Bob’s Your Uncle
When I come up with a story title that is a familiar expression to me, given that I have now written and posted 652 stories on this blog, I like to check myself and make sure I haven’t already used the title once before. Yes, I have actually found myself doing that and I’m not embarrassed to say that. I consider it less about a failing memory and more about finding an idea that is so strong within me that it finds its way out more than once. I like that rationalization. It sounds so noble. So, I searched my 652 stories with a simple word search and came up with five other stories with the name Bob in them, but no Bob’s Your Uncle title. So, we are good to go.
The other day I was working with Handy Brad and we were discussing the tasks on our collective to-do list of household projects as I envision them. I like to summarize what needs to be done for Handy Brad because he is Mr. Diligent and I am Mr. Expedite. I feel that if I briefly summarize and thereby, effectively, minimize what is left to be done, there is a higher probability that he will muscle through them and make an end. The 1965 movie, The Agony and the Ecstasy starred Charlton Heston as Michelangelo with Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, was about the painting of the Sistine Chapel, which becomes the home improvement project of the ages. You have to start by understanding that Michelangelo was kind of pissed at Julius to begin with since he thought of himself as a sculptor and had the commission of all commissions to sculpt the tomb of the King of Italy when Julius played the Pope card (in 1500 the Pope was much bigger than the King…he was like Donald Trump, he was Huge). He insisted that Michelangelo, a guy who had played ball with the Medici and was pretty sassy, dedicate himself to painting his ceiling in remembrance of the last Pope (Sixtus IV) who had rebuilt the chapel. In the movie, Julius would ask Michelangelo every day, “When will you make an end?” And Michelangelo with that Charlton Heston NRA snarl (perfected as Moses, Ben Hur and El Cid) would always say back, “When I am finished.” Now imagine me as the Pope and Handy Brad as Charlton Heston and you understand our work relationship.
After summarizing the current project, I said very naturally and lightheartedly, “Bob’s your uncle!” Handy Brad just stared at me. He had never heard the expression. That’s not his fault since it’s an expression which is most popular in Ireland and the more Celtic parts of England. The expression supposedly came about in the late Nineteenth Century when Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, appointed his otherwise unimpressive nephew to be the Chief Secretary of Ireland to continue the lording over the Emerald Isle by the imperious Brits. When anyone in Ireland thinks in terms of a “there you have it” moment where an outcome is simplified and minimized, they like to say as the last step in the process…”and Bob’s your uncle!”
Yesterday morning I had another visit from Bob the electrician. He was here for two reasons, to add a motion-detector outdoor LED light on the far side of the garage, where I have moved our trash operation, and to install proper wiring in our new Cecil Garden, specifically for our new fountain. While the motion-detector LED was easy, the garden wiring required several decisions. I do enjoy talking to Bob, because he is both a competent and pleasant professional and he is a fine person. I’m not sure why that should surprise me for a tradesman like Bob, but it always strikes me since Bob is both more talkative than most, but still more reserved in the economy of his speech than most cerebrally-oriented people I know. As Steve Martin admonished John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles when Candy drones on, “Here’s an idea, have a point. It’s so much more interesting for the listener.” Bob always has a story for me and he always has a point.
Laying outdoor conduit, even over a short ten feet, requires a one foot deep trench (did you know that in hard rocky soil, one foot is shorter than in soft loamy soil?). Bob marked out his trench and then went to check his parts supply on the truck. I called in Handy Brad to help dig the trench. This is why, as my old Boyo Welsh friend Michael always says “it’s a poor job that can’t afford a gaffer.” Strangely enough, in stage-talk, a gaffer is a head electrician. In Celtic-speak it means a lazy supervisor like me. So, here’s Bob, who as a licensed electrician, makes four times as much per hour as I pay Handy Brad. Also, Brad has a pick handy. As he works up a sweat digging the narrow trench, I sit in the shade and tell him it looks like hard work and is why my mother used to say, “Do your schoolwork because you don’t want to wind up digging ditches.” A ditch is just a big version of a trench. Brad looks up at me from his sweaty brow and says, “That’s me, I’m the guy your mother warned you not to be.” I like Brad. He had a point, I had a point and when Bob returned with the conduit, he too had a point. He said, “When Rich asked you to help me, what he meant to say was, ‘would you do it for Bob?’” Economy of expression all around.
But Bob also had a proper story as well. He was off metal detecting on the beach in Oceanside again. Imagine a hard-working man taking his “busman’s holiday” by waving an electronic gadget across broad stretches of hot, sunny beach. Bob found a men’s high school class ring dated 1975 from Rancho Cucamonga High School. He noted that as his own high school graduation year, as it was for Handy Brad (it was my college graduation year…which is probably why I was the gaffer). Bob (with the help of his internet-literate daughter) looked up the Rancho Cucamonga High Class of ‘75 and found only one grad with the right initials (engraved inside the ring…see there is a point in doing that). He was able to locate the guy in Reno, Nevada and called him. After the guy got past the prospect of that being a scam call seeking his Social Security number, he said, he may, indeed, have lost the ring after graduation forty-five years ago on a drunken beach party visit to Oceanside. He offered to pay Bob for his find, but Bob declined, opting instead for the feel-good of doing a good deed.
There is something about a guy who spends his spare time at the age of sixty-one, seeking out treasures from the earth, finds such a treasure (you have to sift out a lot of bottle caps to get to a ring), and then goes to the trouble to find the owner and pay to send it back to him. We should all be so lucky to have Bob as an uncle since he always seems to have a point and that point is about doing the right thing.