There’s nothing quite like having a fun Sunday morning after a sleepover at the tail-end of winter. Last weekend we had the twins over and they kept us busy all the way through Sunday. When they asked to stay for a little longer while their Dad had to pick up some wood, I couldn’t refuse. The photographs speak for themselves.
Like much of my family’s communication, the way my brother and I talk is largely fucked-up. In this instance, and many of the interactions with my brother, it’s more comical than anything else. I’m talking about when he was trying to explain the name of this car to me. Originally I think he said it was a Malibu, but then he switched jokingly to the ‘Malibooty’ so that’s what I’m calling it. It’s the same old nonsensical gab we have from time to time, like when we text about football. Anyway, here it is – the Malibooty – in all its green glory – with a backdrop of butter.
For my brother’s birthday we had dinner at my parents’ house in Amsterdam, NY, where the twins enjoyed an influx of Uncles. It’s always risky celebrating a birthday in the midst of February in upstate New York, but this year we escaped the usual winter storm that prevents us from joining in the festivities.
Emi and Noah are getting more and more interactive, and get to do pretty much what they want, so we were treated to some wild swings of singing and playing, running around and jumping, and just a little bit of actual eating of a birthday dinner. It’s much more fun to watch when you don’t have to worry about putting them to bed or raising them for the future. So we just watched and chuckled.
Here, Emi channels her inner Janis Joplin, even if there was little singing involved.
Noah played a monkey game with me and his Dad.
It’s all about the pose and the rock-star posture.
The birthday boy and father overseeing dinner and phone at the same time.
Doting Uncles.
I’m not quite sure how it began or who started it. It was a Saturday in winter, and neither of us had anything to do. I sat in my bedroom. Across the hall, my brother sat in his. Blind to what the other was doing, and behind our closed doors, we did what ten or eleven-year-old boys do: he probably marched plastic soldiers over his rust-colored carpet while I likely watered a plant on my windowsill and waited for it to grow. Though we often played together, on this particular Saturday we were doing our own thing. Somehow, though, in the way that only brothers realize, we were keenly aware of the other going about his business – and when one of us opened his door, he found a gift from his brother.
As I said, I don’t know who started it, but soon it was a bit of a game, and a rare bit of unabashed affection. I opened my door to find a wrapped piece of candy that he left. Out of the blue, and without reason or explanation. I rummaged through my room and found a toy, tip-toed across the hall and placed it outside his door. A few minutes later his hand crept out to retrieve it. Inside my room, I smiled and beamed, and felt one of the most pure feelings of love I’d ever experience. It was the love of giving, as much as the love one brother felt for another.
A little while later, I opened my door and there was another gift. The game went on for a few more rounds, as we scrounged for presents and tried to surprise the other without being heard. It’s a simple memory, but one of my favorites. I’m not sure my brother recalls it – I’ll have to ask him. It always reminds me that, when left to our own devices, we always fared rather well.
Today is his birthday, so I’m sending out this virtual wish for a happy day – and a happy memory that, up until this moment, only my brother and I shared.
When you sit next to my nephew Noah and Suzie’s son Milo at the dinner table, there’s a good chance you get to witness some pretty funny things. Such was Andy’s vantage point when he captured these photos on his new iPhone (yes folks, Andy is finally on the 21st century texting scene!) We gathered the crew to celebrate Mom’s birthday, and the pictures tell more funny stories than I ever could.
(Be sure to watch for the frightening shot in which Suzie unhinges her lower jaw to take a bite of some pasta. To be fair, I also included a photo in which my mouth was full too. Throwing shade on myself, look, I can do it.)
If you follow my ranting and raving on FaceBook or Twitter, you may have guessed that I had a rather awful Christmas. (Sample post: It will always marvel me how family can treat strangers with such complete grace, but not their own.) For the first time in my entire life I did not spend Christmas Eve with my family. In truth I haven’t felt at home there for years. Slowly that house has become less of a home to me, turning into some junkyard for the physical remnants of my brother’s broken marriage and a free-for-all for the questionable design he’s advanced for the once-elegant surroundings. Yet part of me still felt, or hoped, that there was some small part that did still belong to me, and to which I still belonged. When they took the last bit of space that I felt could be mine, a final bastion of safety and security in a world that never felt safe or secure for someone like me, I felt lost and unmoored. It may seem childish and stupid to hang onto something like a childhood bedroom, but think about it this way:
For someone who has never felt like he truly belonged, taking that one thing away – the last bit of proof that he lived there, that he mattered – is not a frivolous thing. For someone who’s always doubted his relevance in the family, and who has consistently made that known in self-destructive gestures overt and covert, there is something terribly diabolic about it – about erasing the first place he ever called home without giving him a chance to say goodbye. It’s careless at best, cruel at worst, and hurtful no matter how you want to paint it.
