Gifts and forgeries

From Anna:


My memories, as I assume others’ memories are, come as short anecdotal moments that are triggered at the oddest moments.  Memory has this way of providing gaps where you are unable to recall and then at other times it hits you with such force it is equivalent to a punch to the solar plexus, leaving you gasping for breath at the force of the memory.  The acute pain, as everything around you forces you to remember, to recall, to make heretofore unseen connections in your universe.  That cat on the fence compels the mind to somehow connect it to that vague memory from Halloween when you were twelve.  That smell reminds you of hanging out during the holidays. That sound brings to mind that time.  We rely so heavily on memory, on our perception of how things were, for perspective.  We cling to our memories as a way to keep our loss alive, to keep them present.  And while I struggle against the pain, I am also grateful that I have those moments. And so it is with so many of moments of Joey in my life, since we were 10 years old in glasses too big for our faces and rhyming last names (Coyle and Doyle). 

I could tell you about watching football player Joey eat a Sonic brown bag special—two burgers, two fries (sub one for tator tots), one soda, and a milkshake—in one sitting.  I could tell you about the decapitated gummy bear on his rearview mirror in the Blazer that we watched morph through an Oklahoma year. Perhaps I could tell you about the shrine built in his mother’s house to my Furbie one Christmas. Or about the shrine that was created on his mother’s front porch and built of neighborhood newspapers that were laid out for the light up snowman and left for Joey to discover the next morning. Perhaps you want to know that he allowed himself to be held down and mascara applied to his white pale eyelashes so I could sate a curiosity of what he would look like with "real" eyelashes.  Or about our impending high school graduation and standing in the parking lot at Surrey on the US map—me on Mississippi and him on DC—realizing how far apart we were going to be. I could tell you about the love affair he had with the linen clothes he wore as an usher in my wedding. I could expound upon Tina’s story of a freezing Joey loose in Chicago (the high those days he was in town was a frigid Windy City 9°F) and in borrowed cold weather clothes--I think I knew at that point he would not settle in the Midwest for school. What I want to share, though, is actually from Joey’s own hand.

As Scott and I unpacked into our new place in Portland, OR, last August, I came across the wedding gift that Joey had given us. Even through the tears, we were able to laugh, as we have for years, over this gift and the note he had written. I am so thankful that I have kept the note from him—written not in a nice card, but on yellow legal paper in his barely legible scrawl and taped shut at one point.

It is this gift and note that, after our 9^th wedding anniversary and talking with Scott, I felt that I wanted to share with others because it so wonderfully captures the wry, sly humor of Joey. 

We were given two gifts, actually. One, for Scott, is a ratchet set for our 1976 Volkswagen bus—because every bus needs a great tool set to keep it running or to help get it off the road when it ceases to quit running.  The other gift, for me, is a signed copy of Robert Hunter’s A Box of Rain. For those who may not know, Robert Hunter was the main lyricist for the Grateful Dead.

Scott and I were quite impressed that Joey had gifted us with this “autographed” book until we read the accompanying letter (as written by Joey and deciphered by me):

           

So your big day is finally here. I felt I should write something to accompany my “gifts” to you and Scott. Before I start, I should apologize for any incoherency and for my handwriting, which is probably on par with the penmanship of a not-so-bright 3^rd grader. Anyways, I just want to tell you how extraordinarily happy I am for you both. Your wedding marks the first time that a friend I truly care for has been wed. Also, it’s the first time that someone my age has been married and I haven’t asked myself, “What were they thinking?” You and Scott just seem so happy together that it makes me happy for you. Plus, I think Scott is a great person, not to mention that his last name doesn’t rhyme with Doyle. As I write, I can hardly believe I’ve known you for 10-some-odd years. I can’t recount all that has happened in that time in this note, I will say that I think my life is better because I’ve known you, and I just want to say thanks. My rather feeble to say thanks, congrats, & good luck, come today in a ratchet set & poetry. I thought the tools were a fine idea for work on the van until my father asks, “Is it metric.” So call me later & I’ll get the receipt. The book just sounded rather appropo; I always liked the Dead’s lyrics, & I know y’all like the music. In case you already have the book, I forged his signature at the front to make it extra special…sorry. So again, I just want to say how happy I am for you both. I wish you the best wherever you are; and know that wherever I am, if you need anything of me just call. With that, I send all my love & well wishes with you and Scott on this wonderful day.

Little did we know that our dear Joey was a forger—albeit with a good heart and intentions—but one who I knew that I could take him for his word: wherever he was, if I needed anything of him, all I had to do was call.

