I give everybody pseudonyms around here -- no need to involve the unwilling, after all. It's not always easy to figure them out, either, because they're always supposed to be affectionate, and they can easily come off as mocking.

Naming Uncle Tree was very easy. First of all, he was very tall -- not NBA tall, but 6'3" or so, certainly tall enough to be That Tall Guy at your average cocktail party. Furthermore, he worked for much of his life studying trees -- tree rings, specifically. Uncle Tree: King of Dendrochronology. Explorer of Mexico and Europe and South America; veteran of the Peace Corps and Oberlin and the AFSC; belcher extraordinaire.

My father has two brothers, and for whatever reason, they're both significantly taller than he is. We didn't get the gangly gene in my branch of things, and it's a real shame, too, because I would have made a good tall girl, I think. Uncle Tree had The Family Face, too, which my father's younger brother and his youngest son also have. My grandfather died when my dad and the uncles were about college-aged, and I don't remember seeing a particularly good picture of him until I was college-aged, but of course, it turns out that they got The Face from him. I think Little B has it, a little.

One of my favorite Uncle Tree stories involves him and my father -- as young men -- looking for a place to hang out and talk one night, and settling on watching the planes take off from the nearby Air Force base. They were watching from behind a fence, and apparently they wandered too far from the wrong fence, because before they knew it, a guy in uniform pulled up in a jeep. He told them they weren't supposed to be there, and spoke to them very angrily about the fact that they'd walked past a sign that said they weren't allowed to be there. They told him there was no sign. He got angrier, and Uncle Tree got angrier. Eventually, Uncle Tree got frustrated and started to walk away. At this point, the guy took out his gun (my dad remembers this vividly to this day) and pointed it at Uncle Tree, telling him to stop. Uncle Tree, being Uncle Tree, got even angrier and essentially told the guy to put the gun away and stop acting ridiculous.

Yeah.

So this earned Uncle Tree and my father a trip onto the Air Force base in the jeep, an interrogation regarding their intentions in watching the planes take off, and the eventual need to call my grandmother to pick them up. I love this story not because I necessarily believe that mouthing off to the guy with the gun is a smart move, but more because it speaks as clearly as anything to the utter fearlessness he had. Uncle Tree was a relentless pacifist, hooked throughout much of his adult life to Quakerism and simple living and an impassioned interest in the fate of poor people and, really, all people. He was one of the purest environmentalists I ever knew -- he lived in Tucson and had no air conditioning in his house or his car.

He shared my father's broad, goofy, game sense of humor -- the one that would let him speak to you passionately about the evils of censorship or corporate ownership of the media for half an hour, and then burp so loudly for such a long time that you wondered if it was ever going to end. And he was very proud of these belches, too -- much as my father will provoke my mom by ending one of his rattlers with "Whoops, I accidentally belched," Uncle Tree would just grin at us like a cat who just brought home a headless bird and dropped it on the porch.

I didn't really know until he was diagnosed with cancer this spring that he had made such huge contributions to tree ring research that it turned out that pretty much everybody who was anybody was using stuff he had worked on. He got emails from all over the world wishing him well, and my father was told by one of Uncle Tree's colleagues that he could have been an extremely rich guy, had he ever had a smattering of interest in it. Which he didn't. This was also when we started to learn how many people there were scattered all over the place who traced their professional growth or their social awareness or their personal survival right back to Uncle Tree. Blunt metaphors are hard to avoid at difficult times, and I will admit it made me think about tree rings, and the possibility that if you could sample the core of a person, you would find a ring for everyone who meant anything to him. It seemed like there was a ring for Uncle Tree in so many people that he will be, like a draught or an old lightning storm, showing up in small ways a hundred years from now.

He was also the first gay person I was aware of knowing. I think my father told me that when I was probably about nine or ten -- until then, you hardly pay attention to your uncle's romantic status, except to know he's not married and doesn't have kids. Uncle Tree met M when I was an adult, and they had such a nice, synchronized devotion to the same things -- including that mistrust of air conditioning -- that they always seemed to live in a sort of parallel universe where they did things the way they thought they should be and worried very little about what anybody else was doing.

As political of an animal as he was in some ways, it is tempting to find political meaning in the fact that Uncle Tree lived just long enough to see Lawrence v. Texas; to be told by the Supreme Court that he cannot be outlawed as a human being. I find myself needled by the fact that by the time the decision came down, he was taking so much morphine that he probably wasn't able to appreciate it. He would have been stunned, I think -- he was distrustful, really, of government, and probably wouldn't have expected Kennedy to speak of his right to dignity and privacy. But in the end, what I find myself thinking is that Uncle Tree makes Lawrence seem blissfully irrelevant. My mother tells me about M working on the preparations for the celebration of Uncle Tree's life that they recently held, and I can't help but think that judges are trivial and legalities frankly dwarfed by the fact of his life. I mean . . . as if the judgments of anyone will change anything. I would be lucky to die with Uncle Tree's claim to heaven.

I miss him, even though we didn't talk much. I miss knowing he's out there, doing his thing, sweating and belching and lecturing about trees. When he found out how sick he was, Uncle Tree talked to my dad about how he was feeling, and he said that although he would have liked to live longer, he had to admit that comparing the length of his life to the average lifespan of a human being on Earth, he had done pretty well. That was, in many ways, the core of Uncle Tree. Having traveled so much, both literally and figuratively, he couldn't really look at anything without seeing the whole world. Part of me reels at the fact that this made him an activist -- if I were really able to appreciate where I stand in the grand scheme of things, I worry that it would make me feel impossibly small and unimportant. For him, though, it seemed to make him determined to be . . . well, you can write your own blunt metaphor, I'm sure, about what would happen to forests without the integrity of the individual tree.

He asked that the people who loved him take "a moment to reflect" in honor of him after he died. This is my moment.