The last time I visited my uncle Steve, my father was still alive.
We were in town for my cousin David’s bar mitzvah, but I remember nothing of the trip aside from waking up extremely early to catch a flight. I’ve seen Steve a few times since then—he and his wife Nancy have made it to most of the big family occasions over the years—but his sons, Danny and David, have missed those events. My sister and I have no memory of our cousins. At all.
Part of me believes that cousins not seeing each other for two decades is incredibly abnormal, but I know my definition of normal in regards to this sort of thing could be less than accurate1. From talking with friends, I’ve developed the impression that my maternal family is unusually tight-knit: I’ve seen every aunt, uncle, and cousin on my mom’s side of the family at least four times in the last two years, despite living 2,000 miles away from the closer ones. My dad’s side isn’t as close, but I’ve seen all of my other cousins at least three times this decade, at each of their weddings. And yet, I have these two cousins, Danny and David, whom I would literally not recognize if I bumped into them on the street.
Sometimes, I wonder if things would be different if my father was still alive, but I know the answer: Of course. That alternate reality, at least for me, would bear little-to-no resemblance to this world I inhabit.
Steve can’t give me any answers to the questions that plague me. Maybe he can give me some hints.
When I arrive at Steve’s home in the early afternoon, he answers the door still sporting the same pseudo-Amish beard that my mom, sister, and I giggled about the last time we saw him, five years ago. He shows me in, and with his faded but still noticeable Massachusetts accent, instructs me to ignore his two cats, Socks and Mouser. As I settle in on the couch, he gets me a glass of water and apologizes for not being free yesterday, which I assure him wasn’t a problem at all.
Yesterday, Steve had work. Officially, he retired a few years ago, but these days, he fills in as a substitute school nurse to pass the time.
In this, he is like his mother.
My grandmother Ethel was born in 1910, the daughter of immigrants. Her father had fled from Russia to the United States some time before, leaving his home country due to his criminal ways: He and a partner stole horses, changed their appearances and sold them to the next farmer down the road. Steve laughs as he tells me the authorities were hot on my great-grandfather’s tail when he left.
Once he arrived in America, my great-grandfather went legit, opening a shoe store in Revere, Massachusetts and starting a family. My grandmother Ethel was one of six children, and grew up in an era when women’s opportunities were limited. Ethel, for one, refused to accept that.
“Women were supposed to know their place, and she was just a brash, talkative, inquisitive type person,” Steve tells me. “She became a nurse during the days when there was no bachelor’s degree, associate degree, any degree at all, for associate nurses.”
“She grew up in the days where there were no orderlies. There were what they called stretcher boys, they were all black or gay, the only jobs they could get. She saw a whole lot of changes. She wound up basically retiring from nursing, stayed active in her alumni association, and then, when we all grew up and left home, she wound up doing the eye and ear testing at all the schools in Wakefield. Of course, for her, that was marvelous, because she had a different audience every day.”
My grandfather, Simon, had taken care of a family for years before Ethel gave birth to Steve, their first child, in January of 1941. As soon as he came of age, Simon’s mother made him get a job as a window-washer to support the rest of the family2. Later in life, Simon earned an honorary Master’s degree in photography for his hobby.
By the time my father was born on November 24, 1953, Steve was two months shy of his 13th birthday, and Marcia, their sister, was almost ten. At first, my father slept in a crib in his parents’ bedroom, but after he learned to walk, talk, and most notably, watch TV, he became Steve’s roommate with little warning. As Steve tells the story, my grandmother was getting dressed one day while my father watched from his crib, and my father repeated a line from TV—”Dig that wiggle.” The next day, my dad began sleeping in the second twin bed in Steve’s bedroom3.
Steve remembers my father’s childhood fondly.
“Sharp. Very intelligent. Full of mischief. Always willing to try something, just for fun. Let’s see what happens. A side story: When I was growing up, my parents decided I should learn to play a musical instrument. They wanted me to learn the violin. I learned it well enough to become the first violinist in the high school orchestra, but I never really enjoyed playing it. It was, my folks wanted me to do this, I’ll do it. Your dad, they started him on the violin. He was really good. He had a lot of talent for that4.“
In 1959, Steve left for Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he lasted three semesters before failing out.
