Raymond, among the many middle-class families in our extended neighborhood, was very poor indeed. One look at the disheveled exterior of his house, crying out for the touch of a paint brush and a weed whacker, and you could see that not only was there little cash flow but an assumed degree of neglect.

How would I know this? Did I ever go in his house? No. Did I ever meet his parents? No. Did I even know if he lived with his parents? No. But then I didn’t have to because Raymond carried the ‘air’ of neglect on his person each and every day he came to school.

I knew him from Kindergarten on and was alternatively repelled by the constant body odor and dental disaster and sorry that he had, apparently, no one to guide him in a better direction, making sure he had clean clothes to go to school in. To make matters even stranger, Raymond was like a 40 year old in a 12 year old body, having facial stubble that none of us were to have for many years to come. Combine that with greasy, unwashed hair and you could see why Raymond was socially marginalized.

Even so, I tried to see what was at the heart of every kid, not just their immediate grooming habits or lack of. So I tried to hang out with him a little bit, doing the nothing that we would often do. We had some whackadoodle idea that we could build a rocket out of these large cylinders we’d found but, of course, that was an immediate dead end when it became obvious there was no way to power the rocket and even if we could find an engine lying around we wouldn’t know what to do with it. So the cylinders stayed cylinders and, outside of a brief fist fight near our lilac bushes, Raymond and I didn’t spend too much more quality time together.

But for about a week in 1964, Raymond became the guy to know as we hit 8th grade and hormonal chaos. Getting a glimpse of the female anatomy was of interest to a lot of the guys and most of us still hadn’t seen the real deal so there was much false boasting and wild conjecture as to what was what and what went where, little of it probably accurate. Then Raymond came to school with clear documentation to put the rumors to rest and pretty much flaunted his prize possession.

Raymond had a Playboy Magazine centerfold carefully folded and stuffed in his jeans and at some point during social studies I caught wind of this revelation and immediately worked at getting on Raymond’s good side so I could have a look. This meant I was going to have to do a major ’suck up’ since the last time we’d hung out I was punching him in the head in my backyard. Fortunately, I’ve never been one who loses sight of the greater cause and so, by the end of the school day, I ‘borrowed’ the centerfold.

At the time, to a 13 year old boy, this was like winning the lottery and I carried it with great reverence because this was the anatomical tutorial I’d waited for and my hormones were already having a hoedown in my pants at the prospects of checking this thing out. I’d had no real sex education, either in school or the lame attempt by my dad to explain the phenomena, so this was going to have to suffice and I’d fill in the blanks as I went along.

For some, mostly women, this will sound like a simple prurient interest but for those of my kind, it was a seminal moment that I shall remember in the same way as the Kennedy assassination or 9/11. I’ll always have the day, the centerfold, the excitement, carefully etched into my memory.

Too many years have passed and most of those newly-minted hormones have set sail for more youthful harbor, but on that day Raymond delivered the pictorial proof of all we’d imagined and the party was on…

When I was growing up in the ’50’s and ’60’s, environmental concerns weren’t on the average person’s radar and, in fact, Rachel Carlson’s ground breaking 1962 book, Silent Spring, was the only serious look at pollution and was primarily concerned with the use of poisonous chemicals, dispersed in the ground water supply.

So, when the fall leaves dropped to the ground by the bushel, we raked them up on the curbside into a tidy mound and set them on fire; a blazing heap that chucked out smoke like a runaway barbecue pit. Oddly, the expected acrid cloud was rather pleasant, with an aroma similar to a campfire.

Multiply that single act with designated leaf burning days and you had what amounted to a neighborhood bonfire with nearly every curbside contributing to the fog that spread across the adjacent streets and filled the air with the unmistakable smell of fall.

It’s the smell that, in the sensory memory of those who experienced it, will always be associated with the season. Leaf burning was something that brought neighbors outside to talk and kibitz with one another; a giant social event with a 5-alarm ambiance and a role for everyone to play.

Children did a lot of the raking, if for nothing else than the payoff of diving headfirst into the pile, so it was a chore of joy that was so good we had to do it repeatedly because our leafy playground would end up spread far and wide as if we’d never raked in the first place. At some juncture, the adults took over the operation and the fires commenced. Leaf herders with a constant watch over their fallen flock had to make sure the fire stayed within the confines of reasonable although me and most of my little pyromaniac friends were just prodding the herders into bigger and brighter blazes.

