My Forgetful, Unforgettable Uncle Mose

Every family has its eccentric relative. Ours was the
legendary Mose Nisly, 1896-1956.

Looking through a collection of old family photos recently I ran across a rare one of my late uncle Mose.

As one of my mom's older brothers, Mose was a part of our household for a memorable year or so when I was a young teen. Never married, he always lived with one of his various siblings, and when he could no longer support himself, some of his ten living brothers and sisters took turns taking him in and caring for him.

Uncle Mose was somewhat mentally challenged, the result of a high fever he experienced with a case of meningitis in his childhood, I was told. I don't recall family members saying much about his youth, but there were numerous stories told about his eccentric traits as an adult.

For instance, while he was certainly a man of integrity and with a good heart, Mose was incredibly tight with his money. He even resisted having his work clothes washed regularly, fearing they would wear out sooner as a result. Then there was the story about how he lamented the cost of shipping his favorite rocking chair by rail from Iowa to Virginia when he came to live with us. Outraged by what he was charged by the railroad company, he protested with, “but the train was making the trip here anyway!”

Another of Moses’ traits was his absentmindedness. He was constantly forgetting where he had put things, then blaming others for having misplaced or taken them. All of this added to his generally unhappy and negative outlook on life, and to always seeing himself as a martyr and a victim.

In spite of his general forgetfulness, though, there was one category of memories Mose could recall in the greatest of detail. He could recite example after example of people who had mistreated him throughout his life. So when I heard Garrison Keillor once describe someone as having “Irish Alzheimer's,” a condition that results in people “forgetting everything but their grievances,” I immediately thought of my uncle.

But we can always learn from people like that, and realize how important it is to wrap lots of gratitude around us every day of our lives. Unlike Mose, we can practice living from the assets side of our memory ledger rather than the debit side.

Which reminds me of how much of our emotional and spiritual health depends on how we do our mental bookkeeping, whether we celebrate the generous deposits made every day into our emotional savings accounts, and whether we can then live out of a sense of abundance rather than in a constant state of victimhood and scarcity.

Thanks, Uncle Mose, for helping teach me that kind of lesson.