
Uncle Bill? Well, he was nearly as much a stranger to me as Aunt Cheryl. At least I could remember him very vaguely from when I was a kid, and I'd seen him a couple of times in recent years. Nothing like funerals to bring families together. He'd gone off to school at Berkeley when I was very young, and he'd never come back to Ohio, not that you could blame him. He and Cheryl had gotten married in California I don't know why they bothered with getting married; (like, who does, these days?) and come out to the mountains. Only major traumas seemed likely to stir them from their stronghold in the foothills of the Rockies.
Uncle Bill is younger than Daddy, and he's a few inches taller, I guess, but not built like a big huggy bear, the way my father is. Daddy's an engineer; he can handle anything from a t-square to a jackhammer. Uncle Bill is taller and leaner, his clothes fit him loosely and he walks in a slow, lazy western fashion. His hair is curly and long, where Daddy's is not so curly and not so long, but facially there's a resemblance, especially the eyes – blue, like mine.
Aunt Cheryl was a licensed paramedic. She worked in town, at a women's clinic. Uncle Bill had learned the printer's trade; he had a shop in an outbuilding where he turned out collector's edition reprints of old time pulp detective and science fiction stories, as well as occasional books of poetry or short stories.
