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I have a cute little niece. She's about 12 now and about 5' 5", and is going to be a tall, strong, proud woman (despite her Pisces tendancy to cry too much .

My sister, her mom, is a couple years younger than me and has gone through the proverbial wringer since she was 3.

When my niece was born, it was after several miscarrages and lots of trying. My sister has shown a remarkable and previously unknown ability to parent.

When she was 2, I took my niece to see the Lion King and she sat across my legs, leaning on the seats in front of me. She was too light to keep her own seat down and it was her first movie.

When the lights went down and the music started, she suddenly turned around and gave me a huge hug and kiss; like the light on the giant screen was the most coolest thing ever and I must be responsible for it.

We went to McDs afterward and, me, being the idiot babysitter, took her into the bathroom to wash her up... and after trying to find some paper towels, set her standing on the corner of the sink. She was small and could fit easily on the edge and I didn't think about balance issues. She could walk, after all.

I turned, heard the squeak of rubber on road, so to speak, and whirled with my much older and athetically trained reflexes; plucking her out of the air as she fell.

Swinging her back up to the sink, holding on to her this time, I looked her in the eye and started laughing until she joined me (which was pretty quick); proving once again that children don't really know they're in all this danger people like to think they are until we stupidly tell them.

Later, as she grew older, I told her the story, as her little memory didn't go back that far.

Now, she tells the story like she remembers it. Along with the other games we played and all the teasy ear whispers, I've built a pretty good block of memories for her and a great story to tell her future boyfriends.

My uncle Ty died Friday.

My uncle took a lot of drugs in the 60s and 70s and could pretty safely be called a burn out. As a youth, he started flying model airplanes and as he grew older, he started designing his own things.

As a kid, when I was about 5, I remember him bringing over about 20 kites he had built with his own hands... from balsa and paper. We had this five acre field behind our house and my sister and I (she would have been about 2), hung out with Ty and flew kites all afternoon.

After that, as he grew more and more... weird... the memories of that day were replaced by the odd nonsense letters we would get... the crazy detailed dip pen illos and hand written missives from another planet.

Then only Christmas. Then nothing for about the last 7 years.

Ty now designed, built from scratch, and flew radio controlled planes. I have one of his balsa wood and wax paper gliders right above me as I type, although most of his planes had full on engines and remote controls.

He was a fucking genius, that pissed it all away by getting high and dropping out. Everything in moderation, I guess.

Truth be told, it's been so long since I've thought about him in a tender way, that I can only compare it to me and my niece. I can only think about what it would be like for her if I decided to fuck up my life and drop dead of a heart attack at the stupidly young age of 62. I can only think about how long it took me to recall the kite story and how sad it makes me that I have to epilog it with some goddamn moral fable about staying clean and wasted potential. Then I have to get dressed this week and go help scatter his fucking ashes over the air fields he loved so much and wonder what it would have been like to have an uncle that told me stories.