For those reasons, I couldn’t bring myself to go back there. Knowing that my old room would not be mine would have been too sad. I’m not ready for that yet. But if I learned one thing this Christmas it’s that new traditions must be started. We have to make our own families. We have to start again and start anew. That’s what the New Year is for, and after I mourned what I could not control, I felt the dawn of something else. Gratefulness. To my parents, for what they had given me. The silver lining and blessing of this new time, a feeling I’d never felt before: freedom. When the regret and the sadness and the hurt began to subside, I felt free.
I know what’s it like to be unwanted, to not be missed. I know the onerous obligation that people feel toward family – toward their own children sometimes – and I know that so much of what we as humans do is because it’s what we’re supposed to do. When you give that up, when you accept that there is a relief and an ease when you’re not there, it makes leaving that much easier. Better than that, it opens up a new world of opportunity, of freedom, of love.
The early part of my childhood was happy, and good, and it’s that which I’ll hold close to my heart. Hanging onto a bedroom at this stage of my life was stupid. It’s time for me to grow up. I see that now. The darkness which hovered over that house has lifted. My shadow goes with me.
I won’t go back.
A quick good-night quote from a very wise man on this Christmas Eve:
“There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.” – Winston S. Churchill
And sometimes, one must humbly add, destroyed.
“A few years ago I spent Christmas and New Years alone. No family. No friends. No gifts. A little tree with some lights on it. A small Christmas dinner (in a can). Far from home but with a lot of good memories of it. I didn’t feel too sad because I knew things would change for the better because I knew I would change them for the better. It was all up to me, not fate, or luck (although understand that those are big players in this game too). If I didn’t like where I was at that moment I couldn’t feel sorry myself and blame someone else, play the victim. I was the one who put myself there and I knew I was the one that had to change. So I did. See, misery is never very far away from us (it lurks around every dark corner) but neither is joy. You’ve got to roll with that black horse when it visits, ride that bitch out if you can but you’ve got to enjoy the hell out of the other too, when it chances to come your way. Above all, you’ve got to recognize joy when it shows up to dance with you and, sorry, that’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. You’ve got to fight tooth and nail in this life to try and be as happy as you can with the circumstances you’ve been given. You’ve got to fight with every inch of your being for that and grit your teeth and stick out your chin while you’re doing it too because although without a doubt it’s the right fight to be in, it’s going to be hard sometimes. So hard that maybe you’ll be blind to everything else. Along the way however, always remember one thing: even though there are people out there in the world who will take the heart right out of you…there are those who will put it right back in again (let them). Learn to recognize who they are because that’s something really worth knowing. But it’s up to you in the end. It’s up to you to embrace the wonders in this life and to deny the darkness (and there are plenty of both). Be strong, be brave, be kind, be noble and above all, slay your dragons and keep on moving. Don’t stop. And finally, even if happiness forgets you for a little while, never completely forget about it. It’s there waiting for the other to pass. Even in your darkest hour don’t ever doubt that for a second.” ~ Noel James Riggs
~ OR ~
“I’ll cast a spell that you can’t undo, til you wake up and you find that you love me too…” ~ Madonna
It wasn’t the presents on Christmas morning, or the magical anticipation of Christmas eve that I recall most when I think of Christmas – it was the ride to church. Yes, church. That obligatory rite of passage before any holiday, the bane of my childhood existence (I’ll tell a few altar boy horror stories later), and the only thing standing in the way of carefree enjoyment of any season. Yet on Christmas eve I didn’t mind it as much, mostly for the ride to and from mass.
We’d be together in the car – and it was so long ago that the music was produced not by CD or cassette tape but by an 8-track. On that evening we’d always listen to ‘O Holy Night’ – and sometimes we sang along.
I still remember some of the Christmas lights along the way – the elegant stars that studded the facade of Paul Tonko’s house, the traditional colored strand that wound its way around a wreath at the bottom of Northampton, and the splendor of an entire yard and manger scene on a particular house where Market Street met Romeyn.
Safe in our warm station wagon, with Dad at the wheel and Mom in the front seat, my brother and I peered out the windows at the lights along the way. Somehow I knew then what most adults had already forgotten – the true meaning of Christmas. It wasn’t the gifts, it wasn’t the Grinch, it wasn’t the hustle and bustle and excitement of the season. It was love, and peace, and a family that was still relatively unrocked by the world.
Merry Christmas, my friends.
Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home! ~ Charles Dickens
The question caught me off-guard, not just in its meaning, but in its delivery. I’d just had dinner with my family, but instead of driving straight to my home, I stopped at my parents’ place to pick something up. I had made it into the house before my family arrived, so I was standing in the kitchen when my nephew bounded in and found me there. Usually, I would have just driven home and not been in my parents’ place at that time, so he was unaccustomed to seeing me there.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, half-wonderingly, half-accusingly.
“I… I… well, I live… I used to live here. This is still…” and then I tapered off because either he lost interest or I lost the words to explain. It was a simple question, a harmless and meaningless question from the mouth of a four-year-old, and yet it meant so much more.
A few days later my Mom e-mailed me to tell me that they were going to set up a bunk bed in my childhood bedroom for the twins, trying as diplomatically as possible to explain that my room was going to be theirs. In truth, Andy had told me as much because she’d already told him. I’d braced myself for what it would make me feel, trying to work through whatever anguish or unreasonable sense of possession I felt over the room where I’d grown up (and in which, on the occasional night of difficulty, I still found solace and safety) before the actual news was delivered. Of course, you can’t practice for pain, especially when it’s delivered by your own family.
I realize that was foolish of me. Not just to feel so hurt by the action, but to even think I held any ownership or claim to a childhood bedroom. My mother explained that there was more history to that room than my time in it, and that, in her words, “It is the season for nostalgia but these are also times for passing the torch, so to speak, for new traditions and new directions.”
I felt foolish for feeling so hurt. She was right. My brother lives there. His children live there. My parents live there. The only family member who doesn’t live there is me. It’s only fitting that I should not have a room or place of my own in that house. In truth, I haven’t felt part of that home in years, and it’s as much my fault as anyone else’s.
Like my mother, I remember every incarnation that room went through as I grew up. I remember when I was old enough to ask for a change in the wall-paper – it had been a striped background with blue soldiers ever since I could remember – and in a last-ditch effort to win over my father I chose a new pattern of horses with a border of a horse race – hoping that his love of OTB and betting on horses would somehow translate to a new love of his first-born son. Following his lackluster reception, I think I gave up on trying to make him proud, or even trying to get him to like me in such blatant, pandering ways. (In his defense, I don’t think I was a very likable child.)
But before that, my parents had kissed me goodnight there. In the days before I grew into whatever it was that made people draw back, into whatever off-putting version of myself that kept love at bay, that made people hesitate and pause, I’d been loved – unconditionally, unquestionably, undeniably loved. That sort of love comes, if we’re lucky, once or twice in our lives – and, if we’re very lucky, it starts in childhood. That was what I remember most about that room – not the soldiers or the horses or the pattern of the air-duct grate – it was the love.
That’s why it was hard to let go. Part of me thought there was still some remnant of the boy that I was still inside me, still worthy of that kind of unconditional love. Part of me thought if I held on to that room, there would still be a chance to unlock that love again. But I was wrong.
It’s time for two other children to get that love. I hope they can hang onto it longer than I could.
My brother and I didn’t always get along. Just a year-and-a-half apart, we were probably too close in age to be much more than adversaries, and too far apart to be as tight as twins. For a while, in the dim dwindling days of my high school career, we barely spoke. In fairness to both of us, we were about as different as two brothers could be, so the fact that we didn’t actually kill each other is a Christmas miracle in itself.
Once I went away to college, however, the distance helped our relationship, and time healed the perceived hurts we each felt the other inflicted. On my first or second Christmas home from Brandeis, we somehow ended up volunteering to pick up the family Christmas tree, so we hopped in the Blazer and made our way to Bob’s Tree Farm way out in Galway.
The day was bright and brisk, the sky a vivid blue, and backed by a strong wind. We recalled our shared childhood memories of going to get the tree as little boys. There is only one other person in this word who knows exactly what it was like growing up in my house, and that’s my brother. That’s a bond that can never be broken. On that December day, I started to understand that.
We arrived at Bob’s and got out. The smell of freshly-cut pine, of Christmas, brought a smile to my face, and I think my brother felt it too. We walked around a bit, not wanting to rush the moment. He stood up a few trees and we examined them, coming to an agreement on a fair specimen. The wind was cutting, and we squinted in the falling sunlight. Somehow it got tied loosely to the top of the car, and we were back on the road.
My brother was driving, and as gusts of wind pummeled the car I looked in the rearview mirror to see the tree swinging wildly back and forth. Before I could say anything it rolled off the car completely and into a ditch by the side of the road. My brother’s shocked face, and the image of the tree growing distant in the background, made me laugh. A lot. He backed up and by the time we reached the tree I was hysterical. He kept saying it wasn’t funny, but I could see he was trying to keep from smiling.