Before there were multiple electronic distractions to dumb down social events for kids, sanctioned fun with fire and smoke was something to look forward to. It plays into every irresistible urge kids have to control the potentially uncontrollable, so what could be better than an entire neighborhood flickering at dusk?

“Hey kids, let’s go outside and play with matches!!”

We weren’t even content with our own fires so we made the ‘flammable tour’, roaming the rest of the neighborhood to check out the fires of our buddies on other streets.

Now, to be honest, this wasn’t a risk-free activity because there was the outside chance that a pant leg might catch on fire or somebody’s house was a little too downwind but those were acceptable hazards to be dealt with if necessary. In practice, the only regular danger we encountered was leaping into the pre-burned pile only to discover some kid-maiming surprise, like a rake or other mystery object.  But that’s part of the charm of the unknown and if you were going to get squeamish about a rock in the side of the ribs or a ground steak upside the head, then leaf pile jumping wasn’t for you. We really didn’t weigh the negatives of inhaling tons of toxic fumes because, well, we just didn’t because we were as oblivious as the 1950’s sometimes were. If you didn’t consider the disasterous effects of 3 packs of Lucky Strikes a day then you were hardly phased by pile of burning leaves.

At its peak, the haze just hung in the trees, like one of those World War II movie battlefields covered with artillery smoke. It completely changed the character of the neighborhood and made it, in an odd way, sort of an exotic getaway. I always loved it when the familiarity of home morphed into something else, whether it was 10 feet of snow, an ominous sky before a tornado or, as in this case, scads of little bonfires.

For environmental and safety reasons, nearly all cities have put a stop to that kind of thing and now you see the leaves raked and stuffed in those biodegradable paper bags, lined up neatly on the curb, waiting for trucks to pick them up.

It’s probably a good thing we didn’t have those back then because I’m sure we would have set the bags on fire too. Sorry, Smokey.

My step-dad (father #3 if you’re counting) has been in my life since 1972 and when I dare to count the years, which I often don’t, it adds up to a majority of my adult life.

On Sunday morning, May 24th, 2009, he passed away due to cancerous complications.

From the moment I met Bob I wondered if the word ‘gregarious’ were too meager a term to describe this guy. His personality lit up like a neon Vegas sign; open for business 24/7. How could he keep the energy flowing like that? And yet, he was clearly feeding off of the same electricity he was expending. He was like one of those self-winding watches that sustains itself off of simple motion.

His entire working life, he was a master salesman, entrepreneur and idea-man with an unstoppable enthusiasm for people and an insatiable appetite for the joy in life. Bob wasn’t just a salesman because if he were only interested in raw profit margin he would’ve had only moderate success. He was never selling just a product but an idea as to why you needed the product and why you needed him and how he could actually help you in some tangible way.

He researched and understood his clients and suggested innovations for their products (many of which became the practical property of his employers because of contract) and he made a personal connection with his clients that endeared them to him for the whole of his working life and beyond. Businesses that routinely dodged salesmen, looked forward to spending time with my dad because he was genuinely interested in them and they sensed his earnestness. He wasn’t just a smart and clever salesman, he was someone you ended up trusting and caring about…a collaborator, an ally, a friend.

Selling was what Bob did for a living but, in a larger sense, it was just Bob being happy being Bob, putting himself out there because he loved the interaction. He relished the chance for his cleverness to convince your common sense that he was acting in your best interest as well as his own. This is, perhaps, where his salesmanship took a definite turn from the commonplace.

Bob often blurred the lines between business and friendship because he liked people. He was ecstatic to know you and when you were with him, you were the focus of his attention…you were special. That is, unless you were a transparent schmuck, and then he had a course of action for that as well, because under that gracious exterior, Bob was a very shrewd person and as genuine as he was with his friends, was how conversely cunning he was with folks he didn’t care for.

