Buried in all the clicking I have demonically linked you to, there’s a part where I tell you that every year over chocolate milk I tell my kids a story about their Uncle Patrick, a man they’ve never met.

I will have trouble getting all the kids together for some Nestle’s tomorrow, so I’m going to tell you all this story now:

When he was a young man, Patrick would forget he was supposed to be part of a family. He’d get all absorbed in whatever he was doing (maps, usually) and neglect to call home and talk to us. Now, this was in the olden days, so we didn’t have things like cell phones and email and Twitter. If we’d had Twitter, we could have just sent out a tweet like, “Yo, dude. Call the bleep home, wouldja?” and he would have done it, because he wasn’t ignoring us, he was just making a map.

So it came to pass in the late Seventies/early Eighties, Mom called me at work and mentioned that she hadn’t heard from Patrick in a while. Of course, we knew where he *was*: at that very moment he was ensconced at the National Geographic headquarters in the middle of a map-making internship.

Even then, I was an intrepid soul, so I said goodbye to Mom and called information and got the number of the NG and just called ’em. I don’t know what I was thinking…you’d think that, after years of reading those things cover-to-cover, I would have remembered that the headquarters are something like an entire city block in downtown Washington, DC, with about a zillion people working for them.

It’s a good thing I didn’t remember that, because I wouldn’t have called, because it was impossible, and I wouldn’t have this story to tell.

So I get the operator at the National Geographic, and naive idiot that I am, I tell her I’m looking for my brother. No name, just ‘looking for my brother.’ What am I? Twelve? (I’m actually twenty years old, which is just embarrassing.)

But she’s very nice, and she asks what department this brother works in. Crap. I do not know this. “Um, I’m not sure. He’s making maps?” I supply, trying to be helpful, forgetting that there are legions of cartographers slaving away in the bowels of that building even as we spoke. I mean, maps are what the National Geographic is all about, along with providing pictures of naked people so American kids can learn about sex.

Helpful Operator Lady is trying, but her tools are limited. At this point, we are still years away from computerized directories; for all I know, she was twiddling a real paper Rolodex to find people’s names. About seventeen hundred names, to be precise. And he’s an intern, to boot. She tells me that interns don’t make it into her Pile Of Names, as they’re not official employees.

I sigh. “Oh, dear. Well, his name is Patrick Stocking and….”

She interrupts. “PATRICK STOCKING? I know him!!!”

And before she connects me, she tells me that Patrick makes a point of stopping and having a kind word with her every day on his way in. She doesn’t know the name of most anyone in that giant building, but she knows the name of the well-meaning, geeky kid who is no doubt showing up every day in a jacket and tie and saying hello to the person everyone else is ignoring.

So she happily connects me, bubbling all the while about WHAT A GREAT PERSON PATRICK STOCKING IS, and he answers the phone and I say, “Yo, dude. Call the bleep home, wouldja?”

And he does. Because that’s the kind of person he was, and still is.

Because I’ll never forget.

© E. Stocking Evans