Nanook of the Midwest

From Tina:

Gingimo. That was my nickname for Joe. There were other nicknames Joe had through the years, some of which may or may not have been more immediately decipherable (consider: Joey & Ginger versus Tablespoon & Paprika). But Gingimo was a nickname that was mine and mine alone. It came from a trip to Chicago back in the winter/spring of 2008 to visit Anna & Scott. The weather in Chicago was, not surprisingly, bitterly cold in comparison to DC. Joe was not a fan of extreme temperatures in either direction but cold seemed to have a singular way of bringing out his droll grumpiness. At one point during the visit Joe was exercising his flaneur tendencies, strolling through Chicago clad only in a DC-level winter coat and a thin knit cap he purchased from a kiosk after his arrival. At some point he typed out a text message to me stating simply "I feel like a giant @#$% ginger eskimo." In between giggle fits at the mental image of Joe dressed as a forlorn Eskimo on the shores of Lake Michigan, I immediately shortened this to "Gingimo" and began addressing him as such. I don't know whether Joe ever took to the nickname quite as much as I did, but it always captured in my mind an image of him, with his distinctive gait, weight shifted on one side, pausing briefly after a particularly biting gust off the lake, looking around and muttering with a twinkle in his eye and a half grin on his face. And that's when he pulled out his phone and typed a message with his signature dry wit to bring me into the moment with him, even from 600 miles away. Now it's my turn to continue sharing moments both mundane and extraordinary with him (even if the discussion is a bit one-sided) along with his friends and family.

Gingimo was an explorer in the same tradition of books, unknown foods, and meanderings of which I myself am an ardent subscriber. While our tastes and inclinations were far from identical, the overlap could not be denied. Nor could our mutual zest for experiencing new things, even those that scared us. I have always challenged myself to do those things that frighten me, hoping to discover a strength I did not previously see. Committing to a relationship with Joe was one such challenge; from the beginning our easily interlocking characters scared the daylights out of me. I think, perhaps, it also scared Joe at times. Or maybe that was just my bedhead. I will have to ask him that.

My bedhead, however scary it may have been at times (particularly after a bourbon-infused outing the night before), is not what springs to mind when I think of Joe's willingness to tackle things that scared him. The first memory revolves around my birthday last year, which landed just two weeks before Gingimo's passing. In a decision, which likely caused my parents some consternation, I decided to usher in my third decade by jumping out of a plane at 13,000 feet with a strange man strapped to my back. As my father noted he at least had been paid for such antics while I, inexplicably, was choosing to pay someone else for this experience. Joe took it upon himself to plan the logistics for the day, researching companies, coordinating timing with day's later festivities, etc. I was only responsible for showing up. I had tried to convince my brother to join me in the celebratory leap, but he wasn't able to fit it into his schedule. So what did Gingimo do? He made a reservation for two -- because he thought I should have in-air support for this venture, despite him clearly being disinclined towards such activities. Luckily for him, my brother was able to join at last minute. This allowed Joe to provide support from a picnic table on the ground with a book safely in hand. But knowing he was willing to jump out of a plane despite my assurances I was happy to go it alone...well some things say love and commitment without a word.

The second memory, which scared the bejesus out of me in its own way, occurred several months earlier after an evening of drinking with the UVA crew. I believe it was shortly after little Lizzie McCreesh had been born. Gingimo & I were lying in bed, discussing topics in a slightly disjointed manner as two inebriated people are apt to do. At some point our discussion turned to discussing Lizzie's general adorableness and the joy which parenthood seemed to have imparted on Patrick & Courtney. We were quiet for a while, staring at the ceiling and me quickly nearing slumber when Joe said quietly "We're going to have kids together, aren't we?" His tone was one of bewilderment and realization and also, a request for assurance. As was our tendency, we had never previously discussed such serious relationship questions directly. But I had known for a while that our future would involve redheaded bookworms with glasses and a tendency towards scifi and karaoke. I turned to Joe in the dark and, putting my hand on his chest, said simply "I hope so." Despite the dark, I could see Joe smiling his biggest full Okie smile. As usual, I had no doubt in my mind at that moment that ours would be a long, happy life together.

I am, not surprisingly, a different person than a year ago. My life has gone from being happily sketched out to being obscured by a fog covering much beyond the current moment. In some ways, this scares me more than anything. Except for one item. I will always have my Gingimo, my guardian angel through all of the adventures & surprises life has in store.

The Naval Squirrel: Joe Visits Annapolis

From Jason:

Friends through friends, at first; Joe and I found ourselves closer when our friends graduated and left us. We would get together for dinner, or to go see a show around Charlottesville. We would spend a day replacing his car battery (an entire day was needed thanks to Joe's general lack of "handiness" and abhorrence of life's minutiae, like what type of engine resides in his car's engine compartment). And we would take trips to Northern Virginia to visit our deserter friends. On one such trip, I believe it was a birthday, or Halloween party, we ended up staying at Patrick McCreesh's apartment. Having attended the event the night prior, and having no other plans for ourselves through the week we decided to stay at least another day. Patrick, employed as he was, went off to work leaving Joe and I to figure out what to do with ourselves.

"You ever been to Annapolis?"

