The Garden of Stories: Family Ties and Telling Tales

My short story "Uncles" is currently up on the lively, irreverent online journal "Unlikely Stories," edited by Jonathan Penton. Although a fantasy, the story takes off from the penny ante poker games my family used to have in the back room of my parents' house on Long Island. 
          While the story is a fantasy, it's also a homage to an older generation of my family that is all gone now -- to the poker-playing men of that family at least. 
           The setting is the penny ante poker games that took place either before or after, or sometimes both, "dinner," whenever that meal took place, whether it was a holiday gathering, or just a family gathering with no particular theme or reason. When the gathering took place at 54 Downs Road in Hempstead, the suburban town on Long Island that my parents bought with the help of a postwar GI loan -- a government program. Yes, the federal government used to help ordinary families buy their own homes. What an idea. 
          What makes this experience special is that families, siblings, even extended families, often lived reasonably close to one another. That doesn't happen so routinely any more, and I was the first in my generation to break away. So I have no basis for complaint today that my children live in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
           But back in the time I am writing about, both my mother's and my father's siblings lived and raised families in suburban Nassau County towns. My mother's mother and her elder brother Mark lived together in Queens County in the house where my parents were also living when I was born. They had a longer drive to the family gatherings in Hempstead, but it wasn't terribly long siblings -- and, a further inducement, Mark was the prime mover in getting the poker games going. He would walk around restlessly shuffling a deck of cards. 
            "Sit down, Mark," my Uncle Eric would tell him, "you're making me nervous. We'll play later."
             And we always did. 
             If my father's brothers were attending the same family party, they were likely to play as well. 
              This was how I got to know my uncles, in so far as I did. 
              As mentioned above, I have fantasized some circumstances here, and imagined how each of my uncles seated around this fictional table might respond. 
               Please take a look at my story "Uncles."
               Here's the link  
https://www.unlikelystories.org/content/uncles