That larger-than-life persona was his ultimate strength (and legacy) but it was also his biggest weakness. Like two sides of the same coin, his constant quest for joy, success and satiation also left him, on the flip side, somewhat ill-equipped for the more negative personal challenges in life. Dealing with sticky family problems, in particular, seemed a chore that he needed to hand off to my mother. He probably didn’t quite look at it that way but that is how I saw their roles playing out from the earliest days.

He didn’t defer these family problems for lack of insight or critical thought, which he had an abundance of; it seemed to be the sheer drudgery of having to tackle discomfort. I think his inability to tend to some of these things was an anomaly in his character for which there seemed no other answer than his wiring just didn’t work that way. He wasn’t superficial or cruel. He just simply didn’t understand how to cope with untidy parts of life and found it necessary to channel all his unbridled enthusiasm to where he could get the best bang for the buck. I found it occasionally unsightly but we’ve all got holes, so…

To me, he was kind and generous in ways that I never had from a father when I was younger and, in that sense, I was fortunate to have him in my corner even though my lack of paternal parenting in the developmental years left me ill-equipped to know what to do with his attention. Nevertheless, I worked some of that out as we both got older.

That final week in the hospital, a day before a kidney biopsy would go all wrong, I sat in his room with my mother while he downed a bowl of ice cream. Bob was a dedicated eater and we all needed to get out of the way while the operation was underway. But it was strange this time because, as he made waste to that dessert, he looked straight at me in a way that forced me to lock in on his eyes. At that moment I knew that this wasn’t going to play out well, and it’s as if he were concentrating on this ice cream because it might be the last bowl.

It was. The next day internal bleeding from the biopsy sent him into an unrecoverable tailspin. Even though doctors stopped the bleeding, the damage was done. Already on the precipice, with an incurable  cancer he had been on the run from for longer than most survivors make it, Bob settled into a world that steadily, throughout the week, receded from ours.

My mother asked me if I thought that he’d go home eventually and I couldn’t bring myself to deny what I was sure was the truth. “No, Mom,” I told her, “I don’t think he’s ever coming home.” I suspect that she knew the truth of the matter herself but everything happened so quickly that we were all unprepared for the course of events.

Bob was, as the saying goes, a bull in a China shop; unaware of food dribbling down his shirt or the ear-splitting volume of a voice that had the potential to make dogs howl. I’ll say this, it got your attention and there was no mistaking who was in the room: “HI, SON!!!”, he’d roar as if he hadn’t seen me in 30 years.

None of us escapes this world without our flaws and weaknesses, and Bob wasn’t without his, but people passionately loved him and he loved them in return, often stopping to cajole, council or commiserate and, if his memorial was any indication, he touched a whole hell of a lot of people.

Occasionally I found him a little too self-indulgent, but then he’d turn right around and give you the most generous part of himself. I think he used self-indulgence like a blunt weapon against boredom and sadness, and a host of other life-wrenching moments; that loud, boisterous voice, knocking down misery like a row of tumbling dominoes.

There are days I wish I could do that…it sure worked for him.

At various times throughout my youth I had BB Guns, pellet guns, a machete, archery gear, an array of deadly fireworks that would rival a military ammo dump, and even a .22 caliber rifle, but for all of that I just didn’t have the heart of a hunter.

Tin cans I could brutally mow down with the conscience of a mercenary. A battalion of plastic army men were gone in the blink of an M-80 blast and, hearkening back to the stone age, dirt clods were lobbed like grenades at the neighbor kids. With all of that inherent destructive DNA on my side I still didn’t have the stomach for wantonly harming animals.

But there were incidents. Wrong place, wrong time, I don’t know, but there were a couple of incidents…and they were torturous for my psyche.

My ‘incidents’ took place in my large backyard and an undeveloped woodsy field just next to it. I’d be out back, armed with whatever was at hand (usually a BB gun), stalking my inanimate prey and then, bingo, there would be a bird or a squirrel just looking for trouble, seemingly dying to jump in my cross hairs in an effort to prove the cruelty of mankind.

Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to at least aim at the robin. What could that hurt? Aiming is alright as long as no living thing his harmed in the process but there was a breakdown and my curiosity, bolstered by the probability of a miss, got the better of me and I pulled the trigger.