"Once as a kid, we took a field trip to the Naval Academy."

"Wanna go?"

That was probably the last time Joe asked me whether I wanted to go somewhere, preferring hence to simply tell me where we would be going. We climbed into the Accord and headed generally North. Joe's was an hilariously filthy car, whose darkly tinted windows served not to make Joe look cool, but simply to conceal the traveler's detritus that lay within. On this trip I would forget a copy of Wired (Joe pronounced it "weird") in his back seat only to recover it several years later, in the same spot I'd left it. 

We listened to Ryan Adams while we wandered around trying to figure out how to get to the appropriate highway. We passed by the Arlington Temple United Methodist Church and Chevron, one of my favorite sites in all of Virginia (really, it's a gas station tucked beneath a church). Finding our way onto 95, we set off. We drove through the forested stretch between Baltimore and Washington at a leisurely pace; and Joe told me how he hated highways in the mid-Atlantic because of all the trees. To him, you should see in every direction for miles and miles without interruption from a proper highway.  We joked it was so that you could see the tornado bearing down on you, not a common problem in Maryland. 

We tore straight through Baltimore, pausing only to acknowledge that Camden Yards was easily one of the nicest ballparks to visit, but that, sadly, its home city was nothing to behold. By the time we arrived in Annapolis we were both starved, which might explain why we had such a hard time navigating our way out of the traffic circle that surrounds the Maryland State House. When we finally made it off the circle and down to the inner harbor, we parked and set about on our true goal: crab cakes. 

We walked from the water up and down posh and boutiqued (it's a verb, you've seen it happen) streets that seemed alarmingly touristy despite their being rather few tourists. Amidst the couture studios, handmade furniture shops and boat rental offices we would pass bars and restaurants that each advertised that they had the best crab cakes in the city. What they failed to realize was that Joe and I measured the likelihood of our patronage based on cost almost exclusively. So having passed every door we chose the restaurant which listed the cheapest price for a crab cake sandwich. The bargain was enough that we even splurged on the crab cake appetizer; not realizing this was no more than the crab cake without the bun. 

When we were done we made our way to a used record store, we knew there was sometime still before Patrick would be free from work, but we also knew that if we didn't leave soon we would be stuck in Baltimore traffic for sometime before encountering DC traffic. So we breezed through the record store and back to Joe's car, miraculously not ticketed despite us not realizing that the spot was metered. As we were pulling back into the traffic circle, Joe saw a sign pointing towards the Naval Academy.

"Do you think they would give us a tour?" He asked this as he veered the car off the circle and towards the Academy. I didn't think they would, my suspicions had a lot to do with the lockdown seen at most government facilities post-9/11. "Well, let's find out, maybe they'll at least let us wander around."

I really have no idea what inspired his interest in visiting the Naval Academy, but the fact that they might not show us around seemed to stoke his interest further, so that by the time we approached the gate he was almost preemptively livid at being rebuffed.

The MP, sidearm visible, lowered his head towards Joe's open window and greeted us with a stern, "Can I help you, gentlemen?" 

"Hi, I was wondering whether we could have a tour, we're from out of state," I'm not sure whether the last bit had ever helped Joe's cause in infiltrating a space he had wanted to visit, but I was unsurprised when the MP declined Joe's request. 

"Well, can we drive around a little and just have a look around?"

"No."

At this point the MP gave up trying to find out whether there was anything he could do for us and transitioned to telling us what we would be doing now. He told us he would be raising the gate and gestured to a small parking lot where we could turn around, we could then pull to the exit gate and he would raise it and let us out. He ended by suggesting that we avoid any funny business. 

Joe pulled through, offering some unkind words about the MP and pointing out that he hadn't planned on any funny business he was just interested in looking around. A unique little squirrel had caught my eye, it was of the usual size and shape as the squirrels I have known, but it was bright red, it was a ginger squirrel. I pointed the squirrel out to Joe, as it darted along the curb ahead. He saw it and seemed to dismiss it, as he suddenly darted the vehicle towards the curb and then away, performing a U-turn just short of the lot the MP had pointed out to us. As he spun the wheel I had just a glimpse of the squirrel darting towards us, and then "Thump." 

"Did you just run over that squirrel?"

Joe sped our retreat and said, "I think I did, do you think the Navy's going to be pissed?"

Two Boys on the Bummel

My trip abroad has been postponed for a few days. My grandmother, commonly known as Chichi, became gravely (and rather suddenly) ill late last week, so Kate and I flew to Oklahoma on Friday to be with her. Tina came out over the weekend as well. As of last night her condition seems to have stabilized, but it's unclear for how long.

