Donald Wheeler

As suddenly as cousin Donald Wheeler appeared in our life, he disappeared one day. In between lay a good number of Thanksgivings for which the lanky old man would appear in his "purple people eater", his beloved custom GM van on the rare short wheel base to spend the holiday with us, "his cousins". The vehicle, as we got to see it, had always over 200,000 miles on it.  Donald had it  rebuilt at one point, because it was his goal to drive it until he died. Well, it almost worked out that way. Named after the capability of accommodating at least seven passengers, the vehicle proved its usefulness at Nayna's family reunions which she began organizing for her mother sometime around the turn of the century. That is also where Donald resurfaced for Nayna. She remembered him from her great grandmother's home when Nayna was a teen but hadn't seen him since. Donald was known in the family as working for Anchor Motor Freight, presumably a lifelong job in accounting until he retired and began a second career as part-time tax consultant for H&R block. He took annual continued education classes and worked during the main tax season until he was eighty.

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Donald didn't change much during the ten or so years we knew him as a Thanksgiving guest. He'd show up the day before in high spirits in spite of an arduous drive on the New Jersey Turnpike on the busiest of travel days. He liked to say that he was doing "faan-tastic" and that "life was getting better every day". His face had many smile wrinkles around his blue eyes, he could be quite charming. He was tall, slender and big all around, the type who doesn't fit into any airplane seat, which is maybe, why he didn't fly. He went swimming on a regular basis and was hooked to doing morning stretches. He had long thin, grey and somewhat stringy hair which he bunched into a tale in the back like an old hippy or folk singer. He slept long hours at the rate of 12 hrs a day. On cold nights he would go to bed in a white night cap with a pointy end. The only noticeable change from year to year was that his speech got slower and slower. Living originally with a  partner in his house on 1025 West George Avenue in Linden NJ, and then alone, after the partner died of aids, he enjoyed having company and an audience. He regaled us with lengthy stories from the past which we had mostly already heard in previous years, stories which were stretched by long pauses when he searched his memory for names, dates and words in general and during which he pursed his lips to exhale long puffs of breath. Many stories involved his brother David with which he had a somewhat strenuous relationship and "camp", a cabin in Maine located right at the water which he and "brother" now shared. David spent long month "at camp", a definitely even more monastery existence than the one in Linden. In the winter he would load the van on Amtrak's auto-trains with  sleeper cars and go to Florida. From there he would drive to Texas, where he visited brother at times. I think Donald never took a plane.

Our kids who were still living at home or later came visiting for the holiday took Donald as some kind of odd uncle from a bygone era with artefacts such as his old flip phone to find addresses, names or numbers or told us about working on his old Commodore computer with 256 MB RAM or some such thing which he still fired up to do some housekeeping.

The seats in his van were covered with purple frottier towels and when he parked it in front of our house he always carefully flipped the large side mirror in as if he had parked a big rig of the kind his old employer had sent across America.

Cousin Donald, unsurprisingly, had long, slender fingers and liked to sit down and loom over our piano to give it a workout. He played long jazzy improvisations showing great finger dexterity and sense for music but there was hardly ever anything with a melody and I don't know if he could play sheetmusic.

He was very gracious, lauded Nayna's or my cooking inevitably as "fantastic, restaurant grade", brought a box of Merlot, the only wine he would drink and invited us one night out to wherever we wanted to go. He loved inviting us for dinner and he hated to leave after Thanksgiving, sometimes staying so much beyond the holiday that we began wondering how to tell him that he didn't live here. At the restaurants he would use all his charme to not drive the waiters crazy when he modified the menu items with very particular instructions especially pertaining to the obligatory starter salad (No onions, dressing on the side). Donald was good eater but he never cooked a thing and kept downtown Linden's diner scene alive all on his own. He liked to take an extra dessert home in case he would wake up at night hungry.

During the fifties he had lived in the Baltimore area for a while when he served in the army at Abderdeen. He reminisced about those long gone days when Baltimore had still streetcars while we were cruising through today's much shrunken but shinier city. I gave him once or twice my city tours and he was one of the most grateful guests I ever had on board, showing interest in many aspects of the city. He specially like the visit to the streetcar museum.

Last year Thanksgiving Donald was sick and didn't come. This year we never heard back after Nayna called and e-mailed him again. During the holiday we wondered several times what Donald would be doing. Although with Jonas and family visiting we were not lonely but I missed his fussing and turkey praise ("best meal I have ever eaten in my life") anyway.  After the holiday was over, Nayna finally called Donald's brother David to ask what was going on. That is when we learned that Donald had crashed his purple people eater last year sometime around Thanksgiving, that he fell into ill health and died of a stroke last December. Brother never called, sent a death notice, or published an obituary. The phone in Linden still takes messages and e-mails do not come back as undeliverable. But Donald had been reduced to ashes for almost a year without us having any idea. His urn sits at the family's cemetery somewhere in Connecticut. A very lonely death, indeed, and an end that Donald didn't deserve. "Life is getting better and better" was his way of expressing what we all like to believe. We will never know if he truly believed it.