The Man Who Never Left the Kids Table

He was one of the youngest in a big family, and somewhere along the way he took a seat at the kids table and never really gave it up. Every holiday dinner for sixty-odd years, while the grown-ups held court at one end of the house, he was at the other with the nieces and nephews, teaching them to make spitballs and pulling quarters from behind their ears, and always the one having the most fun there.

But the laughter was never just for fun. Ask his family for the one story that holds the heart of him, and they will take you back to the day their father died suddenly. They came home from the hospital together, their mother poured the coffee, and that is when it hit every one of them. What do we do now? So he read the room and started telling jokes, one after another, the same old groaners he had been telling for years, until the cloud lifted enough that they could move forward and be there for their mother. His sister will tell you that was what he loved most, making you laugh right in the middle of the hardest thing.

That was his gift. He may not have been the mover and shaker in the family, but he always knew how to get the rest of them moving. Mention a renovation and he would show up with the whole plan in his head, down to the hour, promising you would be done by noon, and noon would drift back a few coffees at a time. It was never really about the project being finished when he left. It was that he was there.

That easy way with people went with him wherever he landed. In his twenties, being twenty-two at heart even then, he headed west to ski, worked the lodges for a while, and settled on the coast for close to twenty years. He lived modestly out there, on his own or with a roommate, on a couch, on a beach, or on a mattress in a van, and he never complained, in fact quite the opposite. He always invited the family to come and visit, although his family was never quite sure he expected anyone to take him up on it, and when his sister and her husband did arrive with their two-year-old, the three of them got his comfy mattress on the floor while he happily took the couch beside them.

When he came home, the nieces and nephews had him all to themselves. He never had children of his own, and yet more than thirty nieces, nephews and great nieces and nephews counted him as theirs. He was the uncle who turned up on your porch unannounced, and before the kids had finished asking who that was, it felt as if he had always been there. When he woke from one of his famous naps, usually a few hours after a twelve-hour sleep, he would go looking for the littles to give him a massage and pay them the princely sum of a quarter, and funnily enough, the second generation got paid the same rate their parents had thirty years earlier.

Those naps could happen just about anywhere. At a nephew's wedding out in the country, after he had enjoyed a few, and then a few more, he decided the lawn was as good a place as any, and swore he was fine right where he was. So a cousin went for a tablecloth, giving it one of those quick magic-act tugs where everything is supposed to stay put but the cloth, with mixed results, and they tucked him in for the night, right there on the grass.

For all the goofing around, though, he paid attention. You could mention the cost of something in passing and he would break it down for you by the day, the month, the year and the ten-year interval, and no one ever double-checked the math because it was easier to just let him have it. He remembered the small things too, and texted weeks later to ask how they went. After he died, one of his nieces went back through years of their messages and found him there, over and over, following up and checking in.

Sometimes checking in turned into staying. A friend from high school once asked him to mind her cat for a month, so he cleared his calendar, kept the cat safe, and when she came home he had no plans to leave. He made himself useful with the laundry and the groceries, clipping her coupons and making sure she lived a cost-effective life whether she had asked for one or not, and fourteen years went by. When he offered to pay rent, the deal was simple: when you leave, you can pay a departure tax. Ask her about him now and she will tell you everybody should have someone just like him.

And wherever you invited him, he was there, always in the same colour of shirt. It won the battle in the closet every morning, although, to be fair, every shirt in that closet was some shade of it. Two of his milestone birthdays were surprise parties, which is the only reason he is wearing anything else in those photos.

None of that would ever show up on a résumé, and it rarely does. When a family gathers to remember someone, they don't talk about job titles. They talk about who followed up, who showed up, and who made them laugh when the room went quiet. A good life can be built at the kids table, out of the back of a van, on a couch with the good mattress given to the guests, and in a text message that asks how it went, and most of it is simply a decision to keep showing up.

Who is the person in your family who never left the kids table, and have you told them what they mean to you?

Shared with the family's blessing. Names and places have been left out.

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