It’s a funny thing. Because of the last post I was thinking of people who were strategists in my life, people who thought ahead a distance beyond most, anticipating things, ready for things… You can read about people, but knowing people is a very different thing.

There are a few in my life that I’ve known well that were strategists. One was my Uncle Robin, my father’s brother. He was a thinker and planner, which is why he and my father may not have always gotten along very well, and why he and I did.

And then I had a fond memory.

Now, when I grew up and Uncle Robin and I grew close again, Uncle Robin was on a trip with his new wife in Florida. I had some money for him.

I had a car with a busted transmission at the time and didn’t have enough cash on hand. Uncle Robin loaned me a few hundred bucks, and I wanted to get it back to him.

I met up with him, met his wife, and the hotel had someone playing classical piano. We went downstairs, and he and I sat and sipped scotch, didn’t say a word, and just drank in the piano. It was Mozart.

He and I talked then a bit about our favorite composers. I was more of a Mozart person, he was more of a Bach person. I’m walking him to the elevator before I get a cup of coffee. He’s had much more scotch than I. He stops by the elevator, turns perpendicular to me with his head shifted down, and says, “Your execution improved.” We laughed.

One of the earliest stories he and I had was in his mother’s house. It was my first few months in Trinidad – about age 9 – and there was a rat that would run the top of the open air walls in the old colonial style house. It is an old wooden house, it stands to this day, but there was this enormous rat that would just run around at certain times.

The funny thing is the rat didn’t show back up after that, my grandmother was pleased that the rat was gone and whenever the rat came up in conversation with her, he just quietly laughed and said nothing to her about the entire thing.

I noticed the times. Uncle Robin had a clock on the wall I used to time the rat. It bothered me. They’d laid out poison, but this rat didn’t seem to find it.

If you’ve ever built a model made of plastic, you’ll know you’re stuck with this plastic piping where the parts come from. I had decided I was going to kill the rat, and using that and some string borrowed from somewhere or more likely someone, I would sit in the rocking chair and wait, and when he crossed the path of it I would jerk the string and bring him hurtling down to the floor.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a great plan. It was a bit naive.

Uncle Robin walks in, sits at his seat at the table behind me. He looks at my little trap. “So you’re going to kill the rat?”

“Yes Uncle”

“When it comes down, what will you do?”

I raised the hammer so he could see it.

“Then?”

He was always the one who asked, “And then?”. One of his quirks.

I pointed at the open door to the front of the house. My trap was above it. “I’ll kick it out the front door, it will fall down the stairs and I’ll get some paper towels to clean it up.”

You see, when I had a plan, I had a plan. It was thorough. Not entirely good, but thorough.

He made one of his sounds – sort of like a grunt, but with an inflection at the end. “Do you think your grandmother would be more upset that you killed the rat than she is now about the rat?”

Well, hell. She didn’t like the rat which was the whole reason I went through all of this.

As I’m processing that, the rat runs, and pre-programmed, my arm jerks. The rat comes tumbling down and I’m already rushing forward with the hammer when…

The rat falls on my head and bounces out the front door. In the fracas, I drop the hammer on my toe and fall backwards away from the rat. There I was, on my back, holding my toe.

I hear my Uncle laughing quietly, and he says, “The plan worked as well as all plans, but you need to work on your execution.” Continued soft laughter and the sound of a newspaper page turning.

He remembered that after all those years when it had fallen from my mind.

I was really glad I remembered that. He was a little weird, a little eccentric, very much misunderstood, a person who enjoyed his isolation and was a little jealous sometimes that other people connected so easily while for him it was more work, and who wants to work when you can drink scotch and listen to good music?

I miss that guy. Nobody even bothered to tell me when he died. Bunch of jerks.