Say the word “family” and what catapults to mind?  Most people think of folks they’re related to by blood or adoption – mom and dad, grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews and so on.  Thinking on this recently, I realized that all of my most cherished memories involve family.  Ditto the biggest challenges, most hair-raising adventures, greatest triumphs, deepest heartaches and happiest moments.  As that late, great, three hundred pound, cigar-smoking London journalist G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

Someone else once said, “You can choose your friends, but you’re stuck with your family.”  I have no idea who said that.  If you find out, drop me a line and let me know.  But it has a ring of truth to it.  Family is where life happens.  Where we share our lives, our hearts, and our stories.  No one was better at “storifying” – telling or spinning stories – than my uncle, Norman Naas.  In fact, there are no words for my Uncle Norm.  He used them all.  In spades.

Uncle Norm was my dad’s older brother.  Like mom and dad, Norm was born in Michigan and immigrated to California in the fifties.  (You know, peak “Boom season.”)  Norm and Dorothy settled in Concord, near the fabled Bay Area.  My parents settled a few hundred miles south in San Diego, which is where I was born and raised and have lived long enough to brag about.

Like mom and dad, Uncle Norm and Aunt Dorothy were both educators, first classroom teachers and later administrators.  They all had master’s degrees in education and loved nothing more than watching the proverbial Light go in some kid’s head. 

They were remarkable. 

Uncle Norm smoked like a chimney, loved a roaring fireplace, after-dinner drinks, good food, fine wine, and traveling.  He was a gourmet chef.  Norm loved feeding and entertaining friends, Romans and fellow countrymen by the bus load.  The more, the merrier.  He loved dancing, dinner parties – the more raucous, the better.  Even in retirement Norm was a party waiting to happen.

The thing I remember best about Norm – besides his fabulous drop biscuits and veal/pork/beef meat loaf – was how much he loved books.  Outside of Dad, Norm was the best-read person and most voracious reader I’ve ever met.  His rambling, bougainvillea and camellia-draped house groaned with books.  They were everywhere, sprouting like weeds in a garden.  You couldn’t sit down without first removing a book from your planned perch.  Books populated the kitchen, family room, living room, bathroom, bedrooms, coffee and kitchen tables and every available space.  Even the garage housed shelf after shelf of books.  Everything from Chekov and Tolstoy to Lord Byron, Keats, Hawthorne, Wordsworth, Faulkner, Bronte, George Eliot and Dr. Seuss. 

Summers and some Christmases, we’d visit Concord or Norm and the crew would visit San Diego.  As a little girl I’d look forward to afternoons when I’d climb into my uncle’s ample lap with a book. 

“Well dear, what do we have today?” he’d ask, adjusting his glasses and oohing and ahing over my selection.  “Ah, this is a good one!” he’d smile, even if it was the same “one” we’d read nineteen times in the last two days.

Not surprisingly, Uncle Norm could quote entire scenes out of Shakespeare.  He’d tell us about writers and literature for hours.  Not lectures.  These were more like command performances.  Norm gobbled up books like a starving man, barley taking time to chew.  After dinner Norm would regale us with his “storifying” expertise.  He’d lean back in his chair, scratch his head and take us into the wondrous, magical worlds of Peter and Wendy, Davy Balfour, Captain Bligh and Mr. Fletcher.  Yertle the Turtle.  Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne.  Robin Hood, Maid Marion and Mary Poppins.  So many more.  We’d listen to Norm as words fell from his lips like fine silver, undistorted by a single “um” or “ya know.”

Remember that Mel Gibson movie from 1993, Man Without a Face?  Gibson plays Justin McLeod, a former teacher turned recluse after his face has been horribly disfigured in an auto accident.  Known as "Hamburger Head" to the locals, McLeod is the subject of many rumors and wild stories.  Chuck Norstadt (Nick Stahl) is a young boy determined to get into the same military school as his father, despite his mother's protests and his half-sisters' mocking, even if it means studying all through the summer.  Desperate for a tutor, Chuck encounters the reclusive McLeod, and together they begin to help each other deal with a world that has shunned them both.

There’s a scene in the movie where teacher and student are reading Shakespeare (I think it’s The Merchant of Venice).  Except that they’re not really reading it.  At least, not in the usual sense.  They’re interpreting the text, acting it out with costumes and props.  Living it.  Like they were there.  Teacher and student aren’t just reading the story.  They are the story. 

That’s what listening to Uncle Norm tell or read a story was like.

Uncle Norm and I corresponded regularly when I was in high school and college.  (We did this the old fashioned way – with paper and pen and postage.  This was before email.)  A running dispute developed over an arcane theological point.  I was as right as Norm was, as shy as a cyclone in making my own case on paper.  I recall how disappointed I was when my uncle stopped writing.  No, that’s not it.  Not exactly.  His letters petered out slowly, over time.  Like twin guttering candles.  So did mine.  It wasn’t until my junior year in college that I noticed that I never heard from Uncle Norm anymore.  I never asked why.  An “oops moment.”  I didn’t detect any rancor between us – we just got busy elsewhere and moved on.  Another oops.  Norm died a few years later.

In one of my last missives to my uncle - before the busyness of term papers, exams and GPAs gobbled me up - I told Norm how much I liked to listen to him talk when I was a child.  His rich, sonorous bass was as smooth as glass. That was nearly forty years ago.  I sometimes wonder what else Norm might have said - what else I might have said - if just one of us hadn’t allowed the other to drift.

It’s easy to take people for granted, isn’t it?  Especially family.  How many things we would, could, should say and share and laugh about or argue over or lean back in our chairs and storify – and never quite seem to get around to it?  That uncle, that aunt, those parents, siblings, children or spouse seem as regular as the seasons.  We mistake familiarity for permanence, which is a clever but deceptive chimera.

That’s why today I choose to thank God for uncles.  For books and letters and storyifying.  And family.  If we let Him, God somehow smoothes out the frayed edges of our oops-blotted lives, rewrites the smudges and slips in something new and fresh and beautiful.  He can give us a fresh start.  A blank page.  A second chance.  A new story.  Like the one I’m writing now.

Uncle Norm would’ve loved that.