(seagulls cawing) - Are you sad, Uncle Avery?

- Maybe?

Yes.

- Do you wanna hear a rhyme?

- No, Jojo.

I want to tell a story.

A story the whole world will hear.

One that they'll remember forever.

- Nobody cares about stories from old people, Uncle.

(Avery chuckles) - Who told you that?

- You did when I was five.

And you weren't old yet?

- I did.

- Uh-huh.

At the reception lunch after grandmother's funeral.

Great Auntie Celia was telling me a story from her childhood with grandmother.

And you took me aside and said I didn't have to listen to her because she was old.

In fact, you said I shouldn't listen to her because she was old.

- I said that?

- Yes.

And when I said I didn't wanna hurt her feelings, you said, go ahead and hurt.

It doesn't hurt if you can't remember the pain.

- I'm a terrible person.

- Yeah.

Well you'll get over that.

- Did I say that too?

- Oh yes.

- How do you remember this?

It was eight years ago.

You were five.

- Which means I wasn't old.

Maybe you are now.

- Old enough now to at least see her wisdom.

- Wisdom is a phony construct.

It's just a fake plea for attention from men who are too old to get noticed by women anymore.

- I said that too?

- Mom said not to listen to you.

- You told your mother?

- She didn't seem that surprised.

Although she said you should have been nicer to great Auntie Celia.

- Well, she's dead now.

- Yes, and so are her last two sisters.

Great Auntie Paula and Great Auntie Misha.

They were all sitting together at the lunch.

- They're all gone.

So kind and so wise.

- You called them the Bats Girl Trio.

- How do I remember nothing of this?

- You'd had a few gummies, I think.

- Oh God.

- Can we rhyme now?

- Oh, Jojo, I'm lost.

I'm old.

I'm drifting.

How did this happen?

- A man went in a tumbled wood and found the wolves he once frequented on the ground, writhing and toothless and knuckled by time.

They're trapped in a hole they could not out climb.

Shocked and alone, the man asked with no weight, "What crime have you done to merit this fate?"

"None but forgetting."

said the wolves with no claws.

That whatever now is soon will be was.

- You made that up just now?

- I did.

- Well, it doesn't make me feel any better.

- What are you looking for, Uncle?

- Permanence, refuge and something that lasts.

An anchor so I don't float away.

Mocked and forgotten like the sisters.

- The uncle from Tampa felt bad about grandma, for in his youth swimming he'd missed the advice that never can you step in the same river twice.

- What if... I'll do penance.

I'll tell her story, to write how I wronged her.

Tell it to me.

The story she told you from her childhood.

- It's gone.

You took me away before she could finish it.

- How did I do that?

- You said it was time for my insulin.

- What, but you're not diabetic.

- No.

- Did you even know what insulin was?

- Not really.

But you said it was a new kind of candy.

So I left.

- Oh, the gods must hate me.

- You are always very clever.

- Clever is less than human.

I am a mud crawler.

- The uncle from Tampa was persona non grata, now and always the good Floridian, off to find as inner amphibian.

- I've built nothing that won't be washed away.

Is there no anchor to keep me in place?

- Pitching downstream like a rogue salamander, uncle cried to the gods to throw him an anchor.

Zeus was slow to get up, saying, "Who is this chump?"

And sent down a red canyon lump, a slag heap sized lump.

Here is thy anchor, mug lump, thump.

- So am I just hanging by a sliver?

- No, you are at the bottom of the river.

- Then where do I go, Jojo?

- Maybe move to Orlando.

- I am awful in all places.

- Like star crossed shoe laces.

- Maybe we could write a poem together.

You could help me.

Something huge and epic like Dante or Homer, something that lasts.

- An uncle, old and feeling bad set out to write the "Iliad" and meter brim with bigness bold, where impact grows a thousand fold.

But went to Walmart to buy supplies.

There was no papyrus of any size.

- I thought you believed in poetry, Jojo.

- I only write rhymes, uncle.

- Because things make more sense when they sound the same.

- No, that's not what rhymes are for.

- For what then?

Why write something that doesn't last?

Why build anything that will just fall down?

A story, a poem, a book, a temple.

Something must be forever.

- Why do you believe that?

- Because that's the one part of the puzzle that needs to be true.

- And if it isn't?

- Then there's no solution to the great mystery.

The stories we tell all disappear.

There's nothing left that lasts.

- Maybe that's the one part of the puzzle that is true.

- There is no permanence?

- No uncle.

- I will find no anchor?

- You will not.

- But how does anyone face the blitz of such a truth?

- That's what the rhymes are for, Uncle.

(gentle music) - To sell the horizon before the sunsets.

- Uncle builds a raft with all his regrets.

- Of logs and wire and brutish mechanics.

- An ode to the laws of thermodynamics.

- Every push and paddle, preordained, futile.

- Orphaned by the sea, so often brutal.

- He looks to west, were hope and doom collide.

- And steers this, his boat, a fleet against the tide.

- I feel... better.

- At a boy.

(dog barking) (dog howling) - Some days it all makes sense, doesn't it, Jojo?

- Some days, yes.

Some days less.

(dog howling) (gentle music)