Due to the legally sensitive nature of the post below lets all just say this MIGHT have happened.
Several months after my father passed away my sister was still in our hometown taking care of the important things that need to be done when a loved one dies unexpectedly. Because I could not be there in person I felt like I wasn’t doing enough to get my father’s estate in order but my sister and the rest of the family assured me that they could take care of things.
Once all of the major issues were dealt with my sister needed a break so I invited her to fly out to Los Angeles to spend a few weeks at my house; this would give her a chance to relax and we’d all be able to talk about the unexpected insanity of the previous six months.
My sister arrived in LA on a May afternoon with her clothes, her laptop and a shoebox which she explained was full of candy and homemade brownies. She made it very clear that I was welcome to eat all of the candy but not the brownies because they were not just any brownies…they were special brownies (wink, wink).
My wife and I looked at my sister in shock; not because she had brought pot brownies into our house, that was fine. We just couldn’t believe that she had actually brought it through airport security and onto the plane.
She explained that she didn’t want to worry about buying any in a town where she didn’t have any connections so it was just easier that way. My wife and I explained that we lived in a neighborhood with more marijuana dispensaries than gas stations but it was too late. Besides, my sister had already slipped through the TSA unnoticed and nothing could stop her now.
Still, we were shocked. My sister explained that there was never any reason to worry.
She opened up the box to show us that she had disguised the shoebox containing the brownies as an Easter basket from our grandmother. The brownies were under the plastic grass, which was covered in candy, and itunes gift card and a card that said “Happy Easter from Grandma” on the envelope.
My wife and I had to admit that it looked right, the itunes gift card was an inspired touch, and we couldn’t argue with the results. Still there was one thing that bothered me and I had to say something. I told my sister:
“I can’t believe security didn’t catch you…that’s not grandma’s handwriting.”
The last time I got my hopes up for a New York Mets game in April was back in 2009 because I was going to be in New York for the Mets home opener, which happened to be their first game at the then brand new Citi Field.
My father called me a few days before I left LA for NY to tell me that he scored us a pair of tickets to the game even though it had been sold out for months. He had a knack for obtaining hard to get items and a reputation for not revealing how so I didn’t ask any questions. It was a new season, a new park and my father, who is responsible for my being a Mets fan, was taking me to the game. This was as good as life could get when it came to baseball. There was no reason to ask any questions.
Unfortunately we didn’t make it to the game. The tickets fell through because the person tasked with delivering the tickets traded them for drugs. This is sometimes the cost of doing business with friends and family. I was disappointed and so was my father. At the time the ticket problem felt like a bad end to a trip home.
My father apologized for what had happened and invited me to join him at his favorite bar to watch the game. His favorite bar happened to be the VFW Hall where he was inexplicably a member despite having never served in the armed forces…I didn’t ask how, the explanation would only lead to more questions that I’d never get answers to.
We sat over a few beers and enjoyed the first few innings. A few days earlier we had sat in the same bar and had a long conversation. That talk was the reason I had come home. After years of being distant from one another he and I had settled into a comfortable groove with one another. The change began when I got married in 2007 and just kept getting better. When he asked me when I’d come home so we could catch up in person I booked a flight. I was very surprised and happy to be sitting at a bar with my father, finally clearing the air and talking about regrets as well as our mutual desire to get past them and be closer from then on.
After a few inning we decided to head home to watch the rest of the game. When we arrived at the house there was plenty of ballgame left and beer in the fridge. The Mets fell behind early and lost the game but that didn’t matter. After 34 years of misunderstandings and missed opportunities we were finally just talking like two people who actually liked one another. We talked baseball, comedy and family and eventually stopped paying attention to the Mets.
When the game ended we stayed up a little while longer talking about the future. There was more to talk about but he had to work early the next morning and I had to catch a flight back to Los Angeles so we said goodnight and goodbye.
The next morning my father was gone before I got up to leave. I sat in the airport unsure when I’d be back but I hoped that whenever I did we’d finally get to a game.
Eventually I made it to Citi Field but, instead of going with my father I went with a friend. As it turned out, that Mets home opener in April 2009 would be the last game I would see with my father; in October of that year he passed away. From my perspective it was shocking but in retrospect I should have seen it coming because I now believe that he knew he was running out of time.
It’s been three years since that night and I am no longer disappointed that we didn’t get to that game. Instead, I’m grateful that we got to stay at home talking about more important things. While it wasn’t the last time we spoke it was the last time we saw each other. Things didn’t happen the way we had planned, they rarely did, but they still turned out okay.
In 1984 I was 10 years old and desperately seeking the three B’s: baseball, boobs and break-dancing.
I had some of the things I believed I needed to break-dance: music, cardboard, spray paint but I was missing the one thing I needed most…a crew. Nobody back then would even think of break-dancing solo. Solo breakin’ would be ridiculous…sure someday it might happen someday but I wasn’t going to be the one to cross that line.
I tried putting a crew together but the best I could manage was the kid down the street who was not allowed to listen to rap and my little sister who was six years old. In addition to having a wack crew I only had the vaguest idea of how to actually dance, mostly I just rolled on cardboard while music played and that was not impressive to anyone, not even my mother who remarked that my robot moves looked like: “a robot crapping its robot pants”. Clearly I wasn’t going to achieve greatness in such an oppressive environment. If I wanted to learn I had to find someone to teach me.
I didn’t have to look far for role models. Some of the kids in my neighborhood appeared to be pretty serious dancers, with a real crew and everything complete with matching burgundy outfits with the name of their crew, The Junior Rockers*, on the back.
*The name Junior Rockers was never explained. Were they a minor league affiliate of another bunch of older break-dancers called The Rockers? I’ll never know.
