My brother’s birthday is Sunday. He would be 48 but has been gone almost three years.
Another guy of ‘75, my friend Lonnie Romero, died last month in Chicago.
Both men, two years younger than me, broke down and died before 50. I eulogized them and carry them with me, mark the memories, stoke the little furnace where those memories glow and coax the graying coals that fade with time, as some have with Timothy McNeil and as others will with Lonnie.
Tim and I lived at 11501 S. 86th Avenue in Palos Park as kids and our phone number was 448-6411. Our mother’s birthday was April 24, our dad’s was August 31. Our Boy Scout Troop was 699. These facts were for decades numerologically significant to me, and Tim, and mom and dad, even after they split. The family reservoir of computer passwords, ATM PINs and lock combinations.
So many other demarkers – a cat named Mustard; mom’s silver Omega; the word “Radarange;” and the old oak tree in Palos under whose canopy dad lost his virginity, an event he PG-13 bragged about during Scouts, and where many years later we scattered some of his ashes.
What do these things mean today outside my own head?
To speak of them at all, as I do here, is to describe last night’s dream to my wife as she concentratedly stirs her Mini Wheats.
Mmm-hmm?
Old keystone artifacts now just junk drawer stuff.
I kept some of Tim’s books. Lonnie’s partner is keeping a sentimental motor scooter.
Both men died childless and both left what the tax collectors of Illinois and Indiana call “small estates.” Tim worked in a grocery store. Lonnie ran a spice shop. Both had other interests. Neither would ask you what you did at a party.
I don’t want to make them sound too alike. Lonnie was a great, jocose city guy. Tim was a true suburban indoorsman and really very shy.
Lonnie pursued his dreams and Tim did not.
But both exited, despite the tragedy of such early deaths, with a kind of admirable discretion – small waves, no wills, no lawyers, no feuding heirs. Their spirits passed back into the mists, cremation society obituaries Googleable for those who know the names.
XXX
We endure a lot of nonsense. You lose someone who matters in your life, this becomes more evident. Very few people know what they are talking about and it’s hard to even listen.
The earth spins in an airless universe. Maybe that matters and maybe it doesn’t. People believe what they want to believe.
XXX
I believe the water helps, especially in a canoe, on any quiet bankside but best along a no-motor lake. In a pinch, Baugo Creek will do.
So the three of us, wife and son and me, tucked our boat into a shade patch south of the bay on a sunny Sunday morning, the water still numbing, and watched a Baltimore Oriole work a tree top perch.
The boy stood up, rocking the boat a bit but his balance was good.
“Like Daniel-san,” his mom said. “From The Karate Kid!”
We have never watched this movie as a family but somehow it came up and my son and I have since many times seen on YouTube the climactic fight scene and the famous Cobra Kai ringside enjoinder.
“Say it, daddy.”
It was just us and the breeze.
I said, “Put him in a body bag!”
To peals of child laughter.
“Say it again!”
The boy lost in joy – a silly family joke, the imbecile eighties-ness of the words – his face like his uncle’s when he used to laugh that hard at that line.
Music: "Dress You Up" by Madonna
