As the oldest of my generation, I was the first person on both sides of my family to pursue education after high school. Since we knew what higher education meant only indirectly from others, I was little prepared for freshman year. Pamphlets, stories, and movies helped somewhat, but I had a fuzzy mental picture of what I would encounter 2,000 miles east.

My family read the packing list sent in the freshman packet like the Griswolds following the roadmaps through the unknown wilderness between midwestern suburbia and Far West Wally World. I departed home with two suitcases and two phone numbers. Mom had a second cousin in a city 30 minutes from campus and Dad had an uncle he knew only through reports from our relatives. Uncle Nick had moved away from Dad’s childhood county into a clapboard house on a country road three states away, 10 miles from my campus. It was their way of keeping me close to the security of family.

Though the transition from home to the mysteries of life in the midwestern wilderness proceeded more smoothly than I imagined, I found the parental referrals helpful on occasional weekends and over vacation breaks that were too short for a trip home. I got to know my mother’s cousin, her husband, and their ‘tween age daughter better than Mom ever did. I also dined on the unique hospitality of widowed Uncle Nick…and eventually his nearby daughter, her husband and elementary-aged daughter.

College life was far more accessible to me than college academics. I once found myself daydreaming during an advanced math class and, when the daydream ended, I mistook the professor‘s lecture for a foreign language class. I suppose that may have been part of the reason why I found respite in the offerings of the English department. The lectures there never sounded like a foreign language, daydream or not, although I came close to foreign language puzzlement when my English Composition prof assigned us a mid-term project to “Write Something Creative.”

However, the cluelessness was widespread in the classroom so that the prof thankfully elaborated. “Interview someone who you think would have something interesting to say,” he said. “Go talk to the gravedigger at the Graafschap Cemetery.” We didn’t know where that cemetery even was, but we got the idea. I mean, it was not advanced math!

I saved visits to Uncle Nick for trying times when I needed escapes. He would greet my arrival with eyes lit up, a verbal welcome that all but embraced me in a bear hug, and a firm assurance that he was well prepared for my visit with chiffon cake and root beer in the refrigerator. The front door of his ramshackle house led directly into the kitchen. The furnishings therein looked to be, even then, “vintage farm house.” The floor was wood unadulterated by varnish or floor covering, the cupboards were covered with tattered drapes instead of doors, and a single bulb hung over the chromed and painted kitchen table and chairs. Pioneer American Sparce would be an accurate style description, but Uncle Nick’s joy at my visits always made the space feel comfortable to luxurious.

At first the chiffon cake with a root beer chaser seemed odd, even comical, but it became sacred when I learned it was his own favorite dessert and he kept a cake in the freezer in case I ever made a surprise visit. Uncle Nick relished telling of his travels via a 20-year-old Dodge and 15-foot brush-painted travel trailer, both encased in a well-earned covering of mud and rust. He had visited every state and national park within a 200-mile radius because they had the best campsite bargains.

The twinkle in his eyes grew brightest when he recalled camping bargains, like the privately owned campground in Missouri that charged only $2 per night and had a café where he feasted on a fine breakfast for only 75 cents. On one trip, he fixed a blown tire with a free, cast-off used tire from a nearby gas station. He mounted it himself and drove on it for well over 1,000 miles without incident. He spun stories about interesting fellow travelers, celebrities he met in diners, storms he conquered (or didn’t), and the best cheap restaurants between the Rockies and the Alleghenies. His description of the wonders of Route 66 from Chicago to southern California were the reason I took that route back home while I was in college.

Uncle Nick has become the source of many of my best college-days nostalgia – and some of the most lasting learnings I have ever received. I suppose that is what drove me to Google his name recently. I discovered that after an extended illness my great uncle Nick died 54 years ago – 5 years after I left the warm embrace of the Midwest. He had 2 sons and 7 grandchildren I never knew about and he was, according to his 54-year-old obituary, “buried in Graafschap Cemetery where he had worked many years as the gravedigger.”

It took me 59 years to complete that creative writing assignment. “Better late than never,” they say. I would say it differently: “It’s never too late to be faithful.”