Moments like this are when you need your family the most. Siblings are especially helpful with this stuff, since they stand in exactly the same relation as you to those who are suffering - they share the same mothers, parents, uncles, grandmothers, etc. My mother and her brother have been sharing the burden of their mother's illness for some time - coordinating their visits, handling the details of hospitals and appointments and nurses, talking to each other about everything - and, difficult as all this is, I know it would be nearly unbearable for one of them without the other. My own brother's absence right now is therefore unignorable. Most days, in Nashville, I can pretend that he's out in the world somewhere, just as he always was, but in the midst of a crisis his absence is glaring, a great big Joey-shaped hole right at the middle of everything.

So yesterday I went out looking for him. Chichi had been pretty unresponsive the previous day, both Kate and Tina had flown home, Kent and Denise were heading back to Texas, and my mother had gone to work - everyone was trying to get on with living - and there wasn't much point in lurking around the house. In fact, there was a positive incentive to flee the house, since the home health-care ladies tend to favor a very high volume on the television that they watch in between visits to Chichi's bedroom, making it rather difficult to sit quietly with one's thoughts - or, indeed, the thoughts of anyone else - for even a few moments.

Early yesterday morning, then, I took Chichi's car out for a long drive. My first stop was Starbucks, a place that I'm normally much too good for, in order to buy a CD. I needed a CD because the only thing I had on hand was my mother's Fleet Foxes CD (a gift from me last December - a favorite of Joey's that, unlike many of his other favorites, I imagined she might enjoy), and I wasn't optimistic about my radio choices out in western Oklahoma, my intended destination. Usually I'd go to a record store for that sort of thing, of course, but they were all closed when I set off 8:30, and I couldn't think of anywhere to go - if I'm too good for Starbucks, I'm much too good for Wal-Mart or Target - until I remembered the Starbucks gift card that had been in my wallet for about five years and then further remembered having once seen a Decemberists CD at a Starbucks somewhere. So off I went, gift card in hand, to the local Starbucks and bought the new Paul Simon CD and a small (er, "tall") cup of coffee. Then I set off for Woodward.

I had been to Woodward once before, as a teenager, when my mother and Joey and I had driven to Denver via the Oklahoma Panhandle, but we had only passed through on the highway. Woodward is about 2.5 hours away, the only town of any size in that part of the state, and I knew nothing else about it except that it's not far from the area in which my German ancestors had settled, early in the last century or late in the penultimate one, and scraped out an existence in and around a sod house or two. My idea was to drive around this area and see if I could find any traces of what the area would have looked like a hundred years ago, and then to drive south through Roger Mills County and the Antelope Hills, one of the few areas of topographical distinctness in what is otherwise a flat and barren prairie.

It was a serendipitous day from the beginning. Arriving in downtown Woodward - a downtown that, unlike so many in that part of the state, had a number of thriving businesses and even a bit of foot traffic - I parked the car, walked around a corner, and happened upon the Polly Anna Cafe, a diner dating probably from the twenties or thirties that is the sort of place that was once common in all of these small towns. I sat at the counter, which hadn't changed any since it was installed, and ate eggs and hash browns with a cinnamon roll on the side. The latter was smothered in butter and then heated, so that when the waitress brought it to me it was sitting in a pool of melted butter, reminding me of the butter burgers Joey and I once ate in Milwaukee. As we had on that occasion, I showed it no mercy. On my way out, I noticed two calendars, gifts of local businesses, hanging behind the register. In Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon posits that the more calendars hanging behind a cafe's register, the better the food. I'd say that's about right in the case of the Polly Anna.

After brunch I walked around Woodward for a few minutes. It was very windy and nearing 100 (with 5-15% humidity, according to the radio man), so I didn't linger long, but on one sidewalk I did spot a large chalk drawing of Snoopy (tattooed, with a do-rag), so I knew that I'd come to the right place.

Next I drove over to Gage and Shattuck, the little towns near which my ancestors had lived. Gage often merits a mention on the local weather reports when the temperature gets unusually high, but it merits very little else. Shattuck is a bit more prosperous, but still rather forlorn. After I filled up the tank there I stumbled on the Shattuck Windmill Museum, an outdoor museum displaying a spectacular range of metal windmills that had once been used by settlers in the area to pump water (many smaller windmills still stand on their original locations all across Western Oklahoma, pumping nothing these days and usually not even spinning, but continuing to mark the spot of the original settlements, like pins on a map). All the windmills were spinning mightily in the blast-furnace wind, and as I wandered among them I found a reproduction of a sod house buried in a hillside - not, perhaps, unlike what my own ancestors would have lived in - and it struck me that to live in something like that would be to live a lot like a prairie dog or a ground squirrel, coming out into the desert heat to forage for food and retreating into a half-submerged hole to rest and sleep. There was also a little gift shop, with a couple of friendly ladies minding the place. The museum and its setting reminded me of visiting the giant twine ball with Joey in Darwin, Minnesota, another quirky monument in a desolate prairie town. Only on that occasion the gift shop had been closed and we had to be content with a few inadequate photographs of a giant ball inside a gazebo. We had, of course, driven well out of our way to get there, stopping for apple pie along the way, but we both agreed that it was worth the detour. In Shattuck, I bought a couple of postcards from the ladies in the gift shop and headed on my way. If I'd had more cash I would have bought a few hand-sewn windmill-shaped doilies and given them away as gifts.

