When I was eight years old, my mom helped me write a note introducing myself to the world. We tied the note to the string of latex helium balloon and released it into the Georgia sky. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever done.
I waited impatiently for a response. To where would the balloon fly? I imagined it soaring over exotic lands, mountain ranges, even oceans. I imagined another little boy in a strange foreign place looking up into the sky and seeing a little black speck floating high overhead. I imagined my balloon alighting somewhere in a green field of grass; a kid like me seeing it, picking it up, reading my note. I’d included my address so he or she could respond.
I was certain it would be found; the balloon was bright yellow with the symbol of Batman printed on the side. How could it be missed? Every week I spent my allowance at the corner drugstore on the latest Batman comic to hit the spinning rack next to the dusty greeting cards. Batman wasn’t like the other comic book heroes. He was a regular guy, just extra-smart. In fact he was the smartest of all the superheroes. Even Superman looked up to him. He was the chief of the Justice League of America. All the other heroes relied on his leadership, even though he couldn’t fly or deflect bullets. Batman was my role model. He was proof that if a kid worked hard enough and never gave up, he could be a hero.
I drove my mom nuts asking every day if we could go into town and check our post office box for a response to my aerial message. A week passed, two, and nothing. To an eight-year-old, two weeks is a little bit longer than eternity. I’d almost forgotten about the balloon note when one day my mom, smiling, handed me a small square envelope. My name and address was scrawled on the front in a kid’s handwriting. The postmark was from Douglasville, Georgia, a town nearly fifty miles to the east.
I tore into the letter. Sure enough, another kid had found my balloon! It hadn’t gone as far as I’d hoped, like Germany or something, but it had gone a respectable distance, fifty whole miles! My mom helped me read the short note. I can’t remember everything it said, but it was from another boy like me who’d found the deflated Batman balloon dangling from a tree-limb. He loved Batman, too, he claimed, and he told me a little about himself.
It was defining moment in my young life. I’d thrown a piece of myself out into the wider world, and the world had responded! My mom called me the luckiest kid she’d ever known. I felt lucky. I took the note to school and showed it to everyone: my friends, my teachers, even the principal. My small town newspaper even mentioned it in the weekly social column that was written by Mrs. Jesse Crabtree, our town librarian.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that my mom admitted to me that the return note had been a fake; a plot engineered by her brother, my favorite uncle. When it had become obvious that my balloon had been lost in the sky, to alleviate my disappointment my uncle had written a response and mailed it from his home in Douglasville.
I could only smile. I was old enough to recognize the plot for what it was. It wasn’t a lie, or a betrayal. It had been a coordinated effort by two loving adults, my mom and my favorite uncle, to excite and inspire my young imagination.
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I loved my Uncle Mutt Moe as much as I loved my own parents. His real name was Monroe, but my toddler’s tongue couldn’t pronounce the rounded syllables so it came out as Mutt Moe. The name stuck. Soon even other members of the family were calling him Mutt Moe. He was the eccentric uncle every young boy should have. For him, every moment of every day was spent in an intense state of wonder. Everything excited him, everything fascinated him. Life was an endless series of intriguing questions and endless discoveries.
Mutt Moe saw patterns and connections in everything around him; his love of history and science and nature caused him to see stories in every rock, tree, and rusted nail he found on the ground. During one of our frequent walks through the forests and fields surrounding my hometown of Tallapoosa, Georgia, he bent down and picked up a corroded piece of metal. “Look at this old square nail,” he proclaimed excitedly. “See how it was hand forged? There used to be a cotton gin at this site. The Yankees burned it down in the Civil War. I’m sure this nail is from that mill. Just imagine,” he said, handing me the nail, “You’re holding an important historical artifact!” And boom, all of a sudden the rusted old nail became an object of wonder, a treasure, a fabulous artifact of a lost civilization.
Mutt Moe was a man of passion and a crippling sentimentality. He would often come to tears while telling stories about a particular historical incident, especially one that involved the death and destruction of the Civil War. I still have a strong memory of him tugging off his thick-rimmed glasses so he could dab his eyes on his sleeve, too choked up with emotion to continue the tale. To him, history was family; the unnamed young soldier dying on the bloody field of Chickamauga or Kennesaw, his brother.
Like many brilliant men, my uncle was tormented by demons. His intense, obsessive curiosity caused him to focus on what others would call trivialities. His quirks and eccentricities, so alluring to me as a boy, probably prevented him from achieving career success. I’ve always believed he should have been an academic. His greatest joy was in solving historical mysteries and then sharing the magical stories with others. He would have been an incredible college professor. As it was, he was never really successful in a career, though he was a good and loving father to his own children. Health problems plagued him, including the awful debilitating effects of diabetes. He died while still relatively young from complications of his disease.
In the days following his memorial service I felt the terrible sadness of lost opportunities. I cursed him for allowing his disease to consume him. I was angry that he’d never achieved what I felt was his full potential. There should be a shelf in every library in America crammed with books he’d written, each volume filled with his delightfully inspiring sense of wonder. I was angry at myself for not spending more time with him, especially near the end. Now he was gone, and the great potential of his life would forever be unrealized.
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A few months later while on a business trip through central Virginia my wife and I visited the site of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. It’s a somber place, blanketed by the tremendous weight of the darkest moments of American history, filled with the ghosts of a broken nation. All I could think about was how much my uncle would have loved this place. His poor health and lack of resources had never really allowed him to travel.
I must have inherited some of Mutt Moe’s sentimentality. Suddenly, standing at the Appomattox Courthouse, I found myself dabbing my eyes with my sleeve. When I told my wife I was thinking of my uncle she pointed up into one of the big oak trees and smiled. “There’s no reason to be sad. He’s right there,” she said.
It was a big black ruffled crow, perched on a low limb, staring right at me. “It’s him. He’s here right now,” she said.
I don’t believe in reincarnation or life after death. Despite that, I had no doubt my wife was right. Uncle Mutt Moe was present in the form of that crow, even if it was just me projecting my memory of his spirit onto the bird. By allowing me to see my uncle’s spirit in the crow, my wife had given me a precious gift.
Now that I’m older I’ve come to appreciate just how much my Uncle Mutt Moe has influenced my life. He afflicted me with his sense of wonder, his fierce curiosity about everything. In me, this affliction has manifested itself as a wanderlust, a drive to experience as much of the world as possible, searching for the patterns and connections that weave reality together. Like my uncle, I occasionally wipe my eyes when confronted by a gravestone, or an ocean sunset, or the weight of history as I explore the ruins of an ancient culture. In a way I feel obligated to see as much of the world as possible, for his sake, because these days no matter where I go there always seems to be a crow about, following me, encouraging me, sharing in the joy of discovery. I know now that my childhood comic-book hero, Batman, was never really my role model. It was Mutt Moe all along.
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As I write this blog post I’m sitting on top of a mountain in the Thar Desert of northwestern India. I’m surrounded by dry brown hills beneath a creamy blue sky. Just across the ravine, on top of an adjacent mountain is a gleaming white fortress of marble, the ancient Monsoon Palace of the Maharajah. It’s March, the beginning of spring, and a few of the trees in the valleys below are beginning to bud.
One tree in particular is impossible to miss; it’s covered with thick orange blooms, an incredible splash of color in an otherwise bland landscape. Sitting on the top branch of the orange tree is a black-and-gray crow. It’s looking up at the marble palace, too, admiring the splendor and majesty, just like me.
To see all the posts in this series (Seven Weeks in India), click here and scroll through the post listings.
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