I was a precocious child, even if I didn’t know the word: I read my first book before my second birthday1, learned Chess from my father soon after, and, over the course of several family visits to New York’s museums, decided that Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night was my favorite painting.
And I loved the tunnels.
The drive from Morristown to Manhattan, for almost all destinations, involves passing through one of two tunnels—the Lincoln to the north, the Holland to the south. For us to get where we wanted to go, we took the Lincoln, which emerges on the west edge of midtown Manhattan, a short drive to all of the city’s fine museums.
As a child, I wanted to take the Holland. I was too young then to realize how hypnotized I was by the simple appeal of the path not taken—all I knew was that I wanted to take the Holland tunnel into Manhattan, and my parents refused. It wasn’t the right way, they insisted, and, strapped in the back seat of our Buick Century, I could muster little objection.
We always took the Lincoln Tunnel, and we usually saw my favorite Van Gogh. I was a precocious child, with a favorite artist and a favorite route to see his works, even if it was never taken.
The ideal route from Morristown to Carle Place, Long Island avoids tunnels entirely. Taking either one would lead into the mire of slow-moving traffic on Manhattan’s surface streets, a waste of time, gas, and patience.
The best route from Morristown to Carle Place involves bridges instead: Driving across the George Washington Bridge, touching the north tip of Manhattan for the briefest of moments before merging onto the Cross Bronx Expressway. From there, the path crosses the Clearview Bridge, which leads to the tangle of Long Island parkways that will get me to my destination.
Or so my GPS tells me.
The Pacifica carries me along this route, towards a place known as the Carle Place Diner. Today’s interview subject, a man named Dan Tobin, eats brunch here every Sunday, and invited me to join him to discuss his brother Mark Tobin, who was on Pan Am 103.
Dan arrived before me, and I’m lucky he recognizes me, because I wouldn’t have recognized him after our single, fleeting encounter at the memorial in December. Beneath a new-looking Mets cap with a still-flat brim, Dan’s long grey hair peeks out and joins with a beard that is a mix between black and grey. This morning’s conversation ostensibly will center around Mark, but Dan has a story to tell of his own.
I know very little about Mr. Tobin, but I know he has issues.
After Dan contacted me several months ago expressing interest in this project, I asked for a few details about his life, including what he was doing now, and his reply mentioned acting and antidepressants in the same sentence. An hour from now, he’ll mention taking anti-paranoia medication as well, and I will already understand why.
The hostess shows us to a booth, and we settle in, ordering brunch and discussing our losses. Immediately, I find Dan both incredibly forthcoming and incredibly disturbed, and I wonder how much the loss of his brother had to do with the latter. Was Dan destined for a life of mental instability anyway, or did Mark’s death send him down that path? I don’t ask, and I don’t know that Dan could say.
I don’t know that anyone could.
In December of 1988, Mark was a semester away from a degree in Communications from Fordham University, but had spent the previous semester as part of Syracuse’s program. Of the seven Tobin children—four boys and three girls—Mark was the second-youngest. Dan was the youngest and, at the time, a sophomore at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
On December 21, 1988, Dan had already returned home for Christmas break, and had taken a part-time job working as an accountant for the city of Hempstead. He remembers walking home from work and finding his parents and brother in the kitchen when he arrived.
“I knew that something was wrong,” he tells me. “It was strange, because I thought that they’d be happy to see me, that the day was over and we’ll have dinner.”
Mark had been abroad for so long that Dan wasn’t sure when exactly Mark was due back, partly because he thought Mark might stop by Fordham before coming home for Christmas. Another brother’s behavior first tipped Dan off that something was amiss.
“I remember my brother kind of stammering about ‘Who’s going to tell him?’ And I was like, ‘Who’s going to tell me what?'”
Mark’s death seemed bizarre to Dan, and he struggled to wrap his head around what had happened. An early phone call from the authorities certainly didn’t help.
“I remember the whole thing as, I wasn’t very sad because I didn’t believe it, and that it didn’t really come home for me until they discovered a body. That was 100-something days later, around his birthday, that we got a body back from Scotland. The night that it happened, we got phone calls from the CIA and the FBI saying that there were no remains.
