My uncle Sammy was an angry man. He had printed on his tombstone: What are you looking at?

The line sketches a character through a darkly comic epitaph: even in death, “uncle Sammy” confronts the living with suspicion and hostility. The tombstone inscription turns a grave marker—normally a site of reverence, remembrance, or consolation—into an extension of the man’s temperament, implying that anger has become his defining legacy. The blunt question “What are you looking at?” also implicates the observer: it breaks the expected one-way gaze of the living looking at the dead, reversing it into a challenge. As a miniature anecdote, it suggests how family stories compress personality into a single, memorable detail that is both affectionate and critical.