“In high school, I was one of those kids that was smart enough, and I didn’t get into trouble, so nobody really knew who I was,” Steve explains. “I got acceptable grades without studying, and so I cruised. When you get to college, nobody really cares. You either do the work or you don’t, and if you don’t, you flunk out, which is what happened to me.”
Steve moved home, back into the bedroom he shared with my father, where his academic failure influenced his younger brother’s formative years. Both of my dad’s siblings screwed up, at least in their parents’ minds: Steve flunked out of school, and a few years later, Marcia converted to Catholicism to marry the love of her life. My grandparents reacted poorly to both—in Steve’s case, they made him pay rent while living at home and gave him nothing nicer than socks for birthdays and Hanukkah for years.
“My folks said, ‘If you want college from this point on, you’re going to have to earn it yourself.’ I got a job at a company called Transitron Electronics in Wakefield, and these were the early days of electronics. We made diodes that we sold to people who manufactured radios and other early electronics.”
Steve’s boss at that company felt he was wasting his potential, and threatened to fire him if he didn’t go back to college. Steve acquiesced, enrolling at Northeastern and pursuing a B.A. in Math. At Northeastern, Steve met his wife of 43 years, Nancy.
“Nancy and I were in the same freshman physics class. Three hundred people in a big auditorium. Nancy was one of eleven women in the front row. The rest were all guys.”
While they were classmates early on, several months passed before they became anything more. One November day in the Student Union lounge, Nancy decided to set up a friend with her cousin, and the friend agreed only if Nancy would double-date with them. Nancy wasn’t seeing anybody at the time, so her friend dared her to ask someone out. As various men wandered through the lounge, Nancy’s friend pointed them out, and Nancy shot them all down. All until Steve.
“That was it,” he remembers. “We were dating from that point on.”
The couple married in December of 1965, their senior year at Northeastern, and moved in together. Until he got married, Steve shared a room with my pre-teen father.
After graduation, Steve and Nancy both got jobs with General Electric in Syracuse before winding up back in the Boston area, where Steve worked for Hewlett-Packard. The couple tried to have a child for some time, but after doctors said they couldn’t, they adopted their son Danny.
While Danny was still a baby, HP asked if Steve would transfer to Atlanta. Steve accepted, and not long after they moved to Georgia, a surprise greeted them.
“When (Danny) was a little one, little toddler, we went camping. One morning, there was the smell of bacon blowing across the campground, someone was cooking breakfast, and Nancy got really nauseous, threw up. Turned out she was pregnant with David. So okay, don’t listen to doctors, they don’t really know what they’re saying5.“
The family spent 15 years in Atlanta, during which both Simon and Ethel passed away.
“My mother passed away when she was mid-to-late ’70s6, a form of leukemia. I can’t even remember which one it was, but it was interesting, because she was a lifelong smoker. Didn’t hit her lungs, it hit her blood.
“My dad was just a couple of years later, and he was a type 2 diabetic. Marcia hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days, so she tried to call him, there was no answer. She got really worried, took Bill with her and they went to the house. Knocked on the door, his car was there, no answer. So she said to Bill, ‘Take the door down. You know how to do it7.’ He opened the back door with his foot, and they found my dad on the floor in the bedroom. He had had a stroke, and basically never recovered from that. Died in the hospital a week and a half, two weeks later.”
Around this same time—after Ethel passed away, but before Simon did—my father met my mother. My parents married in October of 1981, and Simon died the following June.
As my father settled down, Steve enjoyed watching his younger brother learn the same lessons he did, especially in regards to parenting.
“We visited them in Baton Rouge, they visited us, those kind of things. We visited New Jersey on occasion. There was good-natured teasing. Once, at our first house in Hudson (Massachusetts), your dad was over visiting. I was putting childproof locks on the cabinets in the kitchen. He wanted to know what the heck it was, and I explained. He said, ‘You can train a kid.’ We got to New Jersey and I noticed there were childproof locks on all the cabinets. I pointed that out to him.
