Reading between the lines at Christmas

With Christmas approaching, Mary sat down at the kitchen table with several boxes of cards and wrote notes on the cards until every card was in an addressed, stamped envelope. I don't know what she wrote, but I'm guessing her message was the same for everyone: I have not forgotten you and never will.

I looked at the names on the envelopes and wondered if I would ever meet these people. They lived in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Back east where my mother grew up and attended college. None of them visited Alaska. If they had money for travel, they went to Florida during the winter.

Just before Christmas 1959, my mother told me "Uncle Mort is coming for a week." Mort Sullivan was her oldest brother and favorite sibling. He lived in Westchester County and worked in Manhattan for Consolidated Edison. His title was engineer, but he didn't have an engineering degree, only a diploma from DeWitt Clinton High School.

Uncle Mort was in his late 50s -- a bald, short, chunky bachelor who had less of a New York accent than my mother but used words I never heard before like gin mill and claptrap. He was a man of firm opinions, not necessarily political opinions, but views on the right and wrong way to do just about anything. He didn't have serious money but nevertheless would buy only the best of everything -- a topcoat fit for Alaska, for instance.

Mort and my mother talked over the kitchen table for hours during his week in Fairbanks. Smoking like fiends. She smoked Viceroys, he smoked cigars.

The Christmas weather was brutal, 40 below or more; it's a good thing the two of them enjoyed talking. No sightseeing at minus 40, not with four hours of daylight and our car immobilized by the cold. When I woke up in the morning, I heard my Dad attempting to turn over the balky Ford. His endeavors ended in a slammed car door, a short burst of profanity, and the sound of mukluks crunching hard snow as he headed for town to pick up the mail or have coffee with his friends.

One afternoon, my mother asked me to take Mort to the store. He needed to do some shopping. We bundled up and walked, 15 minutes each way. His shopping list was short: A bottle of Seagram's Seven. The cold didn't bother him, and the ice fog only aroused his curiosity as a subscriber to The Scientific American, which I had never heard of until I met him.

In 1963, I left for college in New York and saw Uncle Mort during vacations. He took me to restaurants, museums, the World's Fair, scenic drives around Westchester County that ended in bars where he bought me drinks -- legally as the drinking age was 18. While driving, he lectured on what to eat, drink, see in museums, plus how to buy clothes, cameras, and the endless gadgets he purchased to further his interest in science. Michael, he insisted, there's a right way to do everything, including the right way to drink your first daiquiri.

I chafed at his instruction. It took me 50 years to figure out what he was trying to do -- convert the greenhorn kid from Fairbanks into his idea of a gentleman. He was my finishing school. The only one I ever had. My mother would have approved. No doubt in her Christmas cards she reminded Mort to keep an eye on me.

Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com