Driving south out of Shattuck I put on the Fleet Foxes CD (I had, amazingly, had an NPR signal for most of the drive so far) and prepared to explore the Antelope Hills and the Black Kettle National Grassland. I had never been a huge fan of the Foxes, possibly because I hadn't spent enough time with them, but Joey loved them, especially their live shows, which he saw three times. He encouraged me several times to go see them - their harmonies, he said, were especially remarkable in a live setting - but I have never yet done so. I also hadn't ever really listened to their lyrics, but as I rolled down highway 283, through a landscape that looks like this,

I listened more carefully. It turns out many of their songs are about death, and quite a few are about brothers. The one that really caught my attention, as I topped a hill onto a magnificent view, is "Blue Ridge Mountains," which goes, in part, like this:

My brother, where do you intend to go tonight? 
I heard that you missed your connecting flight 
to the Blue Ridge Mountains, over near Tennessee. 

You're ever welcome with me any time you like, 
Let's drive to the country side, leave behind some green-eyed look-a-likes, 
So no one gets worried, no. 
So no one gets worried, no. 

But Sean don't get careless, 
I'm sure it'll be fine. 
I love you. I love you, 
Oh brother of mine.  

And so I knew that I had once again come to the right place.

Coming into the town of Cheyenne, I followed the signs to the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site, Oklahoma's only National Park Service site, which commemorates not a battle but a massacre of Cheyenne Indians by George Custer and his troops in 1868. I had read about the new visitor center there, which, unusually, is rather more sympathetic to the massacred than to the killers, but I hadn't expected to come across it on this trip (my atlas was from 1998). So I spent some time in the visitor center and walked through the massacre site - more briskly than I would have liked, since I wasn't wearing sunscreen and we had clearly bypassed 100 degrees some time ago - before pointing the car toward home. I listened to the Fleet Foxes again, then I listened to Paul Simon, and then I was home.

I had dinner with my father when I returned to Oklahoma City. We met at Ingrid's Kitchen, a German cafe and bar, and shared a basket of currywurst, which is a street-vendor delicacy that Joey and I had first sampled in Berlin (he had subsequently intended to read a book about currywurst, The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm, but I don't know if he ever did). Then I went to visit my grandmother, who was alert and talkative for the first time in days. She told me - whispered to me, actually, since this was all she could muster - that she remembered Tina and Kate being there, remembered them talking to her and reading to her when they weren't entirely sure she was listening, and generally acted more like herself than she over the previous few days. I told her about my trip and about some other things, and we chatted for a longish time before more visitors arrived. It was the final serendipitous event of the day, and it convinced me to stay here for a couple of days more.

I recently learned the word bummel (via Jerome K. Jerome's novel, Three Men on the Bummel). It's a German word that's difficult to translate, but it approximates to a meandering stroll without fixed destination but which must end at a given time and place. In spirit it is akin, I suppose, to bumming around. Joey and I went off on many a bummel together (indeed, we even did so in Germany), and he went off on many more without me, alone and with others, though he sometimes fudged that last part about ending the journey at a specific time and place (just ask Tina about their first big road trip together). If I may get corny about it, it occurs to me that life itself is a bummel - or it should be, if you do it right. For Joey life was most certainly a bummel, an aimless and pleasurable ramble, and my life with him and without him is, or can be, much the same. I wish to hell he were here to visit Chichi right now, but I'm pretty sure I wandered into his path yesterday, and that will just have to suffice.

An Invitation

One of my great worries is that I'll forget what it was like to be around Joey. For a few days after his death, as I sleep-walked my way through the endless procession of visitors and condolences and funeral arrangements, my brain, blurred with shock and sleeplessness, kept grasping at a few persistent thoughts: there was my wedding, forthcoming in two months, at which he was to be the best man; there was the mystery of the circumstances of his death, something that still troubles me; there was the wellbeing of his loved ones, my parents and Tina especially; and there was the concern that, over time, he would inevitably be reduced in my memory to a handful of images and gestures, recalled fitfully and in fragments. This anxiety - not that we'll forget the dead, but that, as the years pass, they will become two-dimensional caricatures of their real selves - is a central part of any grief, and I suspect that it gets worse the closer you are to the deceased. C.S. Lewis wrote about it movingly, with respect to his wife, in A Grief Observed (which I'm now reading), and Francisco Goldman has discussed it in interviews about his new book, Say Her Name, which he wrote after the sudden death of his young wife. Goldman (whom I heard recently on the NY Times Book Review podcast) says that he wrote the book, a sort of memoir-novel hybrid about his wife and their relationship, pretty soon after her death, while living in a borrowed apartment in Berlin, precisely because he was worried that he would forget her. He saw the book as a gift to his future self: as he grows older and his memory fades, he'll always be able to return to the book and revive her.

