A Superabundance of Something Else

One summer as a boy

I stayed with my aunt for a week.

I was amazed to discover the number

of owl collectibles in her house.

She told me with an air of indifference

that she didn’t know how many owls she had,

but I counted over two hundred

perched in every nook and cranny.

Since my uncle was in the radio business,

he literally had hundreds 

of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling,

vinyl records.

There was always

a superabundance of something 

in their household.

When I returned

the following summer

to stay for two weeks,

all the owls were gone.

I had asked my aunt

what happened to all of them.

She said with little emotion  

that she gave them all away;

I counted two.

In my third summer,

I stayed for a month.

My uncle had accumulated

eight aquariums!

Two fifty-gallon aquariums

were in the house, and

six ten gallons aquariums

were in the laundry room.

The sounds of

piston pumps pounding

and bubbles bursting

filled the air.

After my aunt passed away,

my uncle finally remarried

to a newspaper writer.

Passing through town one day

I paid him a surprise visit.

I discovered that he had only

one very large aquarium in his new home.

In one of his bedrooms,

were countless stacks of magazines

piled nearly as high as I was tall,

running along a wall.

He said he was in the process

of cleaning out the room!

When I left that day

I never saw my uncle again.

He was friendly but

kind of cold and distant,
as if I was a stranger,

but he spoke fondly of his nephew.

Since my aunt, on my Dad's side, passed away,

there simply was no more room for me

in my uncle's heart that was already crowded out

by a superabundance of something else.

Come to think of it,

I am of the opinion

that there never was any room...