“It was confirmed by the FBI that he was in the seat. It’s not like he missed the plane. We kind of hoped that he missed the plane. That was the hope that we held out, and thought, Well, that’s his plane, but we haven’t heard from him. He’s had to have heard of it if he wasn’t on the plane. They said all involved were killed, that there were no survivors, and they didn’t know how many on the ground had been killed, so I was watching Peter Jennings or whoever else was on. I think it was Bernie Shaw who told us that there were no survivors and there were people dead on the ground from the plane collapsing on them. So I was kind of in shock for a lot of the time, and I didn’t cry. I wasn’t sad, because I didn’t comprehend what had happened. I didn’t think it was true. I thought that they were wrong. You can’t know that something else happened, or he didn’t make the plane. It’s pretty strange that I didn’t cry. I was catatonic really.
“In the next couple of days, we had a Mass. I kind of have a hazy memory of that, too. I remember the place being full and I remember joking with my brother’s friends that they should go to Fordham and have a kegger to celebrate his life instead of having it end with a Mass. That this Mass is for mom, and that a Mass didn’t really feel appropriate. Mark wasn’t a pagan. He wasn’t an atheist, but it didn’t feel right having a Mass to remember his life, in that it was all mourning. He was one of the happiest people you knew. He wouldn’t get sad very often, and when he did, he’d hide it pretty well.”
Dan returned to college the next semester, a decision which he thinks didn’t help.
“I went home a lot that semester. Now, I kind of wonder if I should have gone back. I didn’t really concentrate very well, and I felt like I was being spied on.”
By whom?
“By students. Maybe some in administration. Some of the teachers might have. I felt like I was being spied on because all of a sudden, my opinion was more important to a lot of people. Some of the conspiracy theories were far out. They thought that the CIA had known about it. Some of the conspiracy stuff was that the CIA planned it. There were some really crazy theories out there, that it was DEA thing gone wrong.
“I wasn’t sure that it made a difference. I didn’t really want to theorize. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to believe. I didn’t want to believe it happened, first of all. Some people were annoyed, they were like, ‘Well, it was your brother and you should be more interested in how it happened.’ I’d tell people like that to fuck off.”
Dan stayed at Catholic and got his degree, but gradually withdrew from student life.
“It got quieter. Some people had to be told a year later or a couple years later. I had dropped my Amnesty International group. I was the founder and president of the student chapter and big mouth on campus. I didn’t go for student government. I thought I was going to, and there were some ideas I had about running for office, but I didn’t really get as involved. I was more interested in having a drink and going out and listening to music, and playing music. I had been for a couple of years. I didn’t feel like doing much that was serious. I still gave the appearance of being a good student, but I kind of wonder now. Years later, I thought, I shouldn’t have gone back to school, because I didn’t really trust the people who were around me. I was kind of in a, not really depressed state, but a mild somber kind of depression. Not a manic depression, where I would lash out at people, but a profane, unserious person.”
By his final year at Catholic, Dan’s sole campus involvement was serving as an altar boy at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. While he was never particularly religious, he says that “I liked the building. The Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is a whopper of a building.” While discussing his semester as an altar boy, Dan makes a casual but possibly significant comment.
“I thought it was my last semester, that I’d be an altar boy for the last semester of the year. I’d never been one before. I hadn’t been molested, so I missed the initiation. You can put that in there, because I’ll tell you about the other molestation problems.”
In the whirl of tangents that ensues, he never does tell me about those “other molestation problems,” and I, regrettably, forget to follow up on the subject.
Dan’s stream of consciousness instead leads to his post-college years, during which he struggled to find direction.
“I’m not that great a party animal. I tried it. I tried to be a libertine, but it’s just not in me. Be a hedonist, I’m just not a very good hedonist. I’m a much better agnostic.”
Dan spent time working as a cashier in a pharmacy, and traveled with his parents. After a while, he decided to go into teaching, and got a master’s degree from Adelphi. Around this time, Dan also dove headlong into Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, where he wound up at odds with others’ political beliefs and agendas.
“I was getting pretty involved, and I was getting pretty abrasive. I was getting more abrasive with the group. I kind of thought there were some problems, to me, because I thought the group was too Democratic. It was too Democratic with a capital ‘D.’ It was too liberal. There were too many people in the group who were anti-Reagan, anti-Bush, and not just anti-Bush because he was a deadbeat on the issue. I was becoming pretty accusative when the group would meet, because I didn’t think, I wasn’t really being given anything to do and felt like, I had my ideas and I shared them, and that was it. Somebody raised their hand and said, ‘Well, let’s make you part of the board of directors.’ What boards of directors do is they sit around and bullshit.”
