Uncle David

This is my father’s baby brother, in a photo taken by a studio photographer in Tallahassee, Florida in 1967. David was nine years old when I was born, which means he was six when his father died, and he must have had a very different life from that of his much-older brothers. When I found my father’s family in 2008, several people said I reminded them of David. “You walk like him, you talk like him, and he was an avid reader, just like you, with a fondness for theatre,” my father’s widow told me. David was a lawyer, but he also wrote at least one play my cousin Tracy knows about, and she thinks he wrote poetry as well. He was gay, which did not make his life easy in Florida in the 1960s. He moved away from the family and kept a low profile, so no one in the family had any photos of him. David died in 1993, just two years after my father, so I never met either of them. 

My cousin Lori found this photograph online and posted it on Facebook, and I can’t quit gazing at it. I feel a deep connection with this man I never met. Maybe it’s because he looks very much like the actor Don Knotts, a much-loved comedian on American TV. Maybe it’s because he sort of looks like me, and my sister Julie, and our sons Noah and Seth. I imagine that if Uncle David had lived longer, we would have loved each other and would have talked for hours, laughing together, discussing books and plays, reading poetry aloud, telling stories. I imagine he might have come to my PhD graduation, I would have sent him my first book. He’d be 81 if he were still alive. I feel like I’m really David’s descendent rather than my father’s, and I’ve been watching Don Knotts on Youtube, imagining. On the site where Lori found this photo, there is an archive of over a thousand photos taken by the photographer Richard Parks from 1962-1974, and I have found his collection fascinating. There are cats and dogs and white people, but not one black person in a state where about half the population is black. How deeply segregated we have been for so long, how much we have lost. I hope Uncle David was as troubled about that as I am.


I had major dental work this morning--two hours, and a huge expense. My jaw aches and I’m feeling off-kilter. I’ll take care of the children tonight, so their mother can attend a workshop for women in business. Sue is trying to get back from Ecuador as I write this. Her plane is delayed, so she’ll miss her connection. I’ll be glad to see her, whatever time it may be when she comes home.

Update: I did find one black person, a child named Tina Fleming, on page 7 of the 47-page archive. I'd love to know her story.