Uncle Mike

(Wrote this a short while after some bad news in January. Kinda wanted to keep it private, and I’m still not certain if this is a lil too much show and tell. Some thoughts and items of info you handle with extra care, ya know? Maybe people that knew Mike Baldyga could still use the information. Either way, ‘ouch!’ I say!)

Everyone should have an Uncle Mike. Not just a nominal Uncle Mike, but a proverbial Uncle Mike. Not just a proverbial Uncle Mike, but my Uncle Mike. Then people would understand well who he was to me.

If there’s one person I can readily point to and say this man indubitably inspired me and shaped my whole being, I suppose it’d be him. Maybe my brother, dad, mom, helped too. It seems so obvious with my Uncle Mike though. What he did was teach me from the youngest age possible that it was cool to be smart, to know about things, to grow with youthful exuberance and mature complexity in tandem, to love science and nature, and to travel. His explanations of weather and thermal dynamics were music to my ears long before it was any other decipherable language. So were his stories of local gangsters and traveling the world to chase solar eclipses. So were gunshots at a rock to get the right “p-taw!” sound, and various other highly necessary science experiments and clown-tricks.

Actually my Dad’s best friend from childhood, and later a co-worker with my mother at a company that specialized in collectable classic book re-pressings and memorabilia, Mike lived, through most of my childhood, in his own childhood home (known as the yellow house regardless of whatever color it took on) with his brother and father, no more than a couple miles from me. Mike never married or had children. He was that uncle. Not the foil-wrapped chocolate one you’re Grandmother gives you when you go to her house to light the Chanukkiah; but that fella who maid the Ernest decision to check out on some of the prescriptives of adult life in order to be free and pass the seed of this type of freedom on through the generations where the ground receives it. A kind of Tom Robbinsian enlightened rogue/guru hedonist character comes to mind, a la Woodpecker or Larry Diamond, but cocooned in layers of caution, vice, and reluctant retiring-ness. Consider a small-time gestor that makes one feel regal to be around sometimes. One can see oneself pleasurably in the mishmash of visible qualities, including when he put on your little clown nose.

               Mike often joined my family on the greatest adventures we could afford as a child: like road-trips to relatives, or skiing. Obviously he was old and experienced enough to be my father, but he was bizarre, entertaining, and child-like enough to be like a second older brother, especially when things weren’t so tender between me and my actual older male sibling; although I was jealous at how my brother could win over Mike’s attention the way one does upon the cool kids with tools like experience and charisma. While with no known desire to have children of his own, he took his value to the Attenberg boys with enough serious dedication to warrant his frequent sharing in dinner at my family’s table and crashing on our couch. “Most exotic meal I ever had” was his refrain after dining with us. I’m not sure if it referred to anything specific, like the Chinese take-out from down the street, or my mom’s potatoes au gratin.

So often in my memory I can recall Mike on the couch with me and my brother, discussing MacGyver, racecars, and other such things that might unexpectedly string an intelligent man with two fawning children; meanwhile my parents and any other adult were about their business in another room. My early years were, upon close inspection, rather tumultuous, with tons of medical issues, nascent family troubles, and the upheaval of trying to integrate in a mainstream school with a facial deformity and poor vision, but memories like those painted by uncle Mike are why my brain, as brain’s do, kind of cursorily scrolls past that ugly stuff in reflection.

               It probably shouldn’t be much surprise that Mike was as into bird-watching, and plant and animal identification as I would become. Before there was the internet and my eventual expertise, there was Mike, who we would always share specimens with. In return, he would present us with something cool, like a snake-skin, feather, or book with audio recordings. If you add the time of magic and whit together with these objects, the value is hard to reckon. There’s really not enough time or patience inside me to plot out and justify his own significance. It is all a rush of feelings and time spent in incubation under the mass of his soul in the endless honeycomb of mirrors in my mind. Ephemera like snake skin or a feather will have to do then. The way they are cooked up and shed without any person’s artifice, like so much magic, is part of the stunning charm we can always take awe in.

               As I say, Mike had no children, and was never married. Perhaps it was out of a mix of fear of dedication and an idealist’s dedication to an ever insipient ruck-sack revolution. One thing I can say is he did retire from too much responsibility. Perhaps it was out of direct experiences I’m no expert in, or out of seeing turmoil produced in attachments like my parent’s marriage and family that told him such things weren’t for him. Instead of a clear path of gentle embraces and detaching with the wind like so many feathers and clouds, He had long-term vices, and stifling hang-ups that could break one’s heart. Adventures that could have been were set aside in drunken stupor alone on his couch with Bevis and Butthead; long overdue rendezvous were likewise flaked on; and whatever marriage might be was in principal out of the question in spite of a tight long-term, live-in relationship.

