The Uncle Meat Project

Submitted for your approval: an actual project I turned in for one of the more useless college classes I have ever taken, and it explains in and of itself why I did it, and how.

Only one thing wrong with it: it's largely bullshit.

No one in my family ever told stories about "Uncle Meat." But… my grandfather, my parents, and several other relatives had a wicked sense of humor, and a knack for storytelling, and a near-total disregard of the truth when in search of a laugh.

So I guess you could say I could blame it on my family. In truth, I guess you could say that the culture of my family is based around humorous bullshit, and attempting to get each other to believe it, but somehow, I didn’t think the TA teaching the course would much like to hear about THAT.

So I framed it a little better for her, and stole “Uncle Meat” from an obscure Frank Zappa project. At any rate, here's the story of how it all began, kind of. The version below is pretty much the exact version I turned in to my teacher. She loved it. Got an A in the course.

Sometimes I still feel kind of guilty about that… but it does prove one of my eternal maxims.

“Good bullshit will get you out of any situation.”

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THE UNCLE MEAT PROJECT: AN INFORMAL ANALYSIS

Project for RDG 1310, Multiculturalism In The Classroom

T.O. Bedlam

11/19/01

Our family began with Dolan. Dolan, first name unknown, came across from Ireland following the Potato Famine, and came to New York to find his brother. He was a country boy, and New York confused him. Unable to find his brother, he wound up moving south in search of work, until he reached West Virginia, where he married a local widow. They had children, hers and theirs, all of whom were daughters; there is no one in the family now named Dolan....

This is what I'd come up with for my Multiculturalism project, and I wasn't pleased with it. It sounded like a million other geneaologies I'd read, a dozen other dramatizations of someone else's family tree. It wasn't what I wanted to do.

Create a presentation based on your culture, your family, your traditions. Include written and visual elements. Be creative. This was the assignment. Bleh. How to be creative? I'm Scots-Irish, but we've been in this country since the Civil War, and some of us go back even further. We don't have any Old World traditions. I grew up living Generic White People culture, the same as everyone else in LIFE magazine. What was I supposed to do, include photos of genuine Generic White People Cuisine? Wonder Bread, tuna salad, and California Dip? Include photos of Christmas With The Bedlams? The only thing that was really traditional at Christmas was my grandmother, running around with the Instamatic, insisting that we pose, pose, pose, and hold that pose.... and even that, I find, isn't all that unique a childhood memory.

I wanted to do something different. I wanted to provide some measure of the flavor of my family, and its uniqueness... while still pointing out its cultural connections within the larger society. I wanted to be creative. But what to do?

We had two days to do our presentations. On day one, I still hadn't started, and had no idea what I was going to do.

Kelly Flores had a nice, memorable presentation. She's from Laredo, a total blend of Hispanic and Anglo culture if ever there was one, and made this the focus of her presentation. I really liked the Collector's Mexican Barbie Doll, complete with correct hair and skin tone, and a cute flamenco dancer's outfit. Talk about blending of cultures! She also had handouts Xeroxed, with the tale of La Llorona, the Crying Woman, both in English and Spanish, a tale firmly rooted in local folklore--

Local folklore.

Folklore.

And then I remembered Uncle Meat.

I was saved.

After class, I sped home, fired up Microsoft Word, and began thinking hard about Uncle Meat, and everything I'd ever been told about him. I called my sister that evening -- one of my few surviving relatives -- and asked what she remembered... and the memories came back.

I would make my presentation about Uncle Meat.

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My mother's father was the first person to mention Uncle Meat in my presence. My grandfather was a big, bluff, Irishman, built like a Maytag, and in many ways was the stereotypical Irishman. He didn't drink, but he could spin a tale in such a way as to stop halfway through and grin in such a way as to have the whole room ready to pass the hat for their pocket change to get him to finish the story.

And one day -- I think I might have been four or five -- he told me about Uncle Meat. That wasn't his real name, of course -- his first name was actually Aloysius, and he had six or seven middle names, one of which was Meatigan -- but his friends and family called him Meat, because he was certainly eager to please, but certainly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, if you know what I mean.

I was curious as to who Uncle Meat was, and why I'd never met him before, and said so. Was he dead? Gran'ther assured me that he was not, but he was not fond of large family gatherings, because someone always seemed to be bringing up something silly he'd done, and he'd get embarrassed. He did a lot of silly things, for some reason.

I don't really remember all of that first Uncle Meat story -- it had to do with how, when the family moved to Texas around the turn of the century, they had sent Uncle Meat down to secure a house for them. He'd done so, but then the worst blizzard in years had struck.

(I interrupted at this point to ask how often blizzards occurred in the lower Rio Grande valley. Gran'ther assured me they weren't common these days, but back around the turn of the century, they happened all the time, even in summer.)

Well, Uncle Meat had shut himself in the house, but it was cold, and he knew he needed to get a fire going, He put the wood in the old iron stove, but he couldn't get the fire lit because it was so cold the matches were frozen! This was bad news. Fortunately, Uncle Meat had a plan. He had bought some food earlier, including some hot peppers, and it occurred to him that if those peppers were really hot, he might be able to use them to get a fire going.

Unfortunately, as he held the frozen peppers over the fire and struck them together briskly, he revealed his ignorance about real Mexican hot peppers. The sparks they struck ignited the wood, but then, those peppers were so hot, the stove began to melt! The molten iron ignited that old timber house! And poor Uncle Meat had to flee outside in his long johns! If not for the warmth from the burning house, poor Uncle Meat might well have frozen solid before daybreak!

I was fascinated. I was amazed. My grandfather had a knack for storytelling, and the limited version I recite here is a small and pathetic thing compared to the original. I believed for quite some time after that that it was possible to ignite fires by striking chilies together, if you knew how... and if they were real Mexican chili peppers.