“It was that kind of relationship. It was teasing, it was fun. I think between the violin and our computer backgrounds and all that, we had common ground to talk. We enjoyed each other’s’ company.”
After the family lived in Atlanta for a while, HP closed its help center and Steve took a job with Tandem Computers, which asked him to move to Austin.
Apparently, the visit I barely remember was soon after they moved here. Putting the numbers together—Steve tells me that Danny is now 37 years old, and David is 34—this must have been less than a year before my father was killed.
Of course, Steve remembers how he learned about his younger brother’s death.
“Your mom called me. Where was I? I think I was at home. The phone rang, it was your mom. She was in tears, and she told me what had happened. I was just totally numb. A form of shock, I guess. I just felt really numb. Of course, the first thing was, what can we do? Wound up going to Massachusetts for the funeral. God, that was cold.”
He assumes I remember this, but I do not.
I tell him the story as it was told to me: My mom felt that my sister was too young to make the trip up to Wakefield, and decided to leave her with a family friend in Morristown. Then, my mom gave me a choice: I could either go to the funeral or stay with my friend Jimmy, who lived across the street, and play all the Nintendo I wanted.
I was not at the funeral8.
“Let me tell you something: You really didn’t miss anything,” Steve assures me. “The usual nice words were said, the ceremony was conducted, we went to the cemetery, and you know, it’s basically on the shore of a lake. In the middle of winter, there’s a really cold wind that comes across that lake, and everybody was freezing.”
I ask Steve how he dealt with the news.
“Like I said, there was the shock of it. How do you process it? I just didn’t know. It may sound strange, but it’s almost like you don’t believe it happened. Because a) you weren’t involved and b) it was so remote. Lockerbie, Scotland. Where the hell is Lockerbie, Scotland? You know, I had to go to a map to look it up.”
“As shocked as I was when that occurred, I always wondered how the people in Lockerbie felt. This plane blew apart and landed on them. There were so many people involved.”
“There was a period afterwards when I felt angry, especially after they started tying it to the Libyans. I felt very angry at Muammar Gaddafi and whoever was actually involved with it. I came to the realization that Muammar Gaddafi is more of a clown or an idiot than anything else. He was enjoying his moment in the spotlight, I guess.”
Steve says the attack didn’t really lead to any big changes in his life, and he probably believes what he says in this regard, but it’s worth noting that less than five years later, at more than 50 years of age, he decided to change careers.
One day in 1992 or 1993, he walked into his boss’s office and announced he was quitting his job to go to nursing school. He enrolled at the University of Mary Harden Baylor’s College of Nursing, where, a couple years later, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. More than three decades after flunking out of Bates College, he earned a place in the Nursing Honor Society.
“I think my mother rolled over in her grave when she heard that,” he laughs.
Despite the career change, when I ask him how his life changed after Lockerbie, he shifts to a different topic.
“I’ve watched airline security get tighter and tighter over the years. When I started flying, there was no such thing as security. You got your ticket, you walked up to the gate and onto the plane. Vastly different today, of course. I think more of the changes have happened since 9/11 than because of incidents like Lockerbie. I don’t think anyone in this country took it too seriously until 9/11.”
“I think it’s a shame that we need to have it. However, I understand the need for it. One does have to protect one’s self, which is what the country is doing in many different ways, some agreeable, some not so agreeable. As long as you have people who are willing to give their own lives to make a political statement, security is necessary.”
While he has strong feelings about airline security, Steve largely avoided the legal proceedings against Pan Am and Libya.
“I’d see the headlines, I’d read the stories. I didn’t follow in depth. Your mom would occasionally email something, but basically, it was two Libyans? I can’t remember the details at this point. It’s kind of faded away.”
