I'm using a mint green Hermes Rocket typewriter to write this. It resides underneath my computer monitor when not in use since its low profile was designed to be so compact it could be toted around war zones for correspondences in Vietnam. Or something like that. It was the coolest looking typewriter when I typed “typewriter” into an eBay search bar after being infatuated by the documentary California Typewriter. It was my third typewriter, fourth if you count my Lego typewriter—which my kids do.
My second typewriter was a present from my Uncle Bob. I have two Uncle Bobs— one that’s my actual uncle and one that just acts like it. I was thrilled when my 84-year-old friend gifted me an electric cartridge Smith-Corona at the beginning of the year, but it broke after 107 pages of typing. When I fire it up now, it emits a whir and the smell of oily mechanisms exhausts through the casing, but it doesn't do anything when you mash the keys. It was also hard to track down the appropriate replacement ink cartridges, the ones I managed to find on eBay were half used and manufactured 5 years prior to my birth. I was heartbroken when the device crapped out, if for anything because it was such a thoughtful gift from a distant family member I admired.
Uncle Bob isn’t my real uncle, he’s my mother-in-law Kathy’s uncle— but Kathy isn’t really my mother-in-law either. Kathy gave birth to my wife, but gave her up for adoption. At the age of 25, Paige reunited with Kathy, and for the last decade they’ve been making up for lost time. For as long as I’ve known Paige, Kathy has been in the picture. Front and center. In high focus. She’s a professionally trained opera singer, but also had stints doing voice-overs for cartoon characters and running her own children’s musical theater. She also kissed me before Paige did. In a Cracker Barrel. On the first day we met.
I can’t remember my first meeting with Uncle Bob, but he’s kind of always been in the picture too. More in the background. Cracking one-liners. Teasing his nieces. Telling stories. Being an uncle.
And in the summer of 2024, something happened. Uncle Bob and I started hanging out.
•••
Our family was taking advantage of Kathy's above-ground pool on a summer afternoon when Bob showed up. Kathy invited him, and his arrival wasn't without ceremony since his ability to navigate via GPS had gotten dicer with the onset of his 84th year of life. He was later than the rest of us, the kids already saturated with pool water, but he became a welcome companion as I tried to avoid parenting duties inside the house amongst the cover of air-conditioning.
Kathy likes to brag, but not about herself. She finds the idea of my writing charming. She always makes a parallel to Uncle Bob's own essays whenever the topic comes up. With her two favorite author hobbyists in the same room, she couldn't help herself. She played matchmaker— insisting Bob read some of my writing out loud, then casually sliding out the back door to watch the grandkids annoy the bejeezus out of everyone that remained outside. She had a sly grin on her face the entire time, proud of herself for arranging this first date.
Because Kathy told him to, Bob read out loud every word of a 21-page essay about hunting. It had been typewritten on his gifted Smith-Corona and scanned into a pdf on my laptop. I had the laptop in tow, I was hoping to get some editing done on a memoir while I outsourced my parenting to an above-ground pool for the afternoon. Bob's delivery was impeccable. I felt like I was being told a story by my grandpa — a grandpa I never had but always wanted— but the words were my own. It would be a shame to let that beautiful old voice go to waste.
I had started doing competitive storytelling events at the Omaha Public Library and even won some impressive homemade trophies crafted by librarians. After a weekend to visit my former youth pastor turned podcaster turned close friend, I purchased a professional grade Podcast mic to turn those tales told in sparsely populated libraries into podcasts. For the inaugural episode, I needed someone to be the voice of old man baseball player Brooks Robinson. I didn't know what Brooks sounded like, but I knew what he should sound like after that afternoon in Kathy’s kitchen listening to Uncle Bob laugh at the word “poser” in my typewritten essay.
I didn’t act on the notion, at least not until I got an email from Kathy about how "touched" Bob was by my writing. Her word, not his. But she did send me some of Bob's words, in the form of a long email encouragement that he asked Kathy to forward. I replied back to Bob directly and asked if he wanted to be the voice of Brooks Robinson, and in exchange, I offered to record some of his own stories so we could give a CD compilation to Kathy and her sister Tina for Christmas.
Bob agreed, well he said he was “inclined to accept,” and we arranged a time to meet in his home in Wahoo, Nebraska to record the ghost of Brooks Robinson.
•••
It took us a while to settle on a time, mostly because I didn’t realize that the mysterious email from “402953XXXX@vzwpix.com” wasn’t spam but actually Bob attempting to contact me from his hand-me-down iPhone. Bob used to be on the cutting edge of technology—he never could understand my fascination with typewriters— but it had progressed at a pace he couldn’t quite keep up with. But he managed. Later that week, I made the 32 minute drive to Wahoo to meet Bob at his house.
Despite his “little home being impossibly cluttered and tiny” according to his email, we found a corner next to his desktop computer that we fashioned into our studio. I had my laptop and professional grade podcast mic crammed into a backpack, and we set up shop. I took copious notes of my surroundings, trying to capture the essence of my setting like an investigative journalist. Bob had run a side hustle for years selling antiques he accumulated on eBay, but his account had been suspended and the collection kept growing. Every corner had something interesting tucked into it, and I wanted to capture all of it. He had asked me my shoe size when I met him at the door, then offered a pair of rubber boots to take home.
Several takes later, we had the essence of Brooks Robinson captured— and Bob pulled out a printed copy of an original essay of his own. In font large enough for his 84-year-old eyes to read, printed on the clean side of recycled paper he confiscated from the discards at the Saunders County Museum. The first story was called “Yelling at the Library.”
We agreed to meet the following week with a new set of essays. And the week after that. And the week after that. For eight straight weeks we recorded Bob’s stories until the production lead time on Christmas presents forced us to draw a line in the sand for Kathy and Tina’s compilation. Bob asked if we could make a few extra copies for some friends and family, and then we decided to make a few more to donate to the Wahoo Public Library and Saunders County Museum. So we did that too. Eventually I stopped writing down notes from our interactions. I went from making observations to making memories. I no longer felt compelled to document the quirks and foibles of meeting with Uncle Bob, those quirks and foibles just got melded into my perception of Uncle Bob’s personality. I didn’t need more examples to tell me who he was— I knew. He was that goofy, crazy uncle. He was Uncle Bob.
With the CD and a companion book finished, we kept going. I got to hear more of Bob’s stories, but I also got to know Bob. My weekly travels to Wahoo became their own adventures. Bob walked me to the Wahoo library to show off our table display and gave me the tour of his basement— my favorite exhibit was the shelf full of miniature chests Bob has set aside to hold his ashes one day. I gave him tutorials on dragging and dropping files to create an email attachment, and jumped his old pickup after he accidentally drained the truck’s battery.
And we kept making arrangements to meet the following week.
Bob even found another typewriter. He offered it to me as nonchalantly as the old pair of rubber boots that I conveniently never brought up again. But this time, I made sure to collect.
When Bob’s house lost power during a thunderstorm, it fried the remains of his old desktop computer. He was able to get up and running again on an old laptop, but his creativity stalled a bit. We had released 21 finished podcast episodes and had another 22 short stories saved for later. So Uncle Bob needed some time to think of some more, luckily he has plenty of stories left to tell.
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