On the thirteenth of November last year, a retired successful and wealthy businessman and entrepreneur, by the name of Michael Lampkin, passed away at his home in El Dorado Hills, California, after a long bout with leukemia. He was eighty-seven years old, surrounded by his five children, and the sounds of Neil Diamond's greatest hits. + + +
The first time I met Uncle Mick, he wasn't my uncle yet. My Aunt Shirley brought him to our house on Christmas Eve in 1960. I was only in kindergarten, but Mick sat down with me, and together we speculated how long it would take for Santa Claus to deliver his goods. According to the math (in some detail for a five-year-old), the United States alone would take the entire year.
Mick married my Aunt Shirley the following year, and Mick became Uncle Mick.
He always called me "Rocky." I had no idea why. He was different from all the other uncles. He was educated, sophisticated without the attitude, and didn't treat me like a little kid. Most people did, because that's what I was. And it was small wonder. I was also a bit of a nuisance. Today, they would have said I was “on the spectrum” and put me on Ritalin for life. But to him, I was more. One time I went with him to a baseball game, and he explained the players, the strategy, everything, in detail. That was unusual in the world of an obnoxious little boy. Obnoxious little boys could only be taken in small doses.
He owned a Volkswagen "Beetle." No one I knew owned anything but an American car. But he wasn't like anyone else I knew. It was small, it was cramped in the back seat, but none of that mattered. Everything looked different; the knobs, the buttons, the arrangement, all so ... European. Imagine something that exotic, that unique, in a world of plain vanilla and white bread.
Eventually, he took his wife and five children from their home in Cincinnati, to the city of Winchester, in Virginia. He left a promising career at Procter and Gamble, for an even more promising career at Rubbermaid.
This was 1968. Virginia was in the South, and the South in those days was still very much ... well, the South. Interracial marriage ceased to be illegal in Virginia and other southern states only in the previous year, but other things took longer. It seemed that there were "no public schools" in that part of the country, only private non-sectarian schools. Only years later did I learn that racial integration was still several years away, not because of the law, but because of hearts and minds. Uncle Mick never explained why there were "no public schools" there, but on the front window by the door was a sticker that said "Open Housing Is Morally Right."
Maybe some things never needed explaining.
One night while we were staying at the house, I woke him up in the middle of the night, and asked him what he did for a living. I had little in the way of social cues back then. But instead of yelling at me to go to sleep, he stayed awake and explained to me what he did for a living. I understood little of it, but what mattered was that I mattered enought that he would stay awake long enough to explain.
Virginia was a great place to visit. I learned to play tennis that summer from the kid across the street. I listend to the radio at night, but WINC-AM, and listend to reports of riots in Chicago, and the Russians invading Prague. I couldn't imagine living in Virginia. Not yet anyway.
After a few years, Virginia wasn't enough for Uncle Mick either. He took his family and moved once again to ... Seattle, Washington! Clear across the country, to take ownership of an office supply company named Ruggles, Inc. Seattle was even farhter away. I knew nothing would be the same; not us, not him, not his family. I was crushed.
The years went by, as they usually do. The next time I saw him was in 1986, when he and the Lampkins came by the house. I was with my first wife then, and Paul was just a baby. We sat in the living room. Well, most of us did. He was upstairs on the phone. Something was up, and there was no rest for the weary, the indispensible man. Eventually he came down and apologized for it. He was different somehow; too busy, too ... let's just settle for "different." It was a difference that affected their marriage, and after twenty-two years, Uncle Mick and Aunt Shirley divorced. Eventually the marriage was declared null and void by the Church, which left them both free to marry again.
I stayed in touch with Aunt Shirley for many years, especially during my divorce in the early 1990s. She understood me and what I endured. It was only in recent years that I renewed my contact with Uncle Mick.
As far as I was concerned, he was still my uncle. He remarried and was living in northern California. He continued to work into his seventies, possibly because he had to, but definitely because he loved his work. Not every man can say the latter, but he could, and so could I. In nearly half a century of my career, I wouldn't have settled for less.
But this love of his work was tempered in later years by regret. He wished he hadn't been quite as driven, that he spent more time with his family. His final years were not only a time of healing between himself and the children from his first marriage, but an admission that, even the breakup of a marriage declared null and void was "the biggest mistake of I ever made."
+ + +
My uncle Mick taught me that I did not have to settle for less. "Decide what you want in life. Then decide what you're willing to give up for it. Then go for it." It was a three-step plan that made for my best and brightest moments. It was why I became an Eagle Scout even after my father was unfairly kicked out of the troop. It was how I completed my internship in spite of gross mismanagement by the "career counselors." It was why I left the complacency of Cincinnati for a steady job in Washington. Finally, it was how I was practically alone in a room with men and women apointed by the President, and being taken seriously, of earning their respect. There were always my parents behind all this, of course, but there was still room for Uncle Mick.
As this is published, there is a "celebration of life" happening in Seattle. I was supposed to be there, until I was (shall we say?) taken over by events. But wherever he is now, he knows I was there in spirit.
He was then, and will always be, my Crackin' Rosie, my Song Sung Blue, my Sweet ... uh, you get the idea.
