I learned this morning that my Uncle Dean died yesterday. I'm writing this with News of the World playing, which will make sense in a minute.

We were poor when I was growing up. Not in a way I understood as a child to be a hardship, exactly, but in a way I understood as the texture of things, the absence of extras, the math always being done somewhere above my head. And then there was my grandmother's house, where I'd stay for weeks at a stretch over the summer. Her house ran on a different economy entirely. There were snacks to be had. There were toys to be bought. It was a respite, and I knew it even then.

Dean still lived at home for part of those years, and for whatever reason he took a real liking to me. He was a crane operator. I was a boy with a natural, consuming interest in construction equipment, the kind of interest that doesn't need a reason, and Dean didn't just tolerate it. He shared in it. He got the joy of it. He bought me cranes. He bought me an Armatron, that 80s robot arm you controlled with two joysticks like you were running a real machine, like you were him. Looking back, I think that was the point. He was handing me a small version of his own working life and letting me play at it, and he was glad to.

When Dean left for Florida, he left some things behind at my grandmother's: a collection of 8-tracks and records. Among them was Queen's News of the World. That album was my first real exposure to music as my own thing, not background, not the radio in someone else's car, but something I sat down beside and chose. I'd put on his headphones, the ones with the curly cord, and sit next to the 8-track player, and listen. I don't think Dean knew he'd given me that. He'd just moved away and left a box behind. But it was one of the realest gifts I ever got from anyone, and he had no idea.

The last time I saw him was years later, when my grandmother, his mother, died. Danielle and I were there, with our first daughter, Anna, still small. We stayed at the local hotel in Uniontown along with a scattering of cousins, and Dean, all of us in our separate rooms for those few days. We made a run to one of the Uniontown drive-thru beer places, and Dean was genuinely, openly excited to have his first beer with me. It was Guinness Extra Stout. I remember that clearly. And that was it. That was the close of our interactions. A Guinness in a Uniontown hotel after his mother's funeral.

I don't have the impression that Dean lived a very full life. He didn't seem to make out well in the relationship space, two women that I know of, one of whom swindled him and my grandfather out of money. His health failed him in his later years, chronic problems that turned him into something of a shut-in. If you laid his life out on paper and added up the columns, I don't think the total would look like much to a stranger.

But I'm not a stranger, and I don't have a theological lesson to draw out of this. I just have this: I was happy to know him. He held a special space in my life, a crane operator who saw a poor kid light up at the sight of a backhoe and decided that was worth something. He gave me cranes. He gave me Queen without meaning to. He was thrilled to split a stout with me one time, once, and then never again.

That counts. I'm playing his record right now, and it counts.

Rest easy, Dean.