While waiting in line at the postoffice, she thought of her Uncle Hughie, for the first time in a long time. When she was young, her Uncle Hughie had been a millionaire several times, that is, he had made and lost a million dollars several times in oil. He lived in Denver and flew a small plane to their family reunions. When she saw him at weddings and funerals, he wore leather boots, a wool sportcoat and a bolo tie the size of a doorknob, encrusted with pink and mint green leaves of Black Hills gold.
Uncle Hughie, the first awake and last to bed, was a large man who told long and funny stories about her grandparents' generation, during which he stopped numerous times to wipe tears from his eyes. When she was older and diagnosed as “obese” by a doctor, she understood why large people sometimes told long and funny stories to make people laugh.
While she waited in line at the post office to mail her taxes, she remembered her Uncle Hughie mostly for his generosity. He followed the Broncos religiously, and when the team finally played in a Super Bowl, he paid for a dozen family members to fly to Pasadena and watch the game from a skybox he rented. With the last million dollars he had before filing for bankruptcy, he bought from his investors their worthless shares of an oil well in West Texas that had come up dry.
She glanced down at her envelope; inside was a check for over $1,500, money she owed in taxes despite Bush’s series of “tax cuts.” She thought about the president and the shady consortium of his father’s wealthy friends who had kept his sinking Harken oil company afloat; how he had dumped his own stock illegally and made himself a million dollars.
She looked at the people in line with her: secretaries, firemen, messengers,
waitresses, and she realized, not for the first time but clearly, fully,
that some people made their money while others bought it. She turned and
left the postoffice, ripping her envelope, and threw the mess of paper in
a trash can.