I've been noticing that my own writing recently has been more about myself and my mourning than it has been about Joey. This is fine - I need to tell the story of my own grief if I'm ever going to learn to live with it (I almost said "work my way through it") - but I'd like to work a little harder to recall Joey's life, if only so that I (we) can have some old stories for future reference.

This is actually more difficult for me than you might think. For all of our closeness, Joey and I actually didn't spend much time together as adults. I would have said that we saw each other pretty frequently - more frequently, indeed, than we saw our parents - but we lived in different parts of the country, so "frequently" here means something like four or five times a year, for a few days at a time. I imagine it added up to no more than a few weeks a year, which is a lot less time that I spend with our cats, say, or with my students, even if the quality of our interactions was rather higher than in either of those examples.

Some of my strongest memories are of the moments when we first met in whatever city or airport we happened to be meeting in. I have a vivid memory of standing in the Nashville airport waiting for him to deplane, looking over the heads of the approaching streams of people for a tall guy who looked a bit like me but always turned out to be much blonder than I remembered. I recall dragging my suitcase through an airport in Berlin doing the same thing, only this time I was the one who was arriving and he was the one who was meeting me. Often - as, I believe, on this occasion - he would be wearing a t-shirt that I had given him (in recent years I had taken to giving him witty t-shirts, and he always made a point of wearing them when we were together, although neither of us ever mentioned that that's what he was doing), but sometimes he would be coming from work and it would take me a moment to recognize the tall, smartly-dressed man heading toward me in loafers and a suit jacket as my brother (this happened when I met him at a train station outside Philadelphia before our cousin's wedding, a moment which, thankfully, I captured with a photo). Sometimes these meetings would be unnecessarily drawn out, either because he couldn't find me (as when he drove up to Boston from Virginia and struggled to follow my directions to my new Somerville apartment) or because I couldn't find him (as in Asheville, the last place we saw each other, when Kate and I wandered around for a good long while in that not-so-big city, and I became increasingly annoyed with his laconic, rather unhelpful [and constantly shifting] descriptions of just where in the hell he and Tina were shopping).

We never worked out any solid protocol for greeting one another: we didn't hug, and we didn't shake hands. This was mildly embarrassing for both of us, especially when we had girlfriends whom the other would hug (thus highlighting the lack of contact between the two brothers), and I think it stemmed from an earlier time in our relationship when we didn't always get along and avoided any open signs of affection. It was something that one of us was one day going to have to address, probably by wrapping the other in an unexpected hug, but neither of us ever made that leap.

Departures I remember less well, though I do remember them. Frequently it would be one of us dropping the other at the airport, usually the Oklahoma City airport, again without a handshake or a hug, but often with an admonition to "call your mother" to let her know we got home safely. I may also have encouraged him, once or twice, not to "take any shit" from the people in the airport or on the plane, but he probably knew to do this already. Our last departure was not at an airport but on the rainy streets of Asheville, as he climbed into his CRV and I stooped into Kate's Saturn. I don't remember what we said to each other, but it's likely that we talked about when next we'd meet (in Nashville, in July) and warned each other to be careful on the road.

This is the part where I come to the point of today's post:

I'm going to work on pinning down other memories, but over the next few months I'll be traveling and might not get a chance to write many of them on this blog, so I'd like to invite guest contributors to take over the blog for a few months. I can give you permission to post on the blog if you send me your email address (a facebook message would be the best way to do that), which will allow me to send you an email that ought to give you posting access. I'd like to limit it to people close to Joey who might have a story or two that they feel like telling. You don't need to talk about your own grief or anything like that (unless you want to), and it doesn't have to be too fancy - mostly I'm hoping to compile a sort of database of Joey stories that we can all return to from time to time as a way to fend off the inevitable erosion of memory. Feel free to write on any topic, although you should know that my grandmother does occasionally read this stuff, and I'll post each new entry to facebook so that my own friends and family will know there's something new to read. I may sneak in a post or two of my own along the way.

This can start as soon as you'd like it to: I'm leaving for the UK on May 8 and will be traveling more or less continuously (UK, Ireland, Brazil) until early July, so there's plenty of time to join in if you don't feel up to it right now. Anna has already agreed to take a crack at this, and I really hope several others will feel similarly inclined. I learn a lot from listening to stories from people who knew him in a different way than I did - Joey, more than most people, very carefully regulated who got to see his different sides - and I think that the more of him we can evoke, the better we can resist our own failing memories.

