My Uncle, Simple Gifts

2023 The Year of Song and Verse

I was thinking of Copland’s tune Simple Gifts, always one of my favorites in music embodying the ideal of the value such small simple things are of beauty and value. My Uncle Kurt passed recently, and I thought of a few of the simple gifts he left me.

When he was moving to Germany after Russian Training at Monterey California, he left me a box of books several Norton Editions of the Russian classics including Anna Karenina, The Brother Karamazov, The Idiot and Crime and Punishment. In the box also was Oedipus the King. For a 14 year old in North Dakota at this was like receiving all the riches of Arabi. Also was left the advice to read them immediately, the thought you are ready for them and here they are. It was the first adult and intellectual gift I received. I never had a conversation with him where books were not discussed. He was the embodiment of the necessity of books to ones intellectual life.

He would come back with my aunt with little treasures from his travels, from Germany and Russia, gifts of sweets, Christmas ornaments, coffee, orange chocolates, and the first really German Gumi bears. He brought back treats from his travels but they were markers that he traveled, and that there was a larger world out there. He talked about Europe and Russia. Once while doing SALT inspections in Russia, he asked to see the Hermitage, jokingly since he heard it was closed. The Russian Military gave him a person individual tour. On your travels always ask and if you can sneak a look, sneak one, conjoul one, negotiate one.

We went fishing twice and never caught a fish, it these were opportunities for grown up discussions on life. I think it was easier in ND to say lets go fishing than lets have a talk. He gave guidance on ones education on, reading on, on ones future, and other things that other adults in my life were a bit neglectful of. He never neglected the education of others.

Once seriously, we were talking of legacy, he said “I am ordinary man and ordinary men's greatest possible legacy will likely be their children. This legacy should not be forgotten nor neglected.”

On his fortieth birthday he gave himself a gift. He shelved a boring Spanish history and told me this was the first book he didn’t finish, he said this was a grave error he should have left several subpar books unfinished.