Sometimes the apple falls far from the tree
I have just spent a couple of days in Venice getting reaquainted with my nephew.
He is now a fully grown man working on cargo ships – with a forearm tattoo to match. It is hard to imagine he was once the scrawny toddler I used to take care of.
I was fifteen when the minors' court decided to temporarily put my brother's five-year-old son into my parents' care. His dad was in jail, his mum had gone awol and he was going to be removed by social services when my parents stepped out and offered to foster.
For about one year I took care of him after school and we became very close, the eleven year gap still allowing us to connect at some playful level. Well, I am sure it helped that I was not averse yet to a bout of Lego town-planning every now and then. I also had the most fascinating secret an uncle could have: a hidden stash of Barbie dolls. They could only come out at night or upon the condition that no strangers (and grandpa) could find out about them.
He was more into inking their hard bods with his magic markers than I would have liked, but we soon set up an efficient collaboration when I started sewing the designes he scribbled. I took him to the cinema (E.T.), picked him up from school, made him do his homework (and discovered that patience is not my most developed quality) and got him the cool clothes and haircut I would have wanted for myself (he was the gayest toddler in pre-school and his favourite outfit was some plum corduroy dungarees with matching lumberjack shirt I'd got him).
We made a pretty good team, him learning how to quickly identify and report my dad's hypo-glycemic episodes that manifested themselves sometimes with a missed step, sometimes from a slight slur in his speech, sometimes – shock! – by a very uncharacteristic joking repartee sticking out like a sore thumb in his otherwise rigid countenance.
He was the one family member I missed when I left home the year after. I had almost considered giving up my scholarship and opportunity of a lifetime, and not moving out, but the circumstances meant that it was the healthiest choice for me and I bloody well knew it. My brother had got out of jail, moved back in with us, got himself a fringed red leather jacket and started hanging out all day and night with dubious frequentations, coming back to shower and eat and play briefly with his already fed-showered-nurtured son.
I believe I will forever be haunted by my nephew's quivering lower lip whenever he saw his dad go out yet again in a cloud of dodgy aftershave. 'I. Want. My. Mummyyy' – not an uncommon exclamation, in other, more normal, circumstances.
I'll cut the rest short: his parents got back together and took their son home. Had another child but within another couple of years of violent rows she packed her bags, left and settled with the kids a couple of hundred miles away. If you'd met my brother, you would now that it is the shortest possible distance to make you feel safe.
It's now been almost twenty years. She did an admiringly good job with the kids, my family kept in touch (unlike their father) and the grandchildren (21 and 27 now) come and visit regularly.
This trip to Italy coincided with the elder being on a break between shipping assignments, and I took Dr B. to meet him in Venice.
I probably had not seen him in five years or so, and I was shocked to see how much like his father he is. The same hot-blooded, generous, roguish Dom Juan – minus the addiction-fuelled paranoic violence.
He speaks, behaves and hell, even smells like his dad, and when you think that he did not grow up with him and has not even seen him in over ten years, it is amazing. Incidentally, I also found this pretty disturbing as it brought back more memories than I was comfortable with, but tried as much as I could not to let it come between us.
He is fortunately light years away from the average Italian in his late twenties. He does not live with his mum. All his clothes are from charity shops. He is very open to cultures he encounters while travelling, absorbs them and lets them add variety to his life.
I used to worry that my brief taking care of him could have possibly given him with sub-secondary acquired homosexual characteristics.
Then yesterday he saw my Ralph Lauren t-shirt and went: "RL? Why have you got a Republic of Liberia t-shirt? You know they are much feared at sea, we consider them some sort of modern-day pirates."
And that is how I knew that the laydees need not worry.