I wanted was to be a Junior Rocker so I asked if I could join. The Junior Rockers immediately said no way. Sure we rode the school bus together and played baseball in the street but that’s as far as it went, I was not dance crew worthy.
While I was dejected, I had a plan, somehow I though that if I just got my own matching suit I’d be accepted in their crew; because in my mind like that was the only requirement…a burgundy suit made of plastic with the name on the back.
It seemed pretty simple in my head…
Instant acceptance, right?
I figured that if they said no I’d play the old “Come on guys, I spent the money on the suit…please let me join” card.
Here was a problem: When I explained the plan to my mom she told me it was ridiculous because she wasn’t buying me a customized dance outfit when I could barely walk in a straight line. Even worse, she said she would go talk to the other kids parents about letting me hang out with the dancers. This was even worse than not getting the suit and I begged her not to talk to anyone’s parents. I felt it was better to have no crew then to have a crew your mom got you into.
Instead of giving up I made my own suit out of things I had at home like sweatpants and trash bags (I wish I was kidding). Then I worked on my moves and got ready to show what I could do.
I’d like to tell you that I marched down the street in my homemade suit to dance for the crew and that they respected my effort and took me in as their equal or at least the token white kid, but they didn’t. Instead of being welcomed I got pointed at, laughed at and if I had lunch money it would have gotten stolen from me.
Looking back on it I guess society was not ready for some social boundaries to be broken through dance, especially not by a ten year old kid in a red windbreaker with trash bags wrapped around his sweat pants.
This short entry appeared on my now defunct old blog many years ago but I was reminded of it today following the passing of the Monkees Davy Jones.
When John Lennon was shot I was only six years old. I remember my mom crying, but I don’t remember being sad because I got to stay home from school. This started the bittersweet tradition of the Celebrity Snow Day.
A few years later it happened again:
“Mom, John Belushi died, can we stay home from school?”
“Yes”
Then the next year:
“Mom, Marvin Gaye got shot”
“Did he die”
“Yeah”
“No school tomorrow”
“Yay!”
In time this tradition faded away and eventually it disappeared completely*. When Rock Hudson died we took a half day but according to my much younger brother, they didn’t miss a minute of school when Kurt Cobain, Tupac or Biggie died. The kids today may have a lot of advantages but they don’t have it all.
*I resurrected the old tradition on my own by taking a day off when Joe Strummer passed away. I’m sure that my mom would have approved and I’m also certain that Davy Jones’ passing would warrant a day off. RIP Davy.
In my early 20’s I begun to suffer from terribly painful headaches. Not migraines, just painful headaches. This was around 1997 a time when I taking home about $200 week and then finding a way to pay rent, keep my car insured and eat. My primary entertainment was sitting in my studio apartment with a headache and keeping these headaches a secret from people.
By the spring of 1997 I had been suffering from headaches for about a year and had done nothing about it. When you’re broke you have to decide what is essential and what you can do without. I was almost 23 years old and my essentials included the aforementioned rent, food and car insurance. On top of that there was the cost of gas for the car, a phone for my apartment, beer and increasingly… gin. Fashion was not a priority, which explains why 90’s era photos of me look so bad and finally, health care was not a priority for me even if this meant not treating things like my terrible headaches.
Not seeking medical care was not new for me; after spending hundreds of hours with doctors in the first 8 years of my life I pretty much stopped going after that. Part of this was due to the fact that I was generally physically healthy but mostly I was afraid that going to a doctor might turn us something wrong and that would cost me a lot of money. I told nobody until finally I found myself unable to do anything for more than a few hours without having to lay down due to the headaches. This was when I finally confided to my then girlfriend that I thought I had a brain tumor and was going to die.
I considered her the sensible one in our relationship so when she told me that I might be getting headaches due to eyestrain I wanted to believe it even though I had never had eye problems in all of my years of taking the eye tests at school or when I took the eye test to get my driver’s license. She asked me to go to an optometrist just in case. I agreed to try it.
A few days later we were on our way to the optometrist and I casually mentioned, like I always did, that the street signs on Long Island were impossible to read because they were so old and faded. She ignored this comment because she had grown tired of hearing it from me. We got to the eye doctor’s office and I went in to take my exam.
I talked about the headaches, I took the eye tests and in a few minutes the doctor advised me that he had good news and bad news: The good news was that I probably didn’t have a brain tumor. The bad news, which suddenly seemed manageable, was that I had a severs astigmatism and would need glasses. He also advised me not to drive until I had glasses.
Out in the lobby I found my girlfriend in the middle of a: “Oh my god what if they find nothing and he IS going to die” style panic. After spending a selfish moment basking in the realization that hey she must really care about me to get this upset I gave her the good news and asked her to drive me home, which she did. I also asked her to drive me to and from work for the next week and she told me that this was not going to happen.
As she drove home she didn’t complain about the road signs once. I drove myself to and from work like I had been doing for a year but I didn’t drive anywhere else that week.
After a week my glasses were ready. To keep up appearances my girlfriend drove me to pick them up. When I tried them on I was amazed. Everything looked different. Because I had never worn glasses before my depth perception would be off until I adjusted to the changes but everything else was suddenly so clear. My eyesight had declined so gradually that I never realized there was anything wrong.
Since I was still adjusting to wearing glasses my girlfriend drove us home too. As she drove I said to her: “Hey while we were in there they must have replaced all of the old street signs.” She didn’t correct me. I would figure it out eventually; the road signs, my priorities and more.
Note: That girl in this story and I eventually split up but not before me and my glasses moved to LA to give it one last try. We are still friends to this day.
