Crazy Uncle Charlie

                       Crazy Uncle Charlie

                          A Short Story by Frank Sperry

         My Grandfather never bragged about anything. Not anything. Not ever. That was my Uncle Charlie’s job. I don’t remember Uncle Charlie ever having another job, so he must have been born to tell everybody things about my Grandfather that no one else wanted to or was able to do.
         Everybody in our family called him “Crazy Uncle Charlie”, even if he wasn’t their uncle and even if he wasn’t really crazy. My Grandfather never called him “Crazy Charlie”. Neither did I. He was my Dad’s brother and that made him my Uncle. But if my Grandfather knew he wasn’t crazy, that was good enough for me, no matter what the rest of our family thought.
         Uncle Charlie bragged that my Grandfather was the smartest man he knew, even when he knew that my Grandfather only went as far as eighth grade. After eighth grade he went to work in the corner grocery store putting cans on the shelves, or standing on a wooden box to take cans of food down for the older people who couldn’t reach them.
         When my Grandfather got older, but not too old before the Army took him away, Uncle Charlie bragged the he could work in the grocery store instead of going to High School, because he found a way to pass the test to get a diploma from what he called GED School. No one in our family believed Uncle Charlie because he could never tell them where this GED School was. My cousin Randy, who got my vote for being the family smart aleck, said the Army wouldn’t have taken him if he didn’t go to High School. Uncle Charlie said the Army would teach him how to shoot a rifle, and they didn’t need him to know how to do algebra. Uncle Charlie said when the Army had more rifles than they had soldiers; they were less particular than when they decided they would only take the ones who knew how to do algebra.
         Uncle Charlie bragged that my Grandfather could have been a millionaire if he wanted to because his favorite subject was about Money and what he called Economics.
              That GED High School must have been about books, because my Grandfather learned just about everything except how to shoot a rifle from books. No matter what he wanted to know about he said the Northeast Library in Philadelphia had a book about it. Once when he got interested in cows, he found and read a book about some place in Texas called the King Ranch. The King guy in Texas taught my Grandfather that he made most of his money when he learned how to breed cows faster than he was able to sell cows. I wasn’t sure I understood what it meant to “breed cows”, so my Grandfather explained that that meant to get the mother cows to have as many baby cows as they could before the mother cows ran out of milk or the King guy sold them.
         It was the same thing about oil and some guy named Rocket Fella. My grandfather said the book he read about that guy taught him that Rocket Fella’s money secret was knowing how to find oil in the ground faster than he knew how to pump it out of the ground. My Grandfather said the finding was called supply and the pumping was called demand.
         Uncle Charlie was my Grandfather’s oldest son and whatever my grandfather taught him, the only other job he had was to pass it on to me. Uncle Charlie was like my Grandfather. Neither of them wanted to become a millionaire, but they wanted me to understand simple things about money, in case I wanted to be a millionaire.
         I was always sure I didn’t want to be. I was always more sure I’d rather be like my Grandfather.