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Uncle Stan
My Uncle Stan died many years ago now, but his presence is still felt from time to time.
First let me say that he was not really my uncle not in the sense of legallity or through blood. He was just a very close friend of my fathers and was as close to the family as any real uncle could be.
He was a watchmaker from the old country and he took my father under his wing and trained him in the trade of Horology. He owned a little repair shop on Concession Street, one side was a Barber shop and the other his store. He owned the shop for many years and when it came time to retire sold the buisiness to my father store and all. My father owned the shop until he retired and now my brother owns and works in it.
While uncle Stan owned the shop he lived in the store above it. A small rather cramped one bedroom apartment. After uncle Stan moved out my brother moved in for several years until his wife became pregnant and they bought a house. While my brother resided in the apartment uncle Stan passed on. When my brother moved out I moved in.
Now I have no idea how long things had been going on there but my brother never mentioned anything.
I would hear noises coming from the store below at odd hours of the night when I knew no one was there and I finally got my brother to give me a key so that I could check things out when I heard these noises.
I would notice movements out of the corner of my eye but when I turned my head there would be nothing there.
It was only when we smelled the cigar smoke one day that I knew who it was.
My uncle enjoyed two things in life, a good class of Scotch Whiskey and his cigars. Trouble was he smoked the most awful smelling cigars in the world. His favorites were "Rea Golds". I like a good cigar myself on occasion but I could not stand to be in the same room with uncle Stan when he lit one of these monsters up. They plain stunk.
We have even on occasion seen a cloud of smoke hanging in the air. I am a smoker and I can tell the difference between the smell of a cigar and cigarette smoke and they even look different. This was cigar smoke and the only one that I know that smells this bad is the Rea Golds.
So we got used to having uncle Stan pop in once and a while and we figured that he was just checking up on us and seeing how things were going.
We would greet him as if he were really present and say hello and the smell of the cigar smoke would soon vanish.
Things got a little hecktic though when we started to renovate the store and the apartment. Things disappeared and appear some where else and it became quite a trick to keep all the tools together to finish the job.
I finally had enough one day and sat down after working all day with a bottle of Scotch (which I do not drink) and two cigars and lit them both and poured two drinks. I talked to uncle Stan as if he were sitting right there with me and asked him to stop and let us finish the job. When I finished my drink I left the bottle and went to bed.
The next morning when I came down to work on the renovations I found a pile of tools sitting in the middle of the floor, all the tools we had lost.
What is stranger than this is the fact that when I had left I had put the alram on and locked the door and I was the only one who knew the alarm code. The infra red, heat activated and motion sensitive alrarm did not go off that night. Yet all these tools lay where nothing was when I had left.
An addition to this story is the fact that I have been told by my father that the man who owned the Barber shop had commited suicide in the chair there one night. He sat down where he used to serve his customers and slit his own throat with the razor.
I have never been able to verify this story with evidence but I know that he never made his presence known to me, it was always uncle Stan.
The present tenant came to my brother just after moving in and asked if there was something strange about the place as he had been hearing things in the store after closing hours.
My brother told him the story of uncle Stan and about the cigar smoke and now he is quite content to share his apartment with the odd visit from his adopted uncle Stan.
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