A Miscellany

Monday of last week (July Fourth) was the one-year anniversary of Joey's accident, and I want to talk about that and a few other things in a moment, but first I want to thank Jason, Tina, and Anna for their posts while I was away. I know it can be tough to set down these things and share them with the world, but it's also, I think really important and wonderful. Especially for someone like Joey, who compartmentalized his personalities so thoroughly that no one (myself included) ever got to see them all, it's helpful and fascinating to see him through other eyes. During the funeral - an event to which I've just realized I give very little thought, possibly because it was so painful - one bright spot was the eulogy delivered by his boss at the law firm where he worked, who talked of his transformation from a shy and slightly aloof paralegal to a buoyant, almost gregarious summer intern whom everybody loved and admired. That side of him - that version of him - would have remained hidden forever, if it were up to Joey. The same is true of the cascade of letters that we received from his work colleagues and friends in the first few weeks, most of which painted a very different picture of Joey than many of us (especially, perhaps, those of us who knew him longest) had ever encountered.

I don't know if hearing other people's stories are comforting, exactly. They force us to encounter the unique size and weight of other people's grief, and that is a difficult thing to do. But they also enable us, both in the hearing and in the telling, to briefly bring him back to life, and that's quite nice - even if, as with the dreams I've been having with some frequency lately, he just disappears again at the end.

I know this is a funny way to say thanks, but, really and truly: thanks. Anyone else who would like to post something is certainly welcome anytime. Just shoot me an email.

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I spent the Fourth of July mostly yawning, and that was not a bad way to spend it. Kate and I returned from our honeymoon in Brazil that morning, the timing partly fortuitous - Kate had the Fourth off of work, so it enabled us to extend the trip by a day - and partly intended precisely to provide a little distraction on a day that is always going to be painful and unignorable (it's very hard to pretend that the day is just another day when rockets are exploding overhead). My mother went to Arizona to be with old and dear friends, traveling to Sedona to visit a chapel that turned out to be much less moving and significant than the rock formation she happened upon called the Snoopy Rock, which resembles Snoopy lying on his back. Meanwhile, my father and Donna went to Kansas City to decompress in a fancy hotel. There they discovered that the currently fashionable barbecue restaurant in town is called Oklahoma Joe's, a place they twice tried to visit but found to be too crowded - a good destination for a future road trip, I imagine. As for ourselves, Kate and I went for dinner that evening to the Loveless Cafe, a very Joey sort of place (which he had, in fact, visited twice) that specializes in ridiculously unhealthy Southern food, served with an endless supply of biscuits. We had hoped to go to the nearby 12South Taproom - the place where we told Joey, first among all the people in our lives, that we were going to get married - but they were closed for the holiday, so we went to the Loveless instead.

I don't know if we'll ever develop any regular traditions for the Fourth of July, and I don't know if we need to. It might be impractical to leave the country every year, but that idea does have some appeal. We will always, I believe, raise a glass or two to Joey, and we will always stand back from the public festivities to nurse our own private pain, but maybe, eventually, we will not wince every time some commercial comes on the TV advertising a Fourth of July sale, or some such nonsense.

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I spent most of May and part of June in Ireland and the UK doing research for a book project that was thriving until just over a year ago and has been lying mostly fallow ever since. It was a good trip, on the whole - I got to explore Oxford, where I ate at a pub frequented by Evelyn Waugh during his student days, and I got to visit my old haunts in Dublin and Belfast and visit old friends - but it was pretty lonely, too. Kate came out for a weekend, and that was great, but without her as a constant companion I was left with my own churning thoughts more often than I'd have liked.

