They buried my uncle yesterday.
He was 82, and had been in poor health for a long time, so it wasn’t a tragic surprise. It was of course regrettable; I had hoped that moving back to California would enable me to spend more time with him before he died, which will not now be the case. I did get to see him at Christmas-time; it was on Christmas Eve the EMTs came and took him to the hospital. We’d had a chat before dinner, about what I can not recall.
It was on holidays that I knew Uncle Rolf.
At the service I kept trying to access my memories of Uncle Rolf and all I could come up with was “Old Spice”. Uncle Rolf smelled like Old Spice. It was his cologne; a reliable gift for him at Christmas was a bottle of the stuff.
When I first started using cologne of my own – which in general I do not, it’s a habit I never got into enough to fall out of, but as a young man at one point I tried it – I tried Drakkar Noir because it was cool, and then I switched to Old Spice. Because Rolf used it, and Rolf was a well-groomed man.
He was always well-kempt. “Dapper” conjures up images too self-aware to be correct; Rolf was just… well-groomed. He wore tweeds, as befitted a theatre instructor; had gloves and scarf in the winter. He was iconic, really.
I can picture him easily; he’s standing in the queue for a holiday meal, laughing and talking. He never lost the German flavor to his voice; it suited him well. He’s the only man I know who actually said “Oh!” on a regular basis. Now and then he would switch into German; by high school I knew enough to follow.
Several of his former students, now well-grown, were at the funeral. He stopped teaching in 1990.
They called him “Tutsch”.
I never knew that. Until yesterday I had never heard anyone call Uncle Rolf (Rolf Tutschek, you see) anything other than “Rolf”. I had never known that he was ever called “Tutsch”. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m spelling it right.
Apparently, that was his name to his students. Students he traveled with, students whose lives he changed. Students who loved him.
Who knew him completely differently than I.
That’s what I regret, really. I’m glad I knew him as my uncle; he was a wonderful uncle and he enriched my life. But there was so much more I didn’t know, and now it’s too late. The book is closed. That trip is over.
“Tutsch”. People who knew him by that name – and who found calling him “Rolf” to be strange and alien – those people cried, too.
All of our lives are thus; only we know all our own facets. Friends and family. Not the same.
We choose our friends, but it’s our family that buries us.
Thanks for being you, Uncle Rolf. Thanks for being Uncle Rolf for me. Thanks for being a brother to my father, a convivial guest to my relatives. Thanks for being “Tutsch”.
I’ll never smell Old Spice without thinking of you.
- Sun Ra