In Dragons of Histh
Book 3 is a character called
Joe Hartmann.Though the character has a little of
me
and a little of Uncle Joe,he was mainly meant to be
Uncle
Henry.
In the story Histh is
feeling awfully lonely and depressed.
Her dragons sense that and set off a chain of events
that bring
a human named Joe Hartmann and the Mousetrap Goddess
together in a farm field.
The meeting is anything
but cordial,and Histh decides
to drag the unwilling human into her family of dragons.
However Joe Hartmann was a heavy smoker,which caused
him to come out of the process a weaker sicker dragon
than
normal.This shocks Histh so much that she takes the
mortal
dragon under her wing.
Hence Joe Hartmann gets to see the world as few other
humans and dragons can.Histh now has a companion she
can
confide in.
In the Black Velvet story "Blacks Worm" is a
character named Charlie Babbage.Mr Babbage with the
aid
of Swiss women clockmakers,brings to life a gear driven
mechanical
intelligence called the Babbage Experimental Sextant(Bessie)
Bessie,Babbage
and the lady clockmakers are reflections
of Uncle Henry's interest in making and repairing
clocks.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Uncle
Henry was a bricklayer by trade who worked with
Opa Herman on various projects on the family farm
in
Barger Oosterveld ,Drenthe,Netherlands.
He married
my dads sister in 1950.Before the main body
of our family emigrated to Canada,my dad,Uncle Herman
and Uncle Henry went over first to set things up.
Uncle
Henry was supposed to work at one farm whilst
his two brothers in law worked for a lawyer who really
wanted
to be a farmer( Raeben McCunt.
However Uncle Henry
somehow missed his stop and ended
up riding the rails to Montreal.Being new to Canada
it hadn't
occurred to him that Montral was not just a suburb
of Halifax.
He finally realied the
error of his ways and made his way
back from Quebec to Nova Scotia.
He quickly left
the farm where he was supposed to work
and made his way to RaeMac farm at River Hebert where
my dad and Uncle Herman were working for the lawyer
farmer.
Raeben McCunt
didn't know anything about farming
and neither did Uncle Henry.My dad and his brother
Herman had been the farmhands at the family farm in
Holland.
However
Uncle Henry was shrewd and learned to
ask his two companions about farm related matters.Once
they had to deal with a old leaky field sprayer whose
leather plunger was worn out.Uncle Henry asked my
dad and Herman about the sprayer,then turned around
and told Raeben how the sprayer needed to be fixed.
The owner was impressed with Uncle Henry's depth of
farm knowledge and took it in his head that Uncle
Henry
was the expert and the other two farmhands were the
bumbling yokels.
Once the rest
of the family came over they stayed in
the area for another year or two .On Sundays they'd
all
go to a nearby ghost village called Minudie and picnic
on
the Bay's beach.
Uncle
Henry settled in the Burlington area,where he
found work as a bricklayer and building houses.
My earlier recollection
of him comes from
when I was about 4-5 years old.His house had steep
steps leading into the basement.During one family
gettogether I went tumbling down the stairs to the
bottom.Uncle Henry was dowen there,freaked out
and worried I'd broken my neck.
A few years later
my dad and him took 3 pigs up north
in Uncle Henry's homemade trailer.The trailer got
stuck
on the entrance to the rural slaughterhouse.Amongst
other
things,the butcher amused us with the spectacle of
having a
headless chicken run around.
Because all three of
them had come over together in 52,
my dad,Uncle Henry and Uncle Herman shared a bond
they
didn't share with other family members.
Uncle
Henry was a 2 pack a day smoker and I was
largely introduced to the concept of smoking by watching
him roll his own cigarettes or buy a pack from a
dispensing machine.It was easy enough to tell when
Uncle
Henry had visited,because you could smell the nicotine
in
the air.
If you look at photos of him you can see that smoking
aged him greatly.He always looked tall and gaunt,but
the
smoking shrivelled him on his bones.
Being shrewd,he
knew how to make a buck.Back in
1980 we contracted him to build a lottery kiosk.He
leisurely
overbuilt the thing,giving us a Fort Knox,rather than
a
safety deposit box.Since he was paid by the hour the
costs quickly rose to the point where my dad had to
tell
him to hurry and finish the job.
Uncle Henry
loved his dogs and in later years tended
to go for small housedogs.When he visited my mom he'd
often go to our pet dog with a treat before entering
the
house.He liked my mothers homemade chicken soup and
everyonce in a while my parents would head to Burlington
with a big pot of soup for him.
Uncle Henry
had a grandfather clock he had made
himself in the basement of his house.He also liked
to fix
and tinker with cuckoo clocks.
In
the end it wasn't the cigarettes that killed Uncle
Henry.About two years ago the doctors told him he
had
a aneuryism that they couldn't do anything about.Sooner
or later it would kill him.
He spent the next
two years telegraphing his eventual
fate to the rest of us.When his last dog died he refused
to
get another one,knowing he wouldn't be able to care
for it.
Slowly he wound down his activities
and was preparing to
move into a nursing home with his wife.Just last
October 30 2006 my parents visited him with the chicken
soup and he chatted about his preparations.
Then came
November 5 and my parents phoned him
around 10:30AM.he'd just finished watching the RC
mass on TV
and was awaiting the arrival of his daughter Eda at
noon.My
parents finished their conversation with him around
11AM
and he sat down on a chair to await his daughters
arrival.
She arrived at
noon and found him sitting there dead
in his chair.What he had told us for two years would
kill him finally had.
All the
various members of the family gathered for
his funeral on Thursday November 9th at St Gabriels
RC
Church.This was a church he had helped build 4 decades
earlier.The priest was knew to the area and really
didn't
know Uncle Henry or the family he'd married into.But
it was
a nice eulogy and we didn't spoil it by enlightening
the Father
on some of the spicier events we could have told him
about.
Uncle Henry
was laid to rest in a cemetary out in the
country north of Burlington.