Regardless, Steve benefitted from the lawsuits. When our settlement with Libya began to take shape, Marcia surprised my mom by calling and asking for a share. Legally, Marcia wasn’t entitled to anything, as my mom was the beneficiary of the estate (but choosing to assign portions of the settlement to my sister and me). When we talked it over, my sister and I felt like our dad’s siblings deserved a cut, out of respect for their pain and suffering, so my mom gave a portion of the first payment to Steven and Marcia, an amount that she described as “house money.”
Which, it turns out, is exactly what Steve used it for.
“We used it to pay off our mortgage,” he says. “Which has been a very nice thing for us.”
After the formal interview concludes, Steve shows me around the house. It’s a three-bedroom, one of which serves as his office. From there, I wander into the guest bedroom, where, on the wall, I notice an arrangement of several portraits. A man and a woman, neither of whom I recognize, are placed on top. Beneath them, I see a teenaged boy who looks vaguely familiar, and beneath that photo, a collection of other shots.
I stare at the portrait of the teen, the generic background of which identifies it as a school photo. The boy wears a plaid blazer and tie, paired with squarish glasses that serve as further confirmation of the era, which I already suspected, and his hair sweeps from his right to his left, with long sideburns. If I saw this photo anywhere else, I would suspect that it was a photoshopped picture of one of the Decemberists—the boy depicted reminds me vaguely of that band’s singer Colin Meloy, or perhaps Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard. Anywhere else, I would see new-millennium indie-rock irony within that frame.
Here, I know better.
“Is that…” I start to ask, and before I finish the question, Steve confirms my suspicions—I’m looking at my father, approximately 40 years ago. The unrecognizable couple above him are my grandparents.
Until now, I’ve never seen any photos from a large swath of my father’s life. We have a fair number of pictures from after he met my mom, and I saw some childhood pictures of him at some point as well. But the years in between remain elusive—while I’ve heard about all the weight he lost before he met my mom, I’ve never seen any documentation of it. I still haven’t, but at least now, I’ve viewed a split-second of my father’s teenage years.
Steve scans the photo and emails it to me, and as he does so, he mentions Nancy put the little shrine together. She’s at work right now, but we have dinner plans later, so we keep catching up until she arrives home.
Soon after, we’re joined by Danny and David—confirming their existence—and the five of us head out to dinner.
Danny is somewhat thick-set and clean-shaven, the latter possibly because he works for the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department, just north of Austin, as a corrections officer in the jail. Steve says he’s surprisingly good at his job for someone who was a troublemaker himself as a child, and that he’s respected by both his fellow officers and his inmates. Meanwhile, he’s one class away from becoming licensed as a realtor.
He will spend a good amount of dinner regaling us with stories from the prison, and as a result, I will learn that before an officer can be certified for wielding a taser, he must be on the receiving end of one first.
Danny carries a taser at work.
While Danny talks about everything—work, investments, his Harley, and so on, all in his thick Texas drawl—David is far quieter. Possessing a soul patch and no noticeable accent, David followed in his parents’ footsteps career-wise. He works for a local tech company called Lombardi Software, providing support for customers in southeast Asia and Australia, which means he usually goes to work around noon and works late. During dinner, he receives an email on his iPhone about some problem at work, but shrugs it off.
We eat, we talk, and eventually, we head back to Steve and Nancy’s house, where we snack on cookies and share stories of pranks from days gone by. As we tell our tales, it gets dark, and Danny, David and I all have other places to be, so we say our farewells and all agree that it shouldn’t be 20 years before we do this again.
- My definition of normal in regards to everything could be less than accurate.
- In those days when divorce was more stigmatized, Simon’s father simply abandoned the family and went off to have a second one somewhere else. Nobody in my family knows any more about the story than this.
- Nearly thirty years later, those twin beds would be moved into my New Jersey bedroom, and then on to my first one in Memphis as well. I believe they now belong to a family friend.
- My mom also played violin when she was younger. However, the one time she tried to play for my sister and me, we could tell she hadn’t practiced in a very long time.
- Says the nurse.
- Spoiler Alert: Her gravestone says she was 70 years old. Human memory is a strange and wonderful thing.
- Bill is a former police officer.
- In fact, I’ve still never attended a funeral.