I did find solace several times, though, at the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin. When I went there with Kate about a week into my stay in Dublin, most of the building was closed for renovations, and, apart from the cafe and gift shop, only the Irish collection and the Jack Yeats gallery were open. The Irish collection was good but limited (can you name any great Irish painters?), but the Yeats gallery was perfect. Jack Yeats was the younger brother of William Butler, the poet with the floppy hair, and most of his paintings fall right in that gap between realism and abstract expressionism that I like for paintings to be in (think Van Gogh, the German Expressionists, etc.). I'd never spent much time with Yeats during my previous visits to the National Gallery, but I spent quite a bit of time with him this time, especially after Kate drew my attention to a painting called And So my Brother Hail and Farewell for Ever More. It was painted in 1945, six years after his brother William died, and it looks kind of like this:

What you can't see on a computer screen are the thick crags of paint jutting up from the canvas, making thick folds on the man's coat and in the distant mountains, or the way the paint thins to nothing in water, off in the middle distance, revealing beneath it the bare white canvas. It's a small painting, not much bigger than a laptop screen, but on this and subsequent visits (I went back to see it twice more on breaks from the library, which is just around the corner) I stared so closely at every inch of it that I think I was hoping I'd fall in.

I don't know if I can explain what it was that it did for me, the lump that it wrenched up from my chest to my face and eyes, but I'm not sure I need to. I mean, look at it. It's a solitary figure, a rucksack slung across a shoulder, looking out into a cold winter sea. It's the sort of lonely, chilly pilgrimage that you would make if your own brother had died. You would walk alone until you found a spot like this, a spot where you could simply stand and stare into a vast blank space for a good long while - not because doing so would bring you comfort, but because surrounding yourself with such a scene would be a way of making the external world conform to your internal state. And standing there on my own chilly pilgrimage (May in Dublin is deadly cold: I had to buy a stocking cap), in a dark room in a mostly shuttered museum, I stared at that painting until I couldn't stand it, and I came back a few days later and did it again.

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I'll end this post on a lighter note.

After I returned from the research trip I spent a week in Nashville before we headed off to Brazil for our honeymoon. While there, during an uninspiring lunch on the island of Boipeba, we heard Elton John singing the song, "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road." It's funny how you don't even notice cheesy American pop songs when you hear them at home, but once you're in Brazil, and you're accustomed to hearing cheesy Brazilian pop songs everywhere, you become inexplicably and quite shamelessly excited by hearing something like Elton John singing "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road" (or, as happened a few days later, George Michael singing "Careless Whisper").

I believe we sang along.

Hearing that song reminded me of the Elton John Greatest Hits cassette we had when we were young, and so I decided to tell Kate about it. Joey and I, deep in our Pound Puppies phase, would stage grand concerts with a tape player and these stuffed animals, moving their heads around in time to the music (as if they were singing) for approximately the entire length of an album. We did this with the Monkees, Barry Manilow, Elton John, and many others. I vividly remember one such concert involving the Elton John tape and a set of newly-acquired Pound Purries (these were the Pound Puppies' feline counterparts, a short-lived bid by Tonka to capture the cat-lover market) upstairs at our grandparents' house in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It may have ended with a fight between us, as moments of happy cooperation often did, but I don't recall that part

Thinking about all this, and talking to Kate about it at lunch in Brazil, I suddenly remembered that one of Joey's most-favored Pound Puppies was a dark brown puppy named Bobby (I had a corresponding one named Slick), and I remembered that he had named him after Bobby Brown - you know, the singer.

And then I remembered how Joey, when he was seven or eight, was really, really into that super-poppy, boy-band R&B stuff that was so big in the late eighties and early nineties - groups like Color Me Badd, Boyz II Men, Milli Vanilli, and, most egregious of all, New Kids on the Block. He was crazy for New Kids on the Block (one of whom, not coincidentally, was named Joey): we had two VHS tapes of NKotB concerts that he watched over and over, so often that even I ended up memorizing most of the songs and some of the dances (at this time I was listening almost exclusively to novelty music of the Weird Al and Dr Demento variety). I made relentless fun of him for this, especially when the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal erupted, but he was unperturbed (and anyway, I was hardly in a position to throw stones).

He stuck with this improbable affinity for several years, eventually finding his way to R. Kelly and similar artists in the '90s, and he developed a particular passion for the Temptations along the way. If you knew him in later years, when his tastes hove much closer to that of other white post-college urban intellectuals (Americana, indie pop, Texas singer-songwriters, etc), you would never have known that there was a soft spot in his heart for Milli Vanilli and their ilk, but I'm pretty sure there still was. I have no idea whether he ever listened to that stuff anymore, but one day soon I'll get up the courage to look at his iPod, and I'll scroll through it with great interest.