Down went the robin out of the tree and, immediately, something stuck in my throat and I ran like a crazy person towards the fallen bird trying to access the damage I had done. ‘What did you shoot that bird for, dumbass?’ And by the time I got there I could see that the bird was unable to fly but still able to hop.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a bird hop but they’re not only very fast hoppers but they have more than enough energy (even wounded) to give a 12 year old boy a run for his money. As hard as I tried I couldn’t catch up to the robin and I felt like it was imperative that I do so. I had to know how badly it was wounded by the BB and I had to make sure that nothing else could hurt it while it was wounded. I had to catch that bird…I had to.

He eventually got under the fence in my yard and into the woods next door and, by that time, my buddy from a couple of doors down had joined in the chase and it went on and on and on. For the next 4 hours we tried to catch that bird and, as dusk settled in, I was worried that night time would finally end the chase and the robin would be lost and it would all be my fault. My fault! My stupid BB gun, my stupid BB gun aiming self!

Did the other animals put them up to this, like aviary Jihadists looking to enrage the animal kingdom into a counter-attack? You didn’t see that I had a BB gun and was capable of random violence? And now me and my buddy are running around like a couple of idiots trying to catch something that is traumatized and scared it will suffer more at the hands of these demons.

And then, at the point of exhaustion and the onset of night, we lucked out and caught the robin in a box and brought it back to my garage. I had an old parakeet cage that would become his temporary home and, with a pair of heavy duty gardening gloves, I held the bird in one hand while my buddy and I cleaned and dressed the wound.

It was like Doogie Howser meets Wild Kingdom. I had become hunter, tracker and nurse all in one long, grueling day.

Within a few days the robin seemed to be regaining its health and so we took it out and freed it near the original crime scene. Off it flew and I was off the hook for potential murder.

Now you’d think I’d have weened myself away from a life of destruction but, being a notoriously slow learner, I was back in the yard messing around with a bow and arrow. The arrow had a big, blunt, rubber tip that was used for whacking things. What things? I have no idea what the rubber tipped arrow was originally meant for but anything shot out of a bow is probably going to do some serious whacking.

I’m whacking this, I’m whacking that…cans, trees, old toys and then sitting in my line of sight like the profile of a buffalo nickel was…

…a squirrel.

For God’s sake wildlife, can’t you see this is a demiliterized zone? Did you just see me chase that robin around for 4 hours? And again I applied the same logic as before…very far away, it’s only a rubber arrow, I’ll probably miss by a mile, what could it hurt, and ‘thunk’…

I whacked the squirrel right in the side of the head and knocked it out cold.

“Oh no, oh no! What are you doing?”, I’m screaming all the way up there thinking I had now ended the life of an innocent fur-ball who was foolish enough to come in my yard and my heart is banging out of my chest. About the time I got within 10 feet of the relaxed rodent, he came to, jumped up and took off, scaring the shit out of me in the process. “Geez, I can’t take anymore of this.”

That would be the last time I put any animals in harm’s way, and how did I know I was cured? I went hunting about a year later. I mean REAL deer hunting, with other hunters, with real guns and bad intentions. But I went because my mother was going with her boyfriend and I was along because tin cans were said to be in the area.

The first day in camp I annihilated an entire village of Campbell cans with a Winchester .32 Special. They never had a chance and ended up labeless and full of holes.

Then came the next morning and I was supposed to go out and hunt deer, so they handed me a World War II issue 30-30 Carbine and off I went to ‘bag’ me a deer, except I just prayed (seriously, prayed) that no deer would get within a 1000 yards of me. I even walked loud and occasionally whistled and sung songs just so they’d know I was coming.

Then, as I walked out of a wooded area into a snowy meadow I caught something out of the corner of my eye and, oh shit, there was a doe standing completely still, sideways, staring at me. We were maybe a 100 feet away and I froze, never lifting my gun and just staring back at the doe until I just looked away, pretended that never happened and kept on walking.

Fortunately, there was no one else around to see my magnificent lack of hunting nerve and I went back to camp claiming  to have never seen a deer the entire time. The next day I went back to stalking soup cans and life was good again.

I never went hunting again and, to this day, when I see a spider in the house I capture it with a glass and a bar coaster, take it out on our balcony and let it free, albeit 5 floors up (did you know they float?). Whatever it is that makes me repulsed by killing something, it’s a pretty strong force.