               A truly difficult time in my life was in bloom as my parent’s relationship fell apart at the seams. This wasn’t so much the divorce that would come – divorce in a sense is the tiny, pragmatic legal imprint concerning a more robust dystopia. Family friends stopped coming around. Tension filled the lonely air, free of all those little things you got used to. Escapist video game music struggles to fill the gaps in contest with shouts and door slams.

               I was 18, and about my uncle Mike’s Hight when I saw and quickly took him in my arms at my Dad’s wedding to my step mom at the end of 2001, perhaps four years after I last saw him. He still had the chocolate lab, Major, from the last time – the failed guide dog in training. Was Uncle Mike a failed guide dog in training? Why not – I was never so happy to see anyone. I never quite lost track of Mike since that time.  He came to graduation parties of mine, and attended my step sister’s wedding in Ohio, and my step mom’s funeral. I spent a gloomy autumn afternoon at his home, enthusiastically discussing hydrology and adiabatic systems a couple days after being released from the psych ward at a hospital near my University.

               I got Mike to visit me once after moving out to Portland, OR like a good Connecticut kid. We had a blast hiking around the waterfalls in the gorge, driving to the coast, dining out where the Vietnamese restaurant proprietors could call him Uncle mike… He was gushing with love and enthusiasm for the trip. While he came to Oregon for the solar eclipse in 2018, I didn’t manage to get him out a second time, although that seemed to be genuinely something he wanted. Getting a hold of him was notoriously difficult, though my communication with him was more sporadic than what he got with a couple others including my dad. If this wasn’t the case, I suppose I’d have a better understanding for the trouble he was in.

               I could see why one could have been mightily sated with the life he had when I dropped in his latest bachelor pad in exurban CT. It was a small two-level apartment, kept tidy with shelves of gold-lined, hard-covered books, a white cat with a single black spot named Spot (succeeding such feline friends as Orangy and Black Kitty), spring-fed forest pools and the wooded Aspetuk River -- although the landlord recently cleared much of the property’s woods – it was still quite lovely, quiet, and yet not far from the bustling New York metropolitan hustle. If one could live in peaceful, Zen-like isolation, this would be a practical place to do it. White-throated and Fox Sparrows were all over his feeders in the darkest of winter days. I was happy to pay a few visits there over the past couple of years to see him and the bird life when I was around my old Connecticut beat; although my visits came after last minute, drunken cancelations of plans to dine out, or cook out at my mom’s place. There were undercurrents of sadness and long-term loneliness plaguing the brilliant guy that seemed to want little more than lounging around with a bottle and NASCAR on the TV. They began to register as others hinted at them, although I saw them in part as the ironic mishmash of an enigmatic guy that never wanted much more than some personal concoction of freedom.

About a year ago, I spoke to Uncle Mike on the phone after several broken promises to meet while I was in the Northeast for the holidays. His voice was tremulous and weak as I’d never heard it before—sickly--elderly. A visit to his home revealed him to be gaunt and tremulous. He admitted to be in withdrawal. He’d binged and claimed he had given up the heavy stuff. He made the latter claim before departing for a liquor store after meeting at a Thai restaurant the next night. He also announced that he gave up his job of several decades just days prior without any fanfare. It was time for him to cash in and move on to a new chapter. I told him to come out to Portland with me. “I might just do that” said he, not for the first time.

He said he was feeling remarkably well and was off the heavy stuff as I spoke to him  on the phone the night before my departure for a stint on the other side of the world in august; though this came after several days of not getting a hold of him during a farewell visit to Connecticut. His voice was slow and tremulous, and he showed no interest in meeting me in the city for a farewell meal before my flight.

               Just days later, my dad informed me that Uncle Mike was taken to the hospital by his siblings for detox and rehab. I didn’t know that he was near death, with his liver and heart on the brink, and his legs barely able to support him.  

  I didn’t contact him directly over the course of the five months in Vietnam. His long-term sweetheart told me she shared with him my article in Chao Hanoi. I woke up on Saturday morning Jan 11 2020 my time to a message from my dad that Uncle Mike was found dead on the floor of his apartment. The shedding of a beautiful something, that while alive helped me fly and kept me warm, and in death has fallen to the deepest parts of me. He lies with the most beautiful dreamscapes of my memories.  

I guess it’s “done seeya bye!” It’d be nice if you told me you weren’t able to be here, but typical. I have missed you Uncle Mike. I will miss you more that I’ll never see you again, as is so with the most beautiful ephemeral springs.

Mike’s Obit.

P.S.

In spite of the funeral, Mike was decidedly unreligious. Probably a good idea to assume you are mortal, and leave instructions at some point, eh? He did leave me on the other side of the world with two Master’s Degrees pertaining to Environmental Science, and with a vast assortment of other steadfast conditions I’m happy to credit to him in his wake. When you are reminded of how the most immortal, larger than life elements inside you are attached to the most mortal in the course of life – ouch.

 Love,

Uncle Trev