Random edits

As I’m driving home that night, I struggle to adjust to this new view on Uncle Sam, and not let it affect my memories of him. It may have been better that I didn't learn this about Sam until now, when my education has helped to prepare me for the realities of drug addiction, and I have a greater understanding and compassion toward those who live it.  By the time I make it home, I have mostly reconciled my image of him with this new information.  It doesn’t change my memories of him.
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I wonder if this “initial drug arrest” is why we no longer visited Uncle Sam, if my father stopped the visits after this.  There is a vague tickling memory of my brother and I being sat down and told we would not be able to visit Uncle Sam any more, and possibly some arguing between our parents before this discussion.  If this was the case, it would turn out to be ironic, because the woman my father started dating 3 months after my mother died (and married 8 months after her death) candidly admitted to a history of excessive drug and alcohol use when she was younger, and her oldest son, my new stepbrother, whom I had met only a couple of times, died of a drug overdose in January of the next year at age 19, 1 month before my thirteenth birthday and less than a year after my mother’s death. The last time I saw this new stepbrother, he had visited our house, and was standing in our living room with his back to our big black wood stove, arms behind his back, much like my father’s usual pose when he came in from outside and was trying to get warm.

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Not that there was much competition for “favorite” uncle and/or aunt.  My father’s sister, Rhonda, I remember meeting once: we visited the cranberry “fields” where she worked, which was a flat lake of water with cranberries floating on it, and her cabin way out in some woods, where I’m pretty sure she lived without electricity, only a generator. I also remember meeting my father’s brother once: he and his wife had come down from Montana and were renting a big house on the beach with a massive array of windows highlighting a view of the beach and ocean.   As for my mother’s other brother, I only remember one rather formal Thanksgiving.  I don’t think my mother liked him, I remember not clicking with his children, and formal has never really been my thing.