On Teaching and Writing

The semester is almost at an end, and it can't come soon enough. I recently listened to a story on the Moth podcast by Anthony Griffith, a comedian whose big break - a series of appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show - came just as his two-year-old daughter was dying of cancer. When he wasn't rushing around to hospitals and going crazy with fear and rage, he was standing on the stage having to be funny. The audience couldn't know what he was going through, or the whole thing would fall apart - nobody wants to see a sad clown, as he put it - and they didn't. He made them laugh, launched his career, and went home to make funeral arrangements for his daughter.

I've been feeling a bit like that since the school year started in August. My livelihood doesn't depend on my ability to be funny (though I do rely pretty heavily on humor to keep the students engaged), but in some ways it's even more difficult to do what I do while grieving than it would be if I were a comedian. My classes, both from necessity and as a result of my own scholarly interests, focus pretty heavily on death - usually death of the earth-shaking, genocidal kind, but there are plenty of individual stories of trauma and loss that come up in readings, films, and discussions. I've taught and read about these topics (the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Irish famine, etc.) enough that I'm usually able to put a little intellectual distance between myself and the raw horror of these events, but it is a pretty unpleasant experience to be discussing a book on, say, Russian attitudes toward death (a book I had ordered for last fall's graduate seminar well before Joey's accident) or a film about the Irish Civil War in which one brother ends up killing another (the film was The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which I had seen years ago and about which I had forgotten a few crucial details) with an unsuspecting group of students. It's also difficult, sometimes, to muster the necessary enthusiasm that it takes to hold the interest of roomfuls of students for several hours a day, although I suppose it can also be a welcome distraction: invariably, eventually, I manage to get wrapped up in the material enough that the steady buzz of sorrow and disbelief that's been with me since July quiets to a whisper.

Still, it's exhausting.

Another reason that I'm looking forward to the end of the semester is that the summer will bring more time to write. You may have noticed that these blog posts have become rather infrequent - this is not because I'm running out of things to say, but simply because I haven't often had the time or energy to say them. Starting in early May, I'll be traveling to Oxford, Dublin, and Belfast for a little over a month, working on an academic research project by day and (hopefully) writing in a bit more focused way about Joey by night. I'm toying with traveling to some remote spot in Ireland or Scotland for a week or so to work on both projects, drawn by the idea of embracing my solitude (Kate will be visiting me for a weekend, but otherwise I'll be on my own) and seeing what sorts of words it enables me to string together. I gather that Evelyn Waugh sought solitude for every book he wrote, even if it just meant going across town to stay in a hotel. I like that.

Death is something people have been writing about for as long as there have been people who write - in fact, death may be the most common topic of all creative activity produced in any media whatever, written or otherwise - and I've been thinking a lot about why that is. Obviously, it springs from a desire to control and contain death, to fit it into some sort of structured narrative. It also is an effort to wring some sort of meaning from death, but I think that search for meaning is more of a motivating force for readers than for writers. For the person who writes about death, the act of writing is itself a form of meditation - it's a way of carving out a chunk of time in which to focus exclusively on death, as well as an exercise in molding a swirl of inchoate thoughts into individual words and sentences to be looked upon, turned over, and peered at from all sides. Yes, writing is therapy, in a way, but not so much because it enables us to communicate our thoughts to others as because the act of writing itself forces us into a particular mental and emotional state.

For some reason - probably just because I'm more alert for these sorts of things - I've recently been stumbling upon lots of articles specifically about the act of writing about grief. Most have been prompted by a new book by Meghan O'Rourke about her mother's recent death and another one by Joyce Carol Oates about the death of her husband. O'Rourke had an article in the New Yorker recently (here) on the topic, and she and Oates had a recent exchange (here) on the topic. Both books have received very good reviews, and a couple of the reviews themselves (I haven't yet read the books) have offered really insightful comments on the impulse to write about death. Deborah Jerome's review of O'Rourke's book (here) is brief and insightful, and she puts it as well as anyone when she says "Writing is a path out of the maze of one's aching head." Julian Barnes wrote a long, excellent review of Oates's book (here), which I'd strongly recommend. It reminded me that Barnes himself has a memoir about death, called Nothing to be Frightened Of, which I'd been meaning to read (Joey was a fan of Julian Barnes - one of the first books I ever bought him was England, England), and so I picked up a copy of it when we were in Austin. Several of these articles mention C.S. Lewis's memoir of his wife's death, A Grief Observed, as the gold-standard of grief memoirs, so I've picked up a copy of that, too.

I'm very much looking forward to the time, just a couple of weeks from now, when I can focus a bit more fully on all these things.

A Funny Thing Happened

Last weekend I was in Austin, Texas, when something unexpected happened.

I was attending a conference for British historians at the University of Texas. Most of the attendees were graduate students locked into the tractor beams of the school's several prominent British historians, whose specialties are the diplomatic and economic history of the British Empire, and so most of the papers were hard-nosed empirical studies of political relations amongst Britain's various dominions, colonies, and dependencies, though there were a few squishier papers (and I say this fondly) about the cultural and literary history of the British Empire. I didn't manage to attend much of the conference - teaching obligations kept me away for the first two days - but I was present on the final day, when I delivered my paper and attended some other talks, including the closing lecture by an eminent historian of British political thought.