Dan felt as though he had no power and no responsibility within the group, and that his views were marginalized by the rest of the board. While he identified as a Republican, he thought the rest of the group had it in for the George H.W. Bush administration.
“I thought the dull roar was basically all about Bush, Reagan, and failure, and I was trying to turn it into, how do you turn this into a victory for him? I was thinking along the lines of, if Bush bombs Libya, within four years of the bombing, that’s a public relations victory, and don’t think he doesn’t think like that. So why not? Because you’re being reminded that America hit Benghazi2, and we missed. We missed Gaddafi. He’s such a disturbed guy that he’s going to retaliate. But the problem with thinking logically is that Gaddafi does not think logically. It’s that you’re dealing with a man who didn’t need any excuse to go bomb somebody. He’s killed tens of thousands of people.”
Politically, Dan identifies as to the right of George H.W. Bush, and says he believes that Clinton would have lost the 1992 election had Bush retaliated against Libya for the downing of Pan Am 103. He also says “Bush basically committed treason” by agreeing to only try al-Megrahi and Fhimah, and not pursuing Gaddafi himself—a deal which was reached during Clinton’s second term.
“I’m surprised that only one got convicted, and disappointed that both weren’t convicted. Because it’s really unsatisfying that one person goes to jail for 30, 40 years because of 270 killed. That’s the scale, 270 on here, and one, one person. Who’s the one person who’s so important that they planned it out and carried it out themselves? They didn’t, and they know it. But they still think that? There’s a discussion now about the guy wanting to be transferred to a different prison. I still get some stuff, but I can’t follow it all.”
I fill Dan in on what I know, what’s been in the news lately: Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the sole man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, has prostate cancer, which doctors claim is terminal. As such, in addition to his ongoing appeal, he has applied for release under compassionate grounds. If it’s granted, he could return to Libya and live out his dying days with his family.
Dan expresses displeasure about this possibility.
“George Williams3 and I would be like saying he’s got AIDS from an animal. We’ve been very big on homosexuality, about the sexual habits of Fhimah and Megrahi, both. It’s, that’s been a bit of a joyful release. Just pile on the bad jokes.”
Dan and his mother spent a week at the trial in June of 2000. He was repulsed by what he saw.
“I feel like we’ve been kicked in the stomach, really. That it’s really insulting for us to be expected to play by ‘the rules’ and be so ethical about dealing with criminals when they should have been punished, they could have been punished, by the military in the ‘usual way.'”
“We’re handling them with kid gloves. We were the ones who had to presume innocence and allow evidence to be entered in a certain way. Trace it back to Malta. We were told that we had to handle the case sensitively when Islamic terrorists don’t have the same agenda. And we let them get away with it. I still think that even just one conviction is, it’s better than nothing, but not a whole lot better than nothing.”
I push back with my thinking on the subject, that compassionate release is why the western world is better than states like Libya: We offer compassion for those who are dying, and more importantly, for their families. We follow due process of law instead of bombing airplanes in retaliation.
Dan disagrees strongly, opining that because they showed us no mercy, we should show them none. He tells me he’s active in political discussions online, and he admits that some of his writings have been considered extremist at times.
“Some of the things I write online, one of the guys I talked to a long time ago said, ‘It’s neo-Nazi, but I know where it’s coming from, so it’s okay.’ I thought, I don’t know how neo-Nazi I became or am. I’m not, but one of the things I started typing on the computer, ‘ragheads,’ ‘towelheads,’ that they sodomize their camels and beat their women. You know, really letting them have it with the rhetoric, and then I would get censored by someone on, you know, ‘My wife and I have read your columns, Mr. Tobin. We are convinced that you are a Nazi. We have alerted the Yahoo! or Google, we have alerted these people that you are too much like Tim McVeigh, Mr. Tobin.’ Really crazy stuff, but I seem to take a lot of anger out on existing Islamic terrorist groups, and I don’t really differentiate from Gaddafi’s terroristic tendencies or his groups.”
Dan claims that, not only was he not surprised by the 9/11 attacks, he expected them.
“I had predicted back in ’98 that they would probably fly planes into buildings, because those are the biggest targets around. I was catty at the time, and they looked at me and thought, ‘Is this insider information? Are you telling us something we don’t know?'”
