That’s all I have: one memory of a man who was dead by the time I was seven. I’m not going to smoke in Munna’s house, too.” He laughed: “It’s bad enough I walk into your Munna’s house with this beard, kid. I asked him, “Uncle Ronnie, why aren’t you smoking?” I was only five years old, maybe six. In my sole memory of him, he was sitting in my grandmother’s den, but to my chagrin he wasn’t smoking. I remember him the way you might remember the way the sky was lit on a great day 20 years ago: brightly yet faintly. In the world of my childhood – spent on a Pentecostal compound in Oklahoma – my uncle Ronnie was a hothouse flower: the way he laughed the way he smiled through his beard his professorial cardigan his glasses his pipe.