Maybe I’m a pansy, maybe I’m a Quaker and don’t know it, but my constitution refuses to allow me to find fulfillment in hunting something that’s not hunting me.

I do, however, still get an itchy trigger finger everytime I go down the soup aisle at the grocery store.

We’ve all got our various acquaintances based upon common interests and work relations and we’ve got friends we see on a more casual basis (often because of distance and time) and those that we see much more often and are a part of serious bonding and history. Friendships are a part of life that sustain us in so many ways that we’re probably not aware of but in nearly all instances, friendship takes work and mutual understanding and can even change form and shape through different stages of our lives.

I value good friendships but I realize that we are all beholden to our schedules and commitments and there is a natural ebb and flow to these things. I think my wife struggles with this concept, as do I, but she tends to believe that her need for ‘down time’, in light of a heavy work load, means that she’s letting friends down; that she’s not a good friend.

That I would strongly disagree with and suggest that what I have witnessed in her over the past 19 years transcends all that I have ever been capable of as a friend. I constantly strive to be a better friend to those I care about but watching her is like watching a clinic on how to relate to a friend, not when times are the best, because we can all do that, but when they are at their most difficult. This is where you find out what people are made of. You’ve heard the saying: ‘When times are bad, you find out who your real friends are’? It’s dead-on true.

This past weekend, when my sister-in-law’s mother passed away (see the prior blog entry), my wife made the quick decision to leave a day and half before me so she could be there for the family and booked a train and plane and was gone. Amidst the natural chaos that is the passing of a loved one, she helped with whatever needed her aid and then I met her later on and we were immediately off to the visitation at the funeral home.

Now I can tell you that there was no formal arrangement that I was aware of as to what our roles were other than to be there for the family. My wife and sister-in-law are not related by blood but by a common friendship and love that is remarkably strong so I should not have been surprised when my wife assumed the part of support mechanism for my sister-in-law.

I was anyway, and in many ways I’m always amazed with the selflessness she employs to help friends that are hurt.

My wife stayed close to my sister-in-law and held her at times and shared the tears, the pain and the loss, and when she wasn’t doing that she was greeting mourners, extending a hand and generally directing traffic. I pretty much stayed with my niece and nephew and did what I am best at doing; entertaining the kids. But what I witnessed in my wife is the kind of friend I hope we all have at some point in our lives; a person that steps up to the plate when you most need it and does so without hesitation.

I can’t say that I’ve always been that sort of friend but after watching my wife do this kind of thing countless times with other friends, sensing when someone is in crisis, I hope that I’ve learned something from her. Over the years I’ve watched my wife get the short end of the stick from people she thought were her ‘friends’ when she was in need but that never deters her a bit.

She simply knows what needs to be done and does it without complaint and usually takes it a step further than that. I really believe that this quality in her has touched me in ways that I’m not even aware of but of the ones that I am aware of, I know I take more time with people and listen to what they say. I look them straight in the eye and listen, not casually but with real interest and that’s not always easy because our days are filled by quickly moving from one task to another and to hear someone you have to stop moving.

Now if you think I’m writing this just to rack up brownie points, you’d be wrong because I’m too lazy for that. No, I’m writing this because that friendship quality in her blows me away and I just want to run around and tell everyone but then I’m too lazy for that too. That’s why I have this blog.

Contemplating all of this, as I am, I realize she’s the friend I’ve always wanted to have.

Lucky me.

There is no primer for how to deal with the passing of a loved one. There’s no simple formula, no self-help book, no real advice that can ever make it go down easier. There is only one tried and true procedure and although you’ve probably heard of it, here it is again in print:

You stand there and let it hit you like a Mack truck and then get up and see how you feel. Sometimes there are some minor scrapes and bruises and other times there are complications.

Birth and death are such primal life experiences and in each one we are pretty much bystanders to the event. Oh, we try to control various factors such as place, time and environment but in the end we control nothing and especially when a person that we have known and/or loved dies we are left feeling powerless and vulnerable as to how hard that Mack truck is going to hit.

My sister-in-law’s mother, Grace, had been managing a bout with lung cancer, a battle no one ever wins. Recently she had entered into the care of Hospice and had but a couple of estimated days remaining.

