Wishes

I was six years old in 1986 when Haley’s Comet passed over Palo Alto. It came overhead at about 4:00 in the morning, and I was there watching it, atop one of the Stanford hills near Highway 280, with my father.

My father had woken me, had driven us through the early morning March frost, and had climbed with me to the top of the tallest hill we could find, away from noise and light pollution, next to a single barren oak that I can still for some reason vividly remember.

We stood there, and we watched Haley’s inch along overhead, and my father told me that Haley’s wouldn’t come around for another 75 years, that he wouldn’t be alive to see it, but that he had brought me out that early morning so that I might, at age 81 or 82, be one of those few people lucky enough to see it twice in their lives.

I think of that morning sometimes, and it makes me think of all the selfless, wonderful, giving things my father did while my brother and I were growing up, and that he still does today.

So, each July 14th, on his birthday, I hope that at least some small measure of all that giving turns back his way, and that he gets exactly the day and the toys and the fun and the love and the adventure that he’s hoping for.

So, to my father:

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
You look like a monkey,
No, seriously, you look like a monkey, especially given the ridiculous amount of body hair you have.

xoxo

j

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Fraternite

Today, my brother David turns twenty-five.

To him I say: enjoy it while you can, as this is the last ‘good’ birthday (reduced car rental prices!) until senior discounts kick in at sixty-five.

So, basically, nothing to look forward to now except for the long, slow slide into middle age.

Happy birthday, assmat!

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Meet the Parents

Far and away, Thanksgiving is the most important day of the year. Or so it would seem from the weight placed upon the holiday by my mother. Skip heading home to California for nearly any other event, and she won’t bat an eye. But my brother or I miss Thanksgiving dinner? That’s a hanging offense.

So, per usual, I’m off to San Francisco to eat turkey. This year, however, I’m dragging Jess in tow. Because while I’ve met her parents a few times (due to their proximity in nearer Boston), she’s yet to meet mine.

I’ve gone back and forth between thinking that this week is a wonderful or a terrible time for that first meet-up, unsure whether the collective preparatory push of cooking and cleaning and table-setting will give us something to focus on other than the inherent weird awkwardness, or simply leave everyone even further on stressed-out edge, compounding the mess of it all.

Whichever it is, however, we land in SFO in about an hour; it seems I’ll soon find out.

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Not as Dumb as I Thought

Congratulations to my brother, who this afternoon hooked a high-level position at a boutique real estate development company that will now be paying him far better than I pay myself.

I’m taking him out for a celebratory dinner. And then putting it on his tab.

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To the Pain

One big disadvantage of having my younger brother here in New York is that we often work out together. Which, in some ways, is an advantage – working out with someone else always being more fun than working out alone. The problems set in when we start competing with each other. Because, after twenty-some years of practice, the two of us have honed to an art the act of pushing far more than we sanely should, just to edge the other out.

This was made particularly clear yesterday, when the CrossFit Workout of the Day called for maximum weight deadlift attempts. [A deadlift, for those not familiar, essentially involves picking a weighted barbell up off the ground, then putting it back down again. Cf.]

So, we started with the bar and a 45 pound plate on either side, and proceeded to pile on additional weight after each attempt. There’s a point somewhere after adding two such forty-five pound plates on each side that, as you stand up, the metal barbell visibly bends. And, it was about at that point that other people nearby began to stop their own workouts, gathering to watch us go back and forth, back and forth, each time adding more and more weight to the bar.

In the end, as he does about half the time these days, my brother edged me out, though not before we had well crossed the 300 pound mark. But, today, we’re both the losers. I, for example, am typing this standing, because my legs are far too sore for me to lower myself into the chair.

They say love hurts; apparently, that’s doubly true for the brotherly sort.

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Macaroni

When I was growing up, I loved macaroni and cheese. But, for some reason, I believed the dish was best served for breakfast. The strange preference passed to my younger brother as well, and on most weekends, he and I would put in a request for macaroni brunch.

Complicating matters further, however, I liked Kraft’s Deluxe, which featured a large packet of congealed Velveeta, while my brother remained partial to Kraft Dinner and its powdery (even once cooked) orange ‘cheese’.

So, in an act of kindness and child-humoring that astounds me even to this day, my father (official school lunch and breakfast preparer of our family) would brew up two parallel pots, one of each, for my brother and me.

I think of this each Fathers’ Day, and of the countless other big and small wonderful things my father Andrew did (and still does) for us, and realize that, as far as dads go, my brother and I got it really, really, remarkably good.

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A Matter of Degree

I’m in Denver at the moment, having come in to town to watch my brother graduate from business school – an event that, officially, makes me the least educated member of my family.

The graduation ceremony itself, on top of the usual array of addresses and pontifications, involved every single graduating graduate student’s name being announced, as they headed up to shake the Chancellor’s hand and receive their diploma.

This was, in short, not a fast process. So, several hours in, to entertain myself, I scawled out a bit of poetry on the back of my program:

Commencement
[A triplet, in haiku verse]

I.
Pomp and circumstance
book-end a mind-numbing line
of young graduates

II.
A sea of black robes
undifferentiated
they flow across stage

III.
I sit in the crowd
ready to stab out my eye
with a dull pencil

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Archived

This weekend, my Great Aunt Gertrude passed away. I was fortunate enough to see her several times a year when I was growing up, and saw her even more frequently since I moved to New York.

Gertrude was the kind of woman who you’d bring a box of cookies, yet return home from still holding that box and ladened down with several more.

She was the kind of woman who would visit the Met, look at a Picasso or a Renoir for a few seconds, and, if it didn’t strike her fancy, shrug and say, “it’s nice enough, I guess, but I don’t really care for it.”

And, mostly, she was the kind of woman who told stories. Excellent stories. Especially with her younger sister, my grandmother, the two would regale my brother and I with tales of growing up in New York City, disagreeing with and correcting each other, talking over one another to add commentary and fill in the blanks.

I realized this weekend that, with her death, many of those stories have disappeared. So, this week, in partnership with my father, I’ve stocked up on condenser mics, mixing boards, and the array of other equipment needed for professional quality audio recording.

Armed with it all, I’m setting out to record the stories of my extended family – how they met their spouses and what holidays were like in their homes when they were growing up. Funny things their children did while they were young and bits of wisdom their parents passed along.

As of yet, I don’t have a grand plan for what to do with all of those stories once they’re recorded. At the moment, I’m simply collecting them, trying to lock them down, taking comfort in that permanence achieved in the shift from ephemeral sound waves to preservable backed-up bits.

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