Uncle Art

I have no pictures of Uncle Art, in part because my father's house burned while I was in college and any pictures we may have had of him were lost. I can picture him in my head, although how accurately I do not know.

Uncle Art was a bachelor his whole life, as far as I am aware. He lived in what used to be a gas station. He had converted it into a home, but the pit, which cars used to be driven on top of so that the mechanic could reach the under parts of the car, was in the center of his work shop, although there was no longer any garage-type doors through which a car could be driven in. I don't remember if Uncle Art drove a car, as I don't recall ever seeing any there, but I suppose he may have.

Uncle Art made the most amazing wood carvings that I have ever seen. He had elaborate peacocks made from a solid piece of wood, as well as things with movable balls and things in the center, which had also been carved from a single piece of wood. He had ships and planes, and all sorts of animals carved from wood, and he cut the wood himself from the woods. He made wooden toys for kids all around, most of whom were related to him, it being a small town in which most people were related.

Another thing he did was that he made bicycles for everyone. When I was growing up, I don't remember anyone being poor in the sense that they were hungry or walking around in rags, since most people had quite a bit of property that they farmed, and other skills in which they could earn any money that they needed. My dad did horseshoeing and logging, for example, and he had a full-time job at a ship building company, and farmed on the side.

But still, there were only a couple of families that seemed to have a lot of spending money, new bicycles, cars, and the like. Most of us had what we needed to survive, but we wore some hand-down clothes, and almost nobody ever got a new bicycle.

Most of the kids in town got their bicycles from Uncle Art, and even those who were not his nephews or nieces called him Uncle Art. He was actually my uncle but as I write this now, I don't know whether he was my mother's or my father's brother. I had never heard him referred to by his last name so I don't know whether it was Anderson or Peterson.

Uncle Art would salvage bicycle parts, and I imagine people would bring their old bicycles to him. So if something went wrong with anyone's bicycle, Uncle Art had the parts and the skills to fix it, and on Christmas time, he would give bicycles to those who were in need of them. They weren't new bicycles; rather, they were made from parts of several different bicycles, but he would sand the parts down and repaint them so, while they were obviously not new, they might appear to be so at first glance, and they worked just fine.

I guess I was about ten or eleven when Uncle Art got sick. I didn't understand it at the time, and I'm still not sure what he died of, but I think it was some sort of cancer. At the time that he went into the hospital, I was told that he had "water on the knee," and that didn't make any sense to me, although I realize now that it referred to some sort of swelling of the knee. It turned out to be a cancer though, and he never came home from the hospital.

Whoever inherited the former gas station that he had turned into a house had it torn down immediately, and that seemed to be such a shame.