“I predicted that planes would fly into buildings because it only made sense that if a Palestinian bomber was going to blow himself up or herself up, he’s going to take people with him. Just because it happens in Israel doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen here. I also predicted that there would be attacks on Major League Baseball stadiums or football stadiums. Thank God that hasn’t happened, but if you’re going to kill a few thousand people at a time, you know, Rolling Stones concerts and Dave Matthews. They’re going to have to charge a separate emergency safety fee.”
Besides thinking he had predicted 9/11, what was his reaction to the day?
“I thought it was bizarre, because it was a beautiful day out. I mean, if anyone remembers, it was a beautiful day. I had nothing else planned. There was nothing I was going to do, but I got on the phone to see if my sister-in-law, I know she was, she had an office in the World Trade Center, one of the buildings down there. She changed her job, but I don’t know where she was located. And it turns out that she was either midtown or in Connecticut. She’s changed her job a few times.
“She wasn’t there. And so I was crying over the phone, talking to her, and she was happy, ‘Oh, that’s nice you’re crying.’ She wasn’t there, and I thought, ‘I don’t know who else I know around there.’ My parents were shut out of the country. They were up in Canada, and I thought, ‘I don’t know if my parents are going to be coming back from Canada. I don’t know if the hijackers used Toronto as a base, because it’s a multicultural city, or when they’re going to be available to come back in the country.’ I thought it was pretty strange that it hadn’t happened earlier, actually. I thought that it probably wasn’t Gaddafi, but he couldn’t be ruled out. And I also thought that it was related to Iran, but I was wrong and it was Saudi Arabia, and now it’s more Pakistani and an itinerant population of terrorists. I wasn’t surprised that it was New York, but I was surprised that they didn’t get out or parachute to safety or whatever. I did go to the mass for a few people who died, and felt empty.”
Dan tells me he hasn’t followed the Pan Am 103 case in several years.
“I was hoping my father was going to follow it a little more closely, but he’s retired now, and he’s also losing his memory a little bit. I’m very impressed when he remembers the name of a ballplayer. Or he’ll read about, he gets about 30 pieces of mail every day. Begging letters, all. But my mom said that in the morning, he’ll read the New York Times, and then he’ll go through the mail. There’s repeat mail, from groups they already support, and they leave that out very carefully and try to make sure that they don’t send more money than expected from any number of charities that they support.”
Among the charities the elder Tobin supports is a scholarship at Fordham in memory of Mark, funded with money from the lawsuits. Dan, meanwhile, still isn’t entirely sure how he feels about the money.
“I had mixed feelings about it, because not only is it not going to bring them back, it poses all kinds of strange questions to me about what Mark would have liked to have done with it. We have a scholarship in his memory, so that’s good.
“It’s the Tobin Memorial Scholarship at Fordham. I feel good that Libya’s hurt somehow, but I realize it’s just a drop in the bucket, many buckets. They have buckets of cash.”
So does Dan, though. He’s not sure exactly how the money was split between his parents, siblings and himself, but he says that, at age 39, his share is plenty for him. He plans on living off of the Pan Am 103 money indefinitely.
“I don’t know what my parents are doing with it. Bought a condo, and were able to move into it before they sold the house. They’re setting up a fund for me, because, my father said, ‘When we die, you stand to inherit a substantial sum of money. We’re going to help set it up with your oldest sister and older brother so you don’t go crazy.'”
Dan sees this as an opportunity to get involved again with causes he was once passionate about.
“I’m still involved with Amnesty International, the Constitution Party, and I may get involved again with the board of directors for Pan Am 103. I have a history with them, but I don’t know what else there is to do with the group. I feel like we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do.”
Aside from politics, Dan plays guitar to keep busy. He tells me he has twenty or thirty songs recorded on a four-track, and wants to get serious about recording them. He struggles with motivation, though.
“The problem is partly that, with the money, there’s no pressure to do that. For a lot of people, there’s a deadline with everything they write and do, whereas I kind of, the days seem to be a lot like each other. I can wake up in the morning and hit the clock and decide I don’t have to go to the diner until 1:00. I’m not going to get up until 11:00. Or I’m going, ‘I’ve got a long day of watching baseball ahead of me.’
“I take depression medication and paranoia medication, and they interfere a little bit with my eating. The side effect is that it makes it harder to judge when I’m full, so I’ve gained weight on the medication. I’m not a manic depressive, I’m just a sober depressive. But I take the medication, and it interferes with my sleep a little bit, but it interferes with my eating. It takes away the feeling of being full. It’s like I’m hungry even after eating. It’s kind of a tough situation to be in when you’re 270 pounds. I’m as big as I’ve ever been, and I’ve lost five pounds in the last couple weeks. It’s not good.”