Today she died.

Grace was many things and, like all of us, there was the good, the bad and the just plain nutty. I’m sure that I’ll be able to apply that epitaph to each and every friend and relative that passes, including myself, because that is the nature of our crazy little lives on this earth. For whatever shape her neurosis took Grace was, at her essence, a caring mother, grandmother, wife, friend and, as she should, will be missed by many people.

Grace always played it ‘large’ and if you didn’t know she was in the room then you were completely missing a pulse because her commanding voice and penchant to express herself at family meals with a mouth full of flying food definitely established her presence. Her opinions were carved in stone; she had the touch of a sledgehammer and, really, I liked her for all those reasons.

She especially enjoyed yanking my chain by asking my wife why she married a bum like me and other assorted wisecracks but she would always make sure it happened within my earshot and then I’d see that grin on her face and I’d walk by and crack back at her and she’d laugh. It was this comedic fencing that we’d do over and over to our mutual amusement.

One inadvertent act endeared her to me forever. While I was writing dining reviews for an arts and entertainment magazine in another state, I was critical of a particular restaurant’s cannoli and mentioned Grace’s connoli as a reference standard as to how it should be done. What I considered a simple A/B comparison she took as high compliment because I wasn’t only writing about food I was writing about her food and food to an Italian is like a full time occupation interrupted by an occasional timeout for those lesser moments that don’t have anything to do with food.

I doubt that Grace would argue that her finest achievement was her daughter and for that we are all thankful that she took the time, with her late husband Louis, to create another truly wonderful person in this world.

I have little patience for fakes and phonies, people who waste my time trying to convince me they’re something they obviously aren’t. I appreciate real people for who they are even if I don’t agree with them all the time. For whatever her faults or triumphs, Grace was unapologetically herself and for that alone I mourn her passing.

From one kook to another, I’ll miss you Grace.

Having no siblings meant a certain freedom, one closely associated with solitary confinement but a freedom nonetheless. The freedom of being alone allowed me to dream, design and create without the distractions of a larger family. It didn’t help me socially at all because I was never challenged in the way that siblings challenge one another so I lagged behind in that development but…

In the vacuum that was my home and my head I could just go wild without restriction and so there were many tasks that I gave myself to do and one that I decided upon at age 13 was to become a singer. Not a hack but a good singer. Being born into a home full of performing arts I knew the difference.

Father #1 gave me the DNA, he being a guitarist, vocalist and drummer of some renown and my dad (father #2) gave me the atmosphere, something like an on-site workshop.

Besides being a skilled musician and prestidigitator, he had his hands in several different aspects of performing and would, on occasion, give music lessons or help individual performers fine tune their craft; comedians, singers, magicians and instrumentalists practiced their shtick at my house. It got so I recognized a couple of them but most I just watched come and go.

My dad would help them work on their act and I would listen on the sly from around the corner because, frankly, the whole thing fascinated me and I wanted to take a swim in that pool, so why not eavesdrop on some helpful advice? In addition, my dad used to work his own magic show in our basement so I had the privilege of watching my mother go up in smoke or skewered with swords like a shish kabob, only to reappear as good as new.

I also got familiar with local celebrity. One night my dad invited Clare Cummings, a.k.a. Milky the Clown, to our home for a little socializing. Now, Milky the Clown was a legendary figure in kid’s television in Detroit throughout the ’50’s and early ’60’s and to have him, even sans costume, standing in our rec room was a big deal. He played with me a bit, pulling a cigarette out of my ear and entertaining me with various slights of hand.

And so it was pre-ordained that the entertainment biz would guide my world. I was groomed unintentionally and the pull was too great for me to make a more sensible choice. It was part of my development and, primarily, it was what I knew the best.

In that light, it was hardly out of the ordinary for me to decide that I would learn the skills of a good singer. I had, in the same year, taken up the guitar so I had the necessary accompaniment and all that was left was to work at it until I thought I was good enough to perform.

My mother did not want me to become a musician and gave thought to forbidding me from even picking up the guitar until a musician friend of ours suggested that she let me go and do what I was obviously talented enough to do. Nearly every time I got the chance to be alone I worked at it and that usually meant waiting until the weekends when my mother would go out on a date and I could practice unobserved.

