Perhaps now is a good time to introduce you to my uncle, Ruben. He goes by various pseudonyms, which I won’t enumerate for his privacy’s sake. But if you meet him you will know it (at least, that’s the object of this description).

I come to this subject in a roundabout way; I was reading a book called “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody,” by Will Cuppy. This book, published before my mother was born, caught my eye in a thrift store years ago, when I was searching for books with interesting titles to line my shelves. Boy did I luck out.

Usually I just buy these things and set them up where people can see them, a false testament to my literary inquisitiveness. But this one proved to be more than a pretty title; it’s got a good personality, too. Inside its svelte 223-page frame are dozens of brief biographies of most of the important figures in history. Very well written (in that 1940s New-York-Herald-Tribune-columnist style). But after getting through Alexander the Great and his overworked horse Bucephalus, I skimmed ahead to the end and realized that nowhere in this clever and quirky book was there a clever and quirky description of my uncle Ruben.

I’m sorry, but a compendium of the famous historical people is just not complete without him.

So here we go, in the tradition of Mr. Cuppy, who’s death in 1949 makes his book’s exclusion of my uncle’s life (at least its first decade or so) completely inexcusable. Shame on you, Cuppy, and may you rest in peace.

Continuing: If you meet him, you will know it, because he will curse at you. The first time he came to visit us here in the U.S. (he makes his home in sunny Buenos Aires) I was 10 years old, and all I can remember him saying is, “Fack eyoou, mannn.”

He said it with love, though, worry not.

For as long as I can remember he has been in some intermediate stage of baldness. This is good, since I’ve heard men inherit baldness from their mother’s brothers (Ruben is, allegedly, my father’s brother). Unfortunately, my mom’s brothers are balding too. But I’ve already started collecting spare back hair for the inevitable follicle transplant. Worry not.

He is a large person, with big hands like thick steaks. When he slaps you on the back in a just-kidding-around way it feels like someone has thrown a calculus textbook into your spine. If that were the case, you could turn on them, screaming, but it’s just your uncle, so you have to smile and wheeze out a reply (if you can get your wind back).

As a child there I believed there were two reliable repositories of information in the world: my father and my uncle Ruben. On matters of importance I felt these were the sources I could trust. Unfortunately they were almost always in disagreement. I often questioned them about my paternal grandparents (whom I never met) and our family history, and got wildly diverging responses. My grandfather was either Polish or German. My grandmother was either very loving or cold and distant, and possibly narcoleptic. Now I realize that there was one aspect in which their stories probably agreed: totally unfounded exaggeration. From my dad I have stories of wolf chases through the snowy Romanian forests; from Ruben I have something about a Colt .45 and gauchos in Paraguay.

Unlike my father, though, Ruben can cook, and for that reason alone he has always been the favorite. Given three hours and a properly functioning oven, he will produce seven rectangular pizzas, in increasing levels of deliciousness. When the oven is empty and stomachs are full, he gets very cheerful. But while he cooks it’s better to stay out of the kitchen, lest he slap one of those heavy hands down on your back, and leave you both unconscious and tomato-stained.

Ruben is a Jewish Buddhist, which is like being a Buddhist Jew but without the meditation. His meditation comes from 1 to 2pm every day, while he’s sleeping on a cot in the back room of his store. Also, deep down I think he’s really neither Buddhist nor Jewish. He’s Jewish because his parents were, and he’s Buddhist because he needs an answer to the question, “What Religion Are You?” But if it came down to an argument I think he’d hold up against the god(s) of both.

His real religion – though I doubt he’d call it that – is The Economist. He’s read every issue front to back for as long as I’ve been alive, probably. Most of his knowledge about the world comes from that magazine, which I suppose is not such a bad thing. I recently got a subscription.

There seems to be an ever-growing number of things to say about my uncle (we’ve only covered only one of his cooking delicacies, ignoring completely his famous microwave salmon and potatoes). But there’s a limited number of words to be dispensed from this machine, and I get the feeling we’re just going in circles. Now I know why Mr. Cuppy excluded Ruben from his book; it’s just too hard to fit him in there.

Alexander the Great? No problem, eight pages. My uncle? Nope, sorry. He left that puzzle for me to solve, and here I’m leaving it, scattered on the floor in pieces for someone else.

To get your name in the history books is an honor. To have it left out is even better.

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