For Uncle Joe

My Uncle Manny is the second youngest of 12 and thus, as memories get hazy and stories get grandiose, and mom changes her story but pretends she doesn’t, or forgets, he seems the most reliable when regaling with stuff about my family.

Lately, he’s been sending me beautiful black and white photos, of my grandma when she was young–oh in her early 40s, but had already given birth to 6 or 7 kids:
“Here’s one of Mom in her kitchen–queen of her domain! One time, she saw a guy peeping in through the window over the sink. She grabbed a big knife out of her drawer and shot out the back door, chasing him down the street.”
And my grandpa, who died when my mom was 16:
“Dad had a form of giantism called acromegaly. As he aged, his cartilage continued to grow, making his ears, jaw, hands, and feet abnormally large. Dad died in 1952 of a heart attack after suffering a stroke in 1949. He essentially killed himself from over-work. I have some of his railroad time books. In 1947, he worked 349 days, taking off only 17-31 August and 24 December. Many of those days were double shifts, 16 hours long! So much for lazy, good for nothing Mexicans!”
Manny is good at purposefully obtuse sarcasm. As it stands, we all share a trait known wryly as “the Escobedo Roll,” which is an exasperated eye roll with a simultaneous “tch” of the tongue, hip cocked, often accompanied with a muttered “ay, chihuahua. The Escobedo Roll is employed to express disgust, dismissal, and annoyance. These are, generally, the three most prevalent states of existence in my family, after love and god-worship. Grandma was OG ER, as partially seen above.
My uncle Joe Velazquez passed away this weekend. Though an Escobedo by marriage only, he was the reigning master of the ER, but would only do it to prod the skeptics; no one tried to kill him for it because he was so intensely charming. As in, he had a lot of dignity. He was a teacher, dedicated his life to god, worked in a Jesuit school and eventually began counseling the troubled–marriages, drug problems, etc—basing his beliefs around the most pious and self-relinquishing* aspects of Catholicism. He believed that to have a good life, you must do good deeds. He and Aunt Bea had a ferocious love; as divorces and separations and too-soon deaths and hostility pocked the sacrament for the rest of my aunts and uncles, Bea and Joe shared a palpable tenderness, a palpable tenderness I doubt most people ever know, into their 70s. They were gentle. Joe put Bea through art school, at age 56. He supported them both, so Aunt Bea could get a degree. In pottery.
Now she makes clay pots, glazes them in Aztec patterns, and scatters them all over his garden.
*or self-abnegating