Interestingly enough, my grandfather was not the only person to have knowledge of Uncle Meat. Around that same time, my mother's brother admitted that he had lived with Uncle Meat for a while during his college years, and proceeded to tell a hilarious story of how Uncle Meat had gotten into the bakery business, but had not known how to leaven bread, and had wound up with an angry mob outside his doors, threatening to beat him to death with his own stony loaves.

My mother was familiar with Uncle Meat, but had not met him personally. She did, however, relate several exploits that her father and brother and a couple of uncles had related to her.

I became fascinated with this amazing, hilarious person, whose sole factor of certainty was his habit of messing around in areas he didn't understand and therefore getting into trouble in some form or fashion. I determined that he had no children, but that he had been married several times -- his wives invariably left him, although TWA had lost one of them (she'd been packed in with the luggage to save the price of a ticket, and they'd lost the suitcase), and another had last been seen clutching the tail of a large kite over Cuero, Texas, during a hurricane. His age was uncertain; although he had been an adult around the turn of the century, he was still alive and quite active during the early 1970s.

When I was seven, I decided that I would very much like to meet Uncle Meat, although by then I knew better than to loan him money or help him build anything. My grandfather laughed, and said he would introduce us if Uncle Meat ever turned up for Christmas, but he couldn't guarantee anything -- Uncle Meat came and went as he pleased, and there was just no telling when or where he'd turn up.

That was the year my sister (who may well have been quicker on the draw than I was) asked precisely how Uncle Meat was related to us. Was he Mom's brother? Or Grandpa's? Just who WAS Uncle Meat? Gran'ther laughed and explained that he was actually a distant cousin on Gramma's side of the family, but he had been around so long, everyone just called him "uncle", although at one point, he had been "Uncle Aloysius", instead of "Uncle Meat".

I later discovered that this was to be one of Uncle Meat's distinguishing characteristics -- he was NEVER from YOUR side of the family, always your spouse's.

Uncle Meat was the last of childhood's illusions I shed. I'd quit believing in the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy, but I'm pretty sure I held some faith that Uncle Meat still existed all the way up to age eight or nine. After that, I still enjoyed the stories, though. We all did. We claimed that we just told them to amuse the children, but for a time, before I reached adulthood, there really weren't any "children"… but still, a Christmas never passed without someone sharing an Uncle Meat story, old or new, or most likely, both.

I left home, and got on with my life. When we got together, though, Uncle Meat was still very much in evidence -- and one day, much to my surprise, I found myself telling one of Gran'ther's old stories to some of my cousins, who were maybe six or so. They sat there, enthralled, as I related the story of how Uncle Meat had accidentally burned the house down by striking frozen chili peppers together… and I realized why Grandpa so enjoyed telling the stories. I also realized that he'd been right -- that I would meet Uncle Meat someday -- because, after the story was told, I realized that I just HAD.

Before my grandfather died, we spoke about Uncle Meat at one point. He told me that he had renamed the character "Uncle Meat" during the late sixties, to avoid confusion with a real fellow who had married into the family… but that "Uncle Aloysius" had been a fixture in stories HIS grandfather had told HIM, and his grandfather had come over from Ireland shortly before the Civil War… and that it made him feel good to know that the tradition (such as it was) would continue.

As I grew older, and as I studied, I came to realize some things about Uncle Meat. I realized that he was folklore, an oral tradition handed down from generation to generation within my family. Uncle Meat was a rite of passage, as well -- only you can determine when and if you will ever pull someone's leg with an Uncle Meat story. Uncle Meat stories were usually humorous anecdotes or longish jokes, but there were more than a few cautionary tales thrown in there as well -- usually involving what happened to Uncle Meat's youngest the time he decided to play with matches, or got separated from his folks at the County Fair. Uncle Meat was no less a teacher of the young than the Brothers Grimm.

Any number of things could give birth to an Uncle Meat story. At least one is a rehashed version of a story originally found in Reader's Digest. Any number of jokes have become Uncle Meat stories.

…And then there was the day my father blew up the pot roast. I was home at the time, and lying in bed reading, when I heard a KAPOW noise from the kitchen. I ran into the kitchen to find my father sitting spraddle-legged in the middle of the kitchen floor with a pot roast in his lap. He was covered with gravy, and looked kind of stunned. He'd tried to check and see if it was done without bleeding off the pressure from the pressure cooker first, and it had exploded, sending the pot roast ricocheting off the ceiling, whereupon it had smacked him in the face on the way down. For days afterwards, he nursed a "sunburn" that had been caused by the hot gravy.

Imagine my surprise when that same story was told -- by my father -- in slightly altered form the following Thanksgiving, as a new Uncle Meat story.

Gran'ther in particular was often inspired by gag postcards of cowboys riding giant jackrabbits and so forth. I still have a postcard he got in Florida, showing a photo of a lovely bikini girl about to get her behind bitten by an alligator (presumably stuffed). He told me that this was the last photo ever taken of Aunt Clofullia in one piece, because Uncle Meat was so busy fiddling with the camera, he hadn't noticed the alligator until it was too late… I remember dozens of odd postcards and strange pictures he showed me over the years, swearing up and down that Uncle Meat had made the papers again…

In time, I had a family of my own, and one night I found myself telling a story about this crazy relative I had to my new daughter. She was skeptical, but willing to listen to the story. Even after hearing two or three other stories, she wasn't entirely convinced I wasn't a liar… until we went to visit my folks for that first Christmas… and she heard my Uncle Ken telling an all-new Uncle Meat story.

It took her a long time after that to decide whether Uncle Meat was real or not -- I refused to admit that he wasn't -- and now, she's twenty years old, and still, from time to time, asks to hear one of her old favorites.

So long as we are family, Uncle Meat will never die.