Welcome to
My Uncle George
by Sean Murphy
Sean’s Tales of Uncle George over the years have meandered through George’s merry prankster roles as farmer, vintner, bootlegger, pirate and international diplomat.
The tales gathered here will meander unapologetically through repetition and chronological disorder.
George hated order so he would be OK with it.
If the meandering makes it more difficult to discern a pathway to “the truth” George would be Ok with that too.
George believed that you should never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Uncle George was my grandmother’s first born, the oldest of ten children.
As my oldest male relative, he usurped the role of grandfather.
By the age of ten George was a family breadwinner.
It was the Depression. Every morning before dawn he walked into the city and sold newspapers until after dark. On his way home he would buy a bone for my grandmother’s soup pot.
He developed a sideline to his journalistic career selling papers. He ran deliveries around town for the city’s bootleggers.
He segueed into mixes with the bootleg deliveries – 7up and Canada Dry ginger ale.
By twenty he was running the distributorship for 7up.
Thus began my love affair with 7up.
Our family drank a boatload of 7up.
Our family also drank a boatload of rum, which is why George’s 7up was generally a little more amber in color.
My mother was George’s youngest sister.
I was her first child of five. The next four followed me in rapid succession and swept us all into a cauldron of familial chaos.
It was every kid for himself, but I caught a break.
Uncle George was instructed by my grandmother to take me under his wing.
Uncle George’s house was my second home.
In my fourth year Uncle George appointed me as his “partner” in “the farm.”
“The Farm” was George’s vaguely disguised plan to drive his neighbors to madness.
George’s second home at the time was in a suburb.
He was in a “planned development.” His property was suffocated by neighbors that strangled his plot with manicured hedges and shrubberies.
George hated shrubberies.
For revenge he tore up his entire property and covered it all with two feet of horse shit.
So there would be no question that the horse shit was horse shit he had it dumped at the edge of the property so it crept out and over the newly installed sidewalks.
The neighbors had to walk around it.
Sometimes they walked in it.
That was George’s hope.
We planted the farm with melons and blueberries.
Nova Scotia’s cool climate did not bode well for the melons, but the blueberries loved the horse poop.
Once the farm got planted George erected a hundred foot radio tower and a huge radar dish in the middle of the yard so he could talk to the Russians and end the cold war.
I loved the farm. Every morning we put on our rubber boots and climbed around in the horse poop for a couple of hours and then took a 7up break.
We would sit in the middle of his front lawn in the horse shit and drink our 7up.
Again, George’s 7up had that amber hue.
Once we got settled with our 7up that was it for the work day.
George would decide that we should go get some lobsters or go see a guy about a boat or go inside to talk to the Russians.
Neither George nor I spoke Russian so that was not my favorite.
I hated packing up to go back to the chaos at home, but George gave me tools to cope.
The horse shit helped a lot.
Saying “shit” was forbidden but George said that horse shit was horse shit and if that was what it was called then you had to be allowed to say it.
I got to say horse shit a lot.
No one could stop me.
It drove my mother nuts.