I sang and played in almost every room in the house because there were different acoustics in each space and the timber of my voice took on different colors depending on my location. If I was looking for ’small room’ reverb, it was the upstairs bathroom. If I wanted ‘medium room’ reverb it was usually the basement, and so on. I did this, literally, for years.

When I hit high school I’d try to incorporate a friend or two into my musical sphere because it gave me a chance for live harmony but it only left me frustrated because their constant pitch problems drove me up the wall and, again, I had no choice but to go solo.

I did, however, take one big fat chance and brought my guitar over to my dad’s house. Who was going to give me better feedback than this musical guidance counselor I’d watched in action for all those years? Besides, he was family and wouldn’t family give me more attention than a stranger? I admired him musically and more than anything I wanted to show him what I could do.

But he was oddly detached from the beginning to the finish and while I wanted his opinion of my technique and skill all I got was commentary on the song itself or the songwriters. It was disconcerting but in typical OCD style I kept coming back with my guitar and my songbooks on the off chance that there would be a more substantive reaction to ME, but that never happened and I eventually gave up.

By the time I was in college I was performing in clubs but it wasn’t until one night in my freshman or sophomore year that my mother decided to visit and hear me sing at a local bar. That night I noticed how surprised she was at my talent level, but it wasn’t until later that I realized that she’d never really heard me before and had no idea what I was or wasn’t.

I only practiced when she wasn’t around because I was embarrassed to reveal myself until I was sure of my abilities. As an adolescent I only really sang for my dad and all his responses were, in hindsight, colored by his own considerable talents being marginalized by his mother which in translation meant what it always meant for me: ‘Sorry kid, I’ve got too many of my own psychological demons to make room for you’.

Ah, the Wonder Bread years; full of alone time and working in a complete vacuum.

A year and a half ago my mother was notified that she had an aortic aneurysm, a discovery made by a radiologist while looking for something else. These aneurysms are like a ‘run’ in women’s hosiery; not a big problem in their small form but when they finally give way, the hosiery is useless and has to be discarded. In any event, surgical repair isn’t recommended (based upon certain risk factors) until the aneurysm reaches a specific length so the doctor does periodic monitoring until the decision is made to repair the tear.

I insisted that she not trust this potentially life-threatening condition to any local physicians and offered to drive her back and forth to the Cleveland Clinic whenever she needed. We’ve made several trips since that discovery and each time I try to unearth more and more things that I didn’t know about the family and believe me, there appears to be quite a treasure trove of withheld gems.

Now in her eighties, it finally became clear as to why these items have leaked out of her in dribs and drabs for all these years. The reason was firmly rooted, as it often is with people, in appearance. She obviously decided a long time ago that there was going to be a ‘presentation’ of these family skeletons that would retain their mythical, Hallmark qualities with all warts removed.

While discussing her mother (the grandmother I never really knew except in photo album pictures) she alluded to the fact that there might have been some anomalies in her mother’s parenting skills. Up until that very point in the car I assumed her mother to have been a hard working, saintly woman who died of breast cancer at a relatively young age, all of which was basically true, except…

Except that there might, and it’s only a ‘might’ at this point, have been a little scrape or two on the saintly bumper.

So when she let slip with a portion of a larger revelation I naturally asked for details, details, but she came back with the hesitation move followed by the “I better not say anymore”. And so I’m like, “Oh no, you’re not going to toss out a teaser and then leave me hanging”, but she got busy building fortress reinforcements and I had to scale the wall.

“Why do you want to know?”, she asked. “Because”, I said, “it helps me gauge just how far the nut has fallen from the tree and I gain some perspective on parts of the family I’ve never known.” Well, we went back and forth until she relented and, while still not turning the faucet open all the way, told me a story of her mother’s infidelity, how unrepentant it was and how other parts of the immediate family dealt with it.

Her mother’s well-documented (except to me) affair actually kept her away from the house many entire nights while my grandfather worked evenings, most of the siblings were gone, and the youngest of the brood was still at home (pause here and consider).

