about two seconds after he heard that I had sold my first screenplay.  The news caused him to instantaneously morph into a machine gun of questions.  Who’s your agent?  How much did it sell for?  Who did you pitch it to?  What did they say?  When will it be produced?  What names are attached to it?  Can I attend the premiere?  He wanted to know everything about the movie, but nothing about me.  Every question was a fatal blow.

                To say that the telephone call was our first meeting may be a little misleading.  Our families gathered together twice a year every year to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas.  But that tradition ended when I was seventeen, after my grandparents died almost simultaneously, one of old age and the second of an aching heart.  Along with the corpses my father and his brother cast their relationship into the caskets for burial, so even though they continued to reside thirty minutes near each other, they rarely spoke.

                One day while I was in college, enduring a quantum physics lecture from a high-pitched troll of a professor, my mind wandered to thoughts of my uncle.  The typical year is comprised of 8,760 hours.  I was twenty then and figured out that I had been alive for approximately 175,640 hours.  Out of those 175,640 hours I estimated that maybe 200 had been spent with my uncle and his family at holiday meals.  During those holiday meals that absorbed roughly one tenth of one percent of my life, hardly anyone said anything and what was said was rarely meaningful and never intimate.

                Mike, the counter clerk at the on-campus Starbucks commanded a full percentage point of my time, that year, my Junior year, when my entire world exploded into a thousand indecipherable pieces.  Mike and I dubbed ourselves “the odd couple” because his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer two weeks after the discovery of my father’s prostrate cancer.  United by the pain of watching our parents suffer, we helped each other gather, sort and rearrange the pieces of our respective worlds.  Mike filled the void left by my uncle’s absence.