Uncle Mike’s Snow Globe                                                          

I hardly saw my Uncle Mike anymore.  Before I got married and the job moved me to Chicago my Uncle Mike was like a second Father to me. But with the job, and the kids, maybe I saw him one out of every five Christmases.  Why do I have to clean out his apartment instead of my brother Billy or my sister Annie the princess? I’ll never know. Yes I do, I always get stuck with the crappy jobs in this family.

I hate to toss all this crap out. I know it must have meant a lot to him while he was alive. ‘While he was alive.’ listen to me. He just might be alive, he’s only been missing for three months.  But Dad said he has been forgetting things lately. Neighbors have found him wondering around lost at night. He probably wondered off and died in the park or where ever.  I spent the past two days looking at John Doe pictures at the city morgue.  I can spend three more days here, four the most. Then I have to get back to Chicago. I offered to pay the rent for a few more months just in case Uncle Mike miraculously shows up again, but the Landlord is being a real S.O.B. about it. He knows he can jack up the rent for the next tenant. He wanted my Uncle gone years ago.

My Pop’s instructions were simple enough; Pack the place up, toss the junk in the dumpster, keep the valuables. Then schlep the boxes of valuables to the storage unit place down the block.  Boxes of valuables? What a joke that is. I can tell right now there isn’t going to be a heck of a lot going to that storage unit. Dad and my sister, Princess Annie, arranged for a 5x10 by 8-foot high storage unit. It was the smallest one they had available. What a waste of money. It would have been cheaper to rent a safe deposit box. That’s about all the space we are going to need from what I can see.  I’ll just take a few old pictures, a few odds and ends, so I can bring them to Pop at his assisted living facility.  At least that way he will have something to remember Uncle Mike by.

Oooooh, what do we have here? A baseball-card collection. BINGO! The ’61 Yankees, all of them autographed. This will be going back to Chicago with me. Call it… compensation for my flying all the way back here to take care of family business.

Now what’s this? A photo of Pop, Mom, and Uncle Mike at the beach. I’ll bring this to Pop.  He can tell me the same old story behind this picture every time I visit him.

What the heck is this?  Looks like a baseball rolled under the bed. Eh.. come here you… got it. Oh crap, my daydream of finding an autographed ’61 Yankees baseball just went up in smoke. It’s only a snow globe.  Looks like a souvenir of the Whitehouse. What’s that?  It looks like some one is in that tiny little window. Oh my God it’s…

One week later…

“Yo, Annie.”

Annie the princess answered her brother with her usual contempt. “What is it now, Bill?”

“Come look at what I found in Uncle Mike’s bedroom.  It looks like a baseball-card collection and a stupid old snow globe-Annie, Annie, come here quick! It looks like…”

Uncle Mike, Billy, and I, trapped in tiny plastic bodies, looked out of a West Wing window of the little plastic Whitehouse. Through a watery sky filled with plastic snowflakes swirling around, we could see Annie enter Uncle Mike’s bedroom, Calling out for Bill. We knew that if she was the least bit curious, she too would be joining us in the snow globe.