All of a sudden so many things fell into place in my understanding of the family dynamic. First of all, my grandmother took human form and became just as flawed as everyone else in the family. Secondly, I understood why my uncle, he being the youngest child, looked to me like a wounded animal the entire time I knew him and, finally, “say what?”.

I felt like a crack in my understanding of the extended family had burst open and flooded my brain with some measure of relief. Certain facets of our family just didn’t make sense without this part of the puzzle.

What does this tell us about family secrets? They’re absolutely worthless attempts to maintain appearance and don’t do anyone any good whatsoever. Whatsoever.

Before she opened up, I asked her why she didn’t want to tell me what happened with her mother and she told me that she didn’t want me to think poorly of her. “Mom,” I said emphatically, “I don’t think poorly of her or otherwise because I don’t know her but if you told me something of her life maybe I’d get a sense of my grandmother. Besides, she’s long dead…who are you protecting?”

“She’s dead”. I couldn’t repeat it enough. The idea that the deceased needed protection from their above ground folly seemed ridiculous to me, as if her mother needed to be seen only in a single dimension so that we would all believe she had no faults. All I could think was how burdensome it must be to spend your life lugging around that heavy bag of illusion. Pop open that case of Samsonite secrets and set yourself free!

But that’s the way my mother’s always been: revealing bits and pieces of stories and if I don’t pull a Mike Wallace on her she’ll simply stop short of the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I’ve even heard things that she passed off as the truth only to hear her revisions later on.

Appearances are simply that, visuals with no substance. Wisps of vapor with no other purpose than to throw you off the scent and deceive but for what actual good? To my mother’s credit, more information has been released under my own personal freedom of information act so stay tuned as I climb into the ‘Sodium Pentothal Special’, bound for Cleveland and traveling through time.

Godparents are assigned to you, based upon their relationship with your parents, as sort of a backup team that can come in off the bench if any of the starters are injured or taking a leave of absence. In general, the system makes sense. Parenting is a full-time, hands-on job that can be interrupted by the unknown and children don’t do real well with the unknown.

Oh no! Mom’s on crack! The coach signals the bench and, boom, you’ve covered. (Note: hypothetical scenario for instructional purposes only)

Again, you’re in no age-shape to make these decisions so the hope is that the second team is as good or better than the first and, if you’re lucky, the second team is an enhancement to the first while the starters are still in. That makes for good team chemistry.

I like sports metaphors.

Anyway, I lucked out with the Godparents thing. I got Jim and Dorothy and while they never replaced the starters, their impact on my developing psyche was monumental.

They were a couple who, for whatever reason, never had children of their own and yet loved children and, best of all for me, made an extremely generous gift of themselves…Dorothy in particular. From these bench reserves I learned certain irreplaceable arts, especially the art of laughter.

Jimmy had a sly wit and a bemused demeanor in the midst of socializing but Dorothy would come totally unglued. Her laugh had a complete arc to it, humbly beginning like the rumblings of a pre-eruptive volcano and progressing through stages of hysteria until she was literally gasping for air and yelling, “stop, oh please stop” and just when it looked like a life threatening seizure was about to take her from us, she’d lift her exhausted self upright and collect her wits for the next joke. My mother used to tell me that when they’d go out to dinner Dorothy would inevitably lose it and the entire room would be looking to get a glimpse of the crazy woman, but she didn’t care and she couldn’t have stopped it if she’d wanted to; this was intrinsically who she was.

Whatever the occasion I always positioned myself near her to bask in that unbridled laughter, so primal and so liberating and so contagious that I was relatively unconcerned what the joke was even about.

That was how I came to understand the power of laughter. Like any of us, I’m certain that Dorothy had her crosses to bear but she also had the ultimate emotional tonic, an immersion in laughter that freed her from the commonplace and set off a spark so bright that I wanted to be in the room when the fireworks started.

I don’t know how it must have been for Jimmy when she passed away but they were both extremely pragmatic and he likely took it painfully in stride. Even so, the silence in that house must have been somewhat unsettling.

Since that time, Jimmy has passed on as well and even though they no longer move through the physical realm I think of them often and Dorothy’s laugh is as fresh in my consciousness as the first time I heard it. I admired her because she went all out and left nothing on the table; fearless, unselfconscious and uncompromising.

I just wanted to be near the joy that was her.