Canada’s Dotty Auntie

Every family has at least one. That slightly off relative that you’re not quite on board with; the cuckoo in the nest.

They’re often the auntie or uncle who never married, or even had a special friend, the sad loner who keeps the curtains drawn so no one suspects they’ve hoarded every Readers’ Digest ever published, have kept, but never opened, all their mail since 1990, and have decorated their walls with styrofoam container lids from the Sunny Good Luck Happy Panda Import-Export Company Szechuan take-out.

Top of my mind, at least, is my second cousin Don Tucker, who returned from World War II traumatized, according to family lore, and who barely spoke above a red-faced grunt. (This is the 1960’s I’m recalling, when I was five to eight years old.)

A confirmed bachelor, Don lived in a little bedroom above the pantry, indeed, the original maid’s room, at the gloomy Victorian house on Brock Street in Whitby, Ontario — or “Ontari-ari-ari-o”, if you’re still feeling nostalgic about that — where my Victorian great-aunts also lived; his lair was a bay rum- and shaving soap-scented time capsule down to the ancient dial radio, the tortoiseshell hairbrush and the crocheted doily on the oak dresser.

Not just a traumatized veteran, he was a joker manqué; he not only regularly trotted out the spinach-in-the-ears trick, he earned my eternal…