The title of this lecture, as printed on the program, was something like, "History, Politics, and Thought in Britain," which is the sort of title that you give to a conference organizer if you haven't decided what you want to talk about yet. So as we gathered in the smallish seminar room overlooking the sunny campus, none of us, I believe, quite knew what to expect.

Now, I have been to many, many such talks in my life, and few of them have been memorable, or even especially enjoyable. They are usually rather dry and technical, especially when academics are the only audience, and they are rarely very funny. (The humorless nature of academic history writing is a serious problem that I've been pondering a lot lately. Not only do historians rarely write about their subjects with wit or humor, they also very rarely write about funny things that happened in the past, when there are, in fact, many quite funny things happening all the time. This is especially true of the British Empire.) So when this eminent historian began talking about how we might use novels to shed light on the prevailing assumptions and prejudices of a historical period, I began to slump a little in my seat. But then she said the name Evelyn Waugh, and I perked up a bit. And then she kept right on saying Waugh's name for the next hour and more, until, by the end, she had delivered a whole lecture - a funny, funny lecture - on the man who was my brother's favorite author.

Anybody who knew Joey and has read Waugh will immediately recognize the affinity between the two. Waugh was a satirist whose books eviscerated, with mordant humor, the smug and the self-congratulatory. He was a man of many prejudices, which he flourished freely and remorselessly, but usually in such a way that you knew not to take them too seriously, for prejudices are funnier when their arbitrariness and irrationality are made clear. He was an elitist who detested the vulgarity of modern life but had few nice things to say about the elite themselves (or about anyone else, for that matter). He was a romantic whose principal critique of his own society was that there wasn't enough nobility or beauty in it, but he was also a wanderer who traveled the world looking for, but rarely finding, beauty and nobility elsewhere (usually he simply found more things to mock). If Waugh's books were not books but were, instead, facial expressions, they would be one continuous series of smirks, with perhaps a trace of wistful nostalgia about the eyes in the case of Brideshead Revisited.

The smirk, of course, was Joey's own most practiced expression.

I don't want to suggest an exact equivalence between Evelyn Waugh and my brother. By most accounts, Waugh could be a most unpleasant person, given to misogyny and anti-Semitism, a poor father, a bully, and a snob. Joey was much gentler than Waugh, and he wore his own prejudices (against things like Baptists, woman novelists, Applebees, and the campus of the University of Notre Dame) much more lightly and employed them more consistently for comic effect, not out of deep conviction. But it's easy to see what he liked about Waugh. In addition to being a fellow smirker, Joey was a great Anglophile, and there are few authors more Anglo than Waugh. He also liked the old-fashioned, sophisticated-sounding expressions that Waugh's characters used, especially the phrase "hard cheese," which means something like "tough going" and is in the title of chapter three of A Handful of Dust ("Hard Cheese on Tony"). This phrase was part of Joey's repertoire of Joey-only phrases and sayings, which he peppered into conversations to make people feel that they were in on some kind of joke, even if they didn't quite get it themselves. This was a skill that Joey and Waugh shared: the ability to draw other people into complicity with their smirking world-view.

The lecture in Austin, as any lecture about Waugh should do, drew many laughs, and in most cases it was Waugh himself - his characters, his plots, his words - who earned the laughter. As I sat there, surrounded by strangers (Kate had come to Austin with me, but she was off exploring the city on her own), I noticed that the only empty chair in the room was the one beside me. And as I listened and laughed along - and, when not laughing, smirked - I felt closer to my brother than I had since I last saw him alive, nearly a year ago now.

During the discussion after the lecture, someone asked the speaker what drew her toward this topic, which is not, after all, within her usual bailiwick. She replied that she liked reading novels, and so she wanted to write about them. This is a sentiment with which many historians can identify: we get drawn into the profession because we like to read, but then we become obliged to read dense, academic histories instead of the things that we enjoy reading. I've struggled with this dilemma for years, and lately I've been feeling not only that life is too short not to read what you want to read (which is a sentiment with which my law-student brother, voracious reader of novels and avoider of law books, would wholly sympathize), but also that I want to write what I want to write. This doesn't mean abandoning academic writing, but it does mean a) writing something else, something more literary and less technical, on the side, and/or b) working in a different, less technical vein in my academic writing. If you're reading this, then you know that I'm already doing a). As for b), well, I did win an award at the conference - for the best paper presented - so I'm taking that as an endorsement of the current path that I'm on with the academic stuff. My aspiration in that latter respect is to become a storyteller rather than a technician, which is what so many in my profession are. It is also to try to find a way to write about something funny that once happened, or at least to tell about something serious that once happened, but to tell it with a half-smile.