My mother came from an Irish family of 11 kids and, of course, had a sister who was a nun, so I spent time at a convent and with an aunt and uncle who lived in New York and took me to the theater.
Imagine that you wanted your children to learn the names of all their cousins, aunts and uncles. But you never actually let them meet or play with them. You just showed them pictures of them, and told them to memorize their names. Each day you'd have them recite the names, over and over again. You'd say, "OK, this is a picture of your great-aunt Beatrice. Her husband was your great-uncle Earnie. They had three children, your uncles Harpo, Zeppo, and Gummo. Harpo married your aunt Leonie. . . yadda, yadda, yadda. "
Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it's okay now because he's off the life support machine and they've discovered he can communicate with eye blinks.
It reminded him of his Uncle Seamus, the notorious and poetic drunk, who would sit down at the breakfast table the morning after a bender, drain a bottle of stout and say 'Ah, the chill of consciousness returns
Before me, my grandfathers, my uncles and my father were all boxers because Native Americans had to box in boarding schools. But in my time, when I grew up in Lawton Oklahoma, we didn't have boxing. I was a wrestler.
Your uncle," Poseidon sighed, "has always had a flair for dramatic exits. I think he would've done well as the god of theater.
In truth, I am a single mother. But I don't feel alone at all in parenting my daughter. Krishna has a whole other side of her family who loves her, too. And so Krishna is parented by me, but also by her grandmother and aunts and cousins and uncles and friends.
I was terrified that the wild boar might be attacking my father, and so I prayed to God - if he existed - to protect him and to direct the boar against my uncle instead, who believed in heaven, and therefore was more willing to die.
Neither my great-grandfather an NAACP founder, my grandfather Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr. an NAACP leader, my father Rev. A. D. Williams King, nor my uncle Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embraced the homosexual agenda that the current NAACP is attempting to label as a civil rights agenda.
Families need families. Parents need to be parented. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles are back in fashion because they are necessary. Stresses on many families are out of proportion to anything two parents can handle.
Oh, these people's minds work in strange ways, Petunia, they're not like you and me," said Uncle Vernon, trying to knock in a nail with the piece of fruitcake Aunt Petunia had just brought him.
Writer Somerset Maugham, after his parents deaths, spent a few stultifying years in his uncle's vicarage. Later, in his teens at a boarding-school, having lost his belief in the existence of God said: "The whole horrible structure, based not on the love of God, but on the fear of hell, tumbled down like a house of cards. "
China has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary.
Then Arjuma saw in both armies fathers, grandfathers, sons, grandsons; fathers of wives, uncles, masters; brothers companions and friends. . . . When Arjuna thus saw his kinsmen face to face in both lines of battle, he was overcome by grief and despair and thus he spoke with a sinking heart.
The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
Louis Brandeis beloved uncle, Lewis Dembitz, was an ardent abolitionist. His mother was an abolitionist in Kentucky at a time when Brandeis remembered hearing the shot from the confederate soldiers after the second battle of Bull Run. Amazing to think that he heard that and I studied with one of his last law clerks in college. And that encapsulates almost all of American history.
I discovered that our clan included loads of cousins and uncles and aunts and animals of every shape. I was taught that chaos and competition were family values. And I learned that we all loved the sea. Somehow, the sea was about us-our past, our exuberance, our frailty, our longing.
Hello, Uncle Brother Zachariah," James said without opening his eyes. "I would say that I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm sure this is the most excitement you've had all year. Not so lively in the City of Bones, now is it?" "James!" Will snapped. "Don't talk to Jem like that. " "As if I am not used to badly behaved Herondales, Brother Zachariah said, in the way Jem had always tried to make peace between Will and the world.
The latest page I've been working is about the organization of the pantheon of the gods. Who's indebted to whom, how they are related, who screwed whose uncle or grandmother, all of that.
It's a myth that if you're liked by only four people it must be good. It might also be very bad: they might be your mother, your brother, your uncle and your aunt.