I hadn’t laughed that much with him since we were kids.
We got the tree righted, and better-secured than before, and made it back home without further incident. To this day, the memory still makes me chuckle. It was the beginning of our way back to each other, and the start of several holiday traditions that we have managed to maintain over the years. As strange as it may sound, there’s no one else I’d rather have as a brother.
On this day of Thanksgiving, I’d like to give thanks to my family, especially the two little folks seen in this post – my niece and nephew. Emi and Noah are always a favorite part of this site, and we had them over last weekend for a Goonies sleepover. While we never got around to see ‘The Goonies’ (a good reason to do it all again), we managed to have other fun, like making pizzas with four other kids (and their parents, I’m not crazy).
As usual, it was the little moments that mattered, like when we made an impromptu airplane out of a piece of cardboard, to fly a collection of toys around the dining room. One of the things I admire most in children is their indefatigable imagination. It knows no bounds, and they are game for almost anything.
A pair of leopard-print pajamas is always right for a sleep-over.
The next morning the twins practiced walking in the shoes from my most recent sartorial cataclysm. There was a minor scuffle as they don’t like to share, but it all worked out in the end. Uncle Al does not tolerate those who don’t share. (It just hits too close to home.)
The morning after saw a breakfast of scrambled eggs, roasted potatoes, bacon and toast by the twins. Uncle Al loves a helper. As the day was nice, we donned our coats for a bit of stalking squirrels in the backyard.
Once again, the boundless imagination of children impressed me, as the kids devised ways of enticing and catching squirrels. It reminded me of the day that my favorite Uncle asked if my brother and I wanted him to catch a squirrel. “You can’t catch a squirrel!” I squealed back then. On this day, I was the Uncle, and the children were the believers.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
There is only one day of the year that this blog does not feature a written post, and it was yesterday. It’s been that way since the beginning, and it will always be that way, because as anyone who was alive on that seminal day will attest, it cannot be forgotten. Unfortunately for those whose birthdays fall on that date, birthday wishes and honors have to wait until today. That means my Dad’s birthday, now forever unforgettable, is always marked the day afterward. (And occasionally the day before.)
Luckily, Dad doesn’t so much mind, as he was never one to make a big deal about his birthday. In many ways, that’s a lot like how he goes through life. More than any other man I know, he has shown me what it’s like to put everyone other than himself first. Thankfully, that usually meant his family, but it also meant all of his patients and co-workers during his time as an anesthesiologist. That sort of service is what made him such a good doctor – and in many respects such a good Dad.
And so, a day later, but without further ado, a great big Happy Birthday wish to my Dad!
It’s not supposed to be, but summer is a busy time in these parts. Most of the business is fun, but it’s still a bit of work. Luckily we have some great people to make it all worth-while, like the family members you will find in this post. I don’t share a great deal of information about my family, but regular readers have come to know most of the key players. Here’s another glimpse at them.
It was as if it happened a few weeks ago, rather than a quarter of a century, but such is the way time and memory play tricks on the heart. We were sitting beneath a thorny hawthorne that has since been cut down. It stood outside the window of my childhood bedroom, and at the moment I’m recalling it was shedding its early summer blossoms. Petals of the purest white floated gently down like the first snowflakes of a winter storm.
My Uncle sat beside me, on the brick sidewalk in front of the house. We’d been wiring outside all day, and we paused for a slight break before getting cleaned up for dinner. He brought an ever-present cigarette to his mouth, and my brother and I watched as he flicked a bit of ash onto the mossy bricks, in dangerous proximity to his faded yellow flip-flops. A few needles of the yews he’d been pruning clung stubbornly to his shirt, and beads of perspiration lined his brow from the hot day. We looked to him for wisdom, for the lessons of life. He could teach us things that Mom and Dad could not. He knew the other side of the world.
Strangely, I do not remember the lesson of that particular moment, just the way he sat there, rather quietly contemplating the mid-point of a day. We watched him inhale, and then the cigarette was done. It was always over sooner than any of us wanted it to be.
I was reminded of that day when I saw photos of a recent family gathering – to which I wasn’t invited or informed (I’m sure I’m just being paranoid, and that it wasn’t intentional to leave me out, but one does wonder. Just kidding – of course my family loves me, they just don’t want me around. Kidding again! If we didn’t laugh we should cry.) In some ways, I’m the contemplative Uncle these days, minus the cigarettes and ratty flip-flops, but with the same pensive look in my eyes. Always somewhat outside, always somewhat apart, always somewhat alone.
