Another old man, a tall one leaning on a cane, with Daniel’s bright blue eyes and straight nose, comes into the picture. This is Uncle… Frank, and he must be a great-uncle if he’s that old. Why he isn’t a grampa, I don’t know.
I do know that Frank is a retired GM man. I don’t think he’s a millionaire, so he wasn’t a top manager, but he’s well enough off that he had planned to spend his retirement years traveling the world with his wife.
He must be something like an engineer. The problem is, I know a car engineer, and all he wants to talk about is car stuff, which I couldn’t care less about and have no intention of researching, for the same reason. Obviously, if Frank was an engineer, he’d want to talk about cars, so I think I’m just going to leave it very open as to what he did.
Anyway, his wife dies before they can get much traveling in, and he’s majorly depressed and lost without her for several months. I think it’s his brother who suggests that Frank visit the town where they grew up. It is much different now, of course. The house where they lived had been torn down and was now a mall.
This too sort of depressed him, but he found the old pharmacy, now a greasy spoon restaurant, where he got his first job. There he finds our old man with the tattered sweater, savoring tomato soup and asking the waitress for more crackers, not because he wants more, but because he’s still hungry and can’t afford more.
Frank is a kind hearted man, and offers to buy this man his lunch. In the course of their conversation, he finds out that “Burt” is a retired doctor, and his very first case in this town had been saving Frank’s sister’s life.
Frank eventually decides to buy the dilapidated trailer park where Burt lives when he finds that many other residents are in Burt’s situation, or worse, and the owner is heartless. And thus, Frank finds his joy.
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