If Dan ever does get a job again, he hopes it’ll be in the music business—perhaps owning a guitar store, or finding some partners and opening a recording studio.
It’s strange for me to hear him utter ideas like the last one, for him to insist that he’s serious about his passions even though he’s wasting whole days watching baseball, but I can’t quite decide why. This sounds strange either because it’s a completely counterintuitive idea, or because probably he sounds like I do.
“Then, we tried to name our babies,
But we forgot all the names that,
The names we used to know.
But sometimes, we remember our bedrooms
And our parents’ bedrooms
And the bedrooms of our friends
Then we think of our parents
Well, what ever happened to them?”
I place Funeral in the Pacifica’s CD player and sing along to the first track, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” as I leave the diner’s parking lot, briefly considering taking the scenic route back to Morristown through one of Manhattan’s tunnels. Instead, I once more put my faith in my GPS to get me where I need to go. This decision frees my mind up to focus on more pressing matters, like what just happened.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t mildly horrified by the interview that just concluded, but not in a judgmental way.
Judging Dan would be all too easy. Anyone can cringe when they hear someone casually throw the word “towelhead” around in a crowded restaurant. Anyone can declare somebody with the opposite political beliefs to be wrong. But as much as I disagree with Dan, I still respect him, because while I think his conclusions are wrong, I understand how he reached them.
This is the second-most terrifying thing about my time with Dan.
As we left the diner, Dan noticed the buttons strewn across the flap of my messenger bag, representing various institutions and bands which I support. Some logos are nationally recognizable, such as Obama ’08, I (heart) New York, and SPIN, but more are local to Seattle, such as 826 Seattle, Math and Physics Club, the Long Winters, and KEXP. The one he noticed most, the one he keyed in on, was an Arcade Fire button. Dan mentioned he picked up one of their albums and enjoyed it, and from there, segued into how, among his other musical interests, he would like to open a record label.
I would not mind doing this myself.
As I drive back to Morristown, I worry about how, despite our vast differences, in many ways, a hair’s breadth separates me from Dan. I can imagine one or two things having gone wrong in my youth, one or two little things that tipped me over the edge into the sort of mental instability that appears to define his life. I know how he got to where he is, to casually tossing around slurs at Sunday brunch, and I quietly thank the universe for keeping my brain reasonably functional despite everything.
However, as surprisingly intact as my mind may be, it is not immune to distractions. Somewhere in the Bronx, as I’m stuck in typical, inexplicable, mid-Sunday-afternoon-in-New York traffic, I think about all the awkward and unpleasant moments during that meal. From there, I begin think of how it could have been better, and then my mind wanders to thoughts of a redheaded Scottish lass who has probably already forgotten me, and what she likes for breakfast.
Not infrequently, there are times when my life feels entirely surreal. For example: A few years ago and a few miles away from this Bronx traffic jam, when I arrived home from attending a Yankees-Red Sox game on my 21st birthday to discover via CNN.com’s homepage that the United States had lifted sanctions against Libya, and as such, the former country would be paying the families of Pan Am 103 the second 40% of the settlement money. This greatly changed both international diplomacy and my net worth, but it mattered more for an entirely different reason.
For many years when I was younger, I imagined scenarios in which my father’s murder had been a lie. Maybe he decided to remain in England—maybe he left my mom for a secretary there or something—and out of spite, she told me he died instead. After all, I wasn’t at the funeral. I don’t remember ever seeing the casket, and nobody I knew saw the body. As time went on, the scenarios in which my father remained alive grew more elaborate: He had grown wealthy in England, and my mom coerced him into paying her a massive amount of child support at the exact same time that Pan Am Airlines’ insurers settled with the families.
These were nothing more than fantasies, of course, and I knew that even then. Still, my imagination kept constructing possibilities that my father was anywhere but in the ground beside a lake in the town where he was born.
No singular event brought a stop to these ruminations, no moment occurred to bring them to an end. As the years went by, I merely realized that the events unfolding went beyond the scope of coincidence or orchestration—while my mom could have lied to my sister and myself, getting my father’s name falsely inscribed on a memorial in Arlington would have required unimaginable efforts. Over time, that final fraction of a percent of my mind that held out hope finally went away, replaced by something else entirely.
