UNCLE WALTER

            On the morning of my arrival in New York harbour I saw a skyline of skyscrapers that seemed to camouflage the place I would shortly call home. At the dock I was met by my mother’s brother Walter, once the black sheep of the family. Walter, viewed by my maternal grandfather as utterly profligate and therefore not fit to work in the family’s machinery sales business, he had been sent away to Canada in his teens.

My first memory of meeting Uncle Walter at the dockside is noticing a dollar bill stuck into his hatband. When I disembarked and we went through customs together, he put his hat in front of the customs officer looking through my suitcase and, before I could wink, the bill had been removed from the hatband. Walter Simson was, at 17 or 18, his family’s pioneer immigrant to the Americas having done much, to his conservative father’s displeasure, that was exotic and out of order for an upper middle class Jewish family.

When my parents first met him on their first visit to America, they discovered that he was involved with a much younger woman, the sister of an Austrian-Jewish friend of my mother’s. It appears that they disapproved of the relationship and, with their judgmental manner, proposed that they immediately get married. That is how my old Uncle Walter was looked after by the young and beautiful Aunt Rosie – and he was lucky to have her seeing that, shortly after their marriage, he was hit by a car while crossing Broadway. The story is that “nearly every bone in his body was broken” and that Rosie looked after him for several years while he was in a wheelchair and helped him gain enough strength so that, for the rest of his life, he was able to walk on crutches.