When I was young my uncle, N, my father’s brother, fascinated me. There was just something about him. Perhaps it was the
way he kept things to himself, or when he did talk, suggesting this or that with odd indirect responses to the topic of
conversation. When he finally spoke up, say, at the tail end of a political argument at a family dinner, we stopped what we were
doing and listened. He had this uncanny ability not only to clarify what my father or my aunt said, and not too kindly about each
other, but also to broaden the context. This wasn’t just about whether or not a president or senator or representative or judge
or chief of police or school principal or teacher or doctor or a neighbor were right. It was about what right was for him or for her,
and how that “right” might not be so right when it came to N or to us. Afterward, things lightened up. There was no longer any
reason to get riled. We were sharing a meal at a table with enough food and drink for us all, and that was enough. Arguments
were important, no doubt, but they didn’t measure up to where we were, even if just by being there, happily eating together.

Anyway, that was N. When he opened his mouth, you knew he would say something that would give us pause. And for a kid of nine
or ten, which is what I was then, that was impressive.

Now N lived alone, he never married or had kids, and worked as a clerk in a dry goods store, which serviced the entire county; a big
place that I loved to run around in, especially the storage rooms in the back, which N would open up for me. There, with those big
packing cartons emptied of their loot, I used that word a lot when describing the place – “big cardboard packing cases full of loot" –
I’d crawl inside and set up camp. This one was a tank but that other one was a castle where an invisible Lady lived, marooned by
her captors and longing for company, perhaps for love. Not that I knew what love was though I had an idea. And once, when I told it
to N, he burst out laughing.

“That comes from the books you read,” he said. “Life isn’t like that. Love isn’t either.”

I’ve never forgotten the pleasure he took in telling me that. Or how his laughter would keep me afloat years later when I desperately
needed love and couldn’t find it.

N was always there during those early years, making just enough to get by on and with us once or twice each week for dinner without
fail. Not being the sort to raise a family, he certainly enjoyed being with family. In one sense, despite my father’s success as a
salesman who rose to a manager’s position in his firm, N was the one who settled us all. And however much fun my father made of him,
and he did when it suited him, we knew that N was the crux, the pivot, without which we would careen about, having lost our compass.

There was more to N, too, which I wouldn’t encounter until years later and after my father died. By then, N was retired, frail, variably ill
and, without his brother, sliding away from us. We did what we could for him; a part-time nurse and cook, someone to clean up once a
week, deliveries of food and liquor – he’d always drunk and wasn’t about to give up the habit whatever the doctor said. We made sure
that we visited him during the week and sit with him outside when weather permitted, sharing a watery cocktail and talking about this
and that.

N was an artist, you see. He made collages from the post cards, newspapers, magazines, comics, and books he could get his hands
on. Ragged old telephone books that no one used any more were good, too. He loved those busty covers on cheap genre novels sold
in drug stores back when. There was also National Geographic (we kept up his subscription until his stroke, which partially blinded him)
and engineering journals he magically dug up with their curious schematics; nothing was out of bounds. Now and then he’d throw in a
string, a twig, some leaves, bubble gum, cigarette butts, mud – whatever was handy, whatever he could use.

It went this way:  One afternoon when I was visiting, N asked me if I wanted to see what he did when he was alone. Of course, I said, not
knowing what he would drag out from the back of the closet.

So he lifted himself slowly from his chair and told me to wait. He returned with a large, thick hand-sewn book, which he must have
made, and which held several hundred heavy pages. When he handed me the book, I held it on my lap. To counterpoint its weight, or
so I thought then, he had carved into the cowhide cover a fairly decent semblance of a clipper ship, angled up, its sails full as if in flight.
        
“Go ahead,” he told me, “open it.”

On each page was a collage, colorful, witty, sometimes erotic, other times sadistic, debunking this or that newsworthy figure or story,
and now and then transgressive, even for someone like me who thought he was open enough and willing to accept any kind of
treatment of current or past events. And that past went back millennia.

Apparently, current chronologies weren’t enough. N invaded realms that we encounter in passing, mostly as tourists, and only because
specialists have been there before us, enriching us with their findings, tentative or not. Totemic animals, birds and fish, squatting stick
women dropping infants from inflated vulvas, lightning bolts, rain slashes, antler-headed, web-footed dancers, spear throwing hunters,
shaman priests, star patterns -- all carved in rock hundreds or thousands of years ago; the Neolithic panoply in profusion scored by red
palm prints. All this, too, crossed his stage.

His collages embraced an array of channels and imaginary theaters, disrupting and refocusing them with an intrinsic jocular levity,
a wonderful areal sensation, set toward whatever it was that impressed him enough to respond with scissors, a scalpel, a spoon and
some paste.

I sensed that he had not shown his collection to anyone else, that he worked in secret, that the work consumed him when he did it, and
that he wanted me, his nephew, to see it. I also knew that he knew I dealt in art as a sometime critic and curator. Did he finally want
me to reveal the work to others if I could? Was this precious legacy his way of telling me that, while he was my father’s brother and
my uncle, he had also lived another life of his own peculiar creation that he kept completely to himself? I’d like to think so but I’m not
sure there are any simple answers here.

Then he told me to take the book, he had finished with it, and do with it what I wanted to. I understood. This was his way of saying
good-bye. Several weeks later N died in bed, most probably while sleeping.

 I didn’t disappoint him. How could I? His collages expressed a rare creative will and what we loved him for; that was the best of it --
 his quietly humorous, incisive ability to suggest solutions when we couldn’t.

Some years on now, after making his name with galleries and museums as an “outsider” who created marvels, and writing about him
 in several magazines devoted to this kind of art, I still can’t get over how splendid this secret life of his was. None of us in the family
really had the faintest notion that he spent his nights making collages, and that he made them for his own pleasure and need to explore
what it was that drove him in just this way.
 
 I am fortunate that N was my uncle, and that he gave me this essential wellspring from which he drank from when no one was looking
 or caring to bother about him at all.
 
Addendum:
 
In retrospect and as I still recall those moments when N gave me his book of collages and I first looked through them, the naïve
luminous fantasy it revealed in him, the multiform images that composed his inner life, some of them visible through a thin gradation
of water colors from yellow to blue, in addition to their lightness, the near absence of gravity that wide-winged birds enjoy as they
navigate updrafts easily, playfully, and which these collages joined as if born from the same blood, I marvel at how they spoke to me–
as if N were singing a song to himself, a song I knew but had never heard as he sung it, with that warm, seductive lilt.

In some essential way, N had found in his collages the rhythms and melodies of a collective vision, which I was somehow part of; and
which I think anyone else could be part of, too. An origin, yes, his own, but not just his own, and whose sonorities and resonance
seemed of a piece, each page of the book adding their lift to a new yet familiar place then becoming visible.

Some of his collages took this a step further, too, perfectly imbued with the spirit that N brought to them as he cut and pasted; a
mercurial spirit that made me see what I could not at first accept, but which now, well, who is to say? Did they change as I gazed
at them, quite subtly and then with greater accentuation? Or did they spark memories of events that happened and events I dreamed
or desired and all the emotions they provoked, feeding and sharpening them? And did they make me see the collage anew, not
animated in the way we understand that word, no mere technical projection here, but as if flickering into new life the strength and
purpose they gave me? I believe that is the truth of it but I’m also fond of transformations, and how they happen, and what makes
them intimate… and so…