Now, when confronted with the ridiculous nature of my existence, I find myself wondering if this is all perhaps a child’s dream, if somehow I went to bed on December 21, 1988 and never woke up. But then I try to remember my bedroom, and my parents’ bedroom, and the bedrooms of my friends, and they are all too far gone from my mind. These are the moments when I am most certain of all, when I know for sure that I am not a five-year-old who cannot wake up, but a 25-year-old who all too often can’t sleep.
These are the moments when I wouldn’t mind being wrong about everything.
When I awoke, I knew there was something wrong. Call it intuition—I had no reason to believe such a thing. I couldn’t possibly have known what was coming.
But that morning, as I climbed out of what had been my father’s childhood bed and made my way out of the room that my parents had lovingly painted a sky blue shade at my request, something somehow tickled the back of my mind. Down the hall I went, past the door to my parents’ room on the right and my not-quite two-year-old sister’s room on the left.
And I heard sobbing.
I continued until I reached the living room, where I discovered my mother crying in our big blue chair. I didn’t know why, so I asked the question I had been waiting several days to ask.
“Is Daddy home yet?”
“No, Scott,” she told me between sobs. “Your Daddy’s not coming home. Your Daddy’s dead.”
She arose from the chair and fled into the room which was now only hers, slamming the door behind her and crying hysterically. With her gone, I climbed into the chair and started crying too.
Tonight, I am going home, and yet I am not.
A few months ago, when I charted out this little adventure, I mailed a letter to an unknown recipient.
“You don’t know me, but I’m writing you because of your house,” the letter began. “I lived there, at 116 Burnham Road, from my birth until August of 1989, and I’m now working on a book about the circumstances that led to my family leaving.”
From there, I went into detail—how my parents purchased the house months before my birth, how my father died on board Pan Am 103, how we’d moved away, and how we’d driven by during our visits to Morristown, but hadn’t set foot inside since August 15, 1989. The latter half of the letter described the house as I remembered it, an attempt to prove what I was saying.
It all seemed like a long shot. I joked with friends that the major points of the letter—I used to live in your house, then my dad was murdered, and now I’m coming back—could serve as the outline of a horror movie simply by adding the phrase “and I’m bringing an axe” to the end. Surprisingly, a few days after I mailed the letter, I received an email from a man named Scot saying he and his family now lived in the house, and they’d love to have me visit.
So, I guess this is happening.
I punch my childhood address into my GPS, and while I could easily walk from my hotel, I decide to drive anyway.
As I pull the rented SUV into the driveway, the first thing that strikes me about my former home is how small it is. The basketball rim is gone, as is the apple tree we planted our final summer, but its sudden lack of size stands out the most.
If it could talk, it would probably say the opposite of me.
Scot’s wife Linda answers the door, and the two of them welcome me into their home. From the entry hall, the house splits—half a flight of stairs leads to the lower floor, while half a flight leads to the upper floor, where the couple’s two daughters stand. It’s strange to see these stairs, which once seemed so imposing, are no taller than I—I remember falling asleep as a child at the top of the upper set of stairs and awakening at the bottom, wondering how I’d survived such a tremendous fall.
The couple begins the grand tour, showing me a house that I used to call my own, and my memory proves somehow both startlingly accurate and disturbingly off. We start upstairs, and, after we’ve ascended, I look to my right and immediately notice something wrong.
A wall has replaced my bedroom door.
In his email, Scot mentioned that what were once my sister and I’s rooms had been merged into one some time ago, but I wasn’t prepared for this—for whatever reason, I assumed that my door had remained and my sister’s had gone away. Somehow, I feel robbed—there’s a picture I took with the point-and-shoot camera my parents got me for my father’s final Hanukkah of my sister sitting in the hallway, a blue “Scott Pl” faux street sign—which I still have—hung on my bedroom door behind her. It’s one of the few photos I have of the house, and it’s possibly the only one I shot whose quality doesn’t betray that it was taken by a five-year-old.
That door—my door—is gone.
It makes sense, though. As I peek into the preteen girl’s room, it seems small, and if I didn’t know the space used to be two rooms, I wouldn’t believe it. As the tour continues, it becomes a recurring theme: The master bedroom is similarly undersized, and the idea of two people having to share its minuscule closet seems downright laughable. Suddenly, the armoire that has featured prominently in my mother’s bedroom for as long as I can remember, despite the ample closet space both her homes in Memphis possessed, makes sense.
The other thing I keep noticing about the house is how much better it looks than it did in my memories. It was built at some point in the ’70s—I believe my mom said there was one owner before my parents—and the color scheme was atrocious. The bedroom and kitchen appliances were that unique ’70s shade of yellow, while ill-advised pink floral wallpaper adorned the living and dining rooms.
After the upstairs circuit, including a step out onto the deck between the kitchen and master bedroom that was added by the couple who purchased the home from my family, we continue downstairs, to what was once our guest room but is now the room of the other of the daughters. While I knew we’d had people stay with us while they visited, I completely forgot we had a guest room.
The next room over, the den, I remember well—that room contained some of the most horrid brown, orange, and yellow shag carpeting ever seen. I tell Scot and Linda how my mom, her older sister and her younger brother all had similarly hideous carpeting in their homes at the time, and how a debate raged between the three about whose was worst. My uncle always insisted his was, but none of us had made it down to visit him. Years later, when we finally did, my mom immediately conceded defeat.
I remember so many more things about this room that I don’t tell them, such as how, after birthday parties in the pool outside, we’d retreat into that room to open presents. In the months before we moved, a family friend gave us their old TV, which seemed huge compared to the other two we had in the house, and it ended up down there for lack of space anywhere else. A metal armadillo lived by the fireplace there, the culmination of a running joke between my parents where my dad claimed before every trip to Texas that he would return with an armadillo for a pet. For Halloween, he wore on a cowboy hat and carried the metal mammal, claiming he was an invented character named Armadillo Bill.
We step outside once more, and as we walk around the pool, I tell the family about my twin childhood fears: Falling down the hill beyond the backyard’s fence, and the monster in the deep end, an invention of my imagination inspired by the dark outline of tiles and leaves that formed in the pool.
Twenty years later, I am convinced that at least one of these fears was entirely unreasonable. The hill still looks mighty steep.
We return inside, where Scot, Linda, and I settle into the living room to chat while their daughters go to their rooms to tackle their weekend homework. We talk about all sorts of things: Scot, who confirms that Morristown has grown into somewhat of a party hub in recent years, is an Atlanta Braves fan whose Battlestar Galactica box set sits next to the 42″ flat-screen TV, which feels anachronistic in that room. Linda wonders if I can share any interior decorating tips, asking for insight into how my parents got the most out of such a small house. I apologize and tell her I can’t help—80% of my life has passed since I last lived here, and in the meantime, the objects around which we arrange our homes have shrunken drastically. My parents had boxy CRT televisions, record players and a sedan, while Scot and Linda have flat-screens, iPods, and a minivan4.
Even the kitchen has more space, the result of an expansion when the deck connecting it to the master bedroom was built.
We talk for several hours, until I realize how long I’ve stayed and offer to let them get back to their Sunday night. They have been gracious hosts, and happily offer to give my mom and sister the same treatment should they ever wish to return, an offer which I assure them I will pass along.
After thanking them profusely, I leave my childhood home for the last time yet again. I spend a moment in the driveway, staring across the house across the street, the house that used to be Jimmy’s house, where I played Nintendo as my father’s casket was lowered into the ground. Maybe I should knock, I think to myself, wondering if I could explain my situation to the current residents, who hopefully would prove as kind as Scot and Linda and might let me poke around for a moment.
Jimmy was one of my closest friends when I lived here, despite being two years ahead of me in school, but I haven’t heard from him in probably 18 years. A few years ago, he tried to look me up on MySpace, but I never set up an account on that site, so he settled for finding my sister and sending her a message. My sister, who had no memory of Jimmy, had to ask my mom about him out of fear it was some sort of scam.
The whole idea of trying to talk my way into Jimmy’s former abode seems a little too weird for my tastes, so I go back to my hotel. It’s not until I’m there that I realize the strangest thing of all: Those hours I spent chatting with Scot and Linda, I sat on a couch in the exact same spot where I found my mother crying in our big blue chair on the most surprising morning of my life.
- At first, my parents thought I had simply memorized Hop on Pop, so they turned to random pages and asked me to read random words. Nobody ever believes this story, but my mom insists it’s true.
- As explained in Chapter 23.
- A former president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 who lost his son George Waterson Williams in the attack.
- Which probably contains an additional flat-screen TV.