Eric, who particularly enjoyed brown whiskeys, had a secret stash that he hid from guests.
If he hadn’t died a year ago today, perhaps I’d be
enjoying my first sip of this secret stash with him as he sat, surrounded by
his three cats – one resting atop his belly – in the kitchen of his house, five miles from my own.
The notorious cat man and gentlest of souls had splurged
for this secret, hiding it away on the top shelf of his kitchen booze cabinet,
high above the regular stuff.
It was a $150 or maybe even $175 bottle of Jameson
18-year-old, Limited Reserve Irish Whiskey, if I recall correctly.
He had tasted it,
but then put it back on the top shelf, saving for special occasions.
He did not expect that occasion to be his wake, nor for
those who drank it to be among the 40 or 50 friends, cousins, in-law families
and his own nuclear family, with spouses and offspring.
His widow, Ann – and I was deservedly their best man all
those years ago – didn’t have any alcohol.
She couldn’t and can’t now, as she, with courage and fortitude and
faith, continues her battle with cancer well into its second year. I love her
and find this damned cancer unfair, as she already lost her husband. This isn’t about her, though, but I believe
she’ll eventually triumph. If you pray, this is a good time. If not, send your
best thoughts.
The splurge on the Jameson was just that, an
extraordinary purchase. Eric -- who I normally referred to as “Brother,” since
I only had one … and now have none -- wasn’t cheap. I’m told you can get pretty
damned good brown whiskey (his color of choice) for $50 or $60 range. I really
don’t know, because I pretty much retired from that game 30 years ago, limiting
consumption to special occasions, holidays, deaths, and the like.
Eric’s upper shelf hidden treasure came after he and Ann
had returned from both the Irish Republic and Belfast, where his protestant youth
minister son-in-law Michael and his Christian social services worker daughter,
Maria live.
Eric and daughter Maria strike delightful poses for the camera
I did call him while he was in that
green land of Bono and St. Patrick. Highlights included his visits to the locations of
his favorite movie: The John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara classic “The Quiet Man” – and
times spent at Guinness breweries and Irish whiskey distillers.
There was joy in his voice when I talked to him during
that tour. Much of it came from his delight at seeing where the great film,
about a former boxer, who escaped from the violence in the blood-soaked rings
of America in pursuit of a quiet life in his homeland. If you knew my brother,
it only makes sense that this former Illinois All-State offensive tackle and
less-successful college football player -- whose body had been torn apart by
that sport, causing the need for a dozen replacement parts over the decades –
would find camaraderie with the Duke’s Sean Thornton.
Brother’s blue Italian eyes were smiling all during that three-week tour, and I’m told he more than held his own when it came to blarney while in the pubs or visiting castles and the like.
That visit came in the summer of 2023. It was his first, and turned out to be only, trip overseas in his 74 years.
He did tell me once on the phone that he was almost ready to get home and see those young fellas who thoroughly overtook the heart of the 5-10, 350-pound nicer of the two decrepit Ghianni boys.
But being with Maria and Michael in their warm embrace kept homesickness at bay.
You see, he also loved his time at home in Nashville, within driving range of his other daughter, Ana, and Josh and their two
boys, Sabatino and Emilio (aka Tony and Leo).
Sometime, after returning to the States and immediately playing with his grandsons in Rutherford County, he splurged on that whiskey.
“I’m going to save that for really special occasions,” or
some such he told me, laughing, almost apologetically, for this dynamic
expense.
“You can taste it if you come by,” he told me during one
of our frequent phone calls. I still have the last voicemail he left me on my
phone. The gist of it is that he said he was going to call me back in a later time
that never arrived.
He did admit to me, many months post-Ireland over
cheeseburgers and beer (him) and dark iced tea (me) at our regular Brown’s
Diner lunch, that he began to feel a bit out-of-sorts even before he went to
Ireland. In the hospital, he told me he ignored it, figuring he’d get better.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said.
As for the whiskey invitation, he knew I no longer drank
much alcohol. In my younger years, when I was a newspaperman, a rapscallion
running like I was running out of time, I drank, sometimes to excess.
I told him I’d be glad to taste it though.
Well, when he talked about that special occasion, he
wasn’t talking about the wake that came three or four days after he died a year
ago.
He didn’t know that 40 or 50 people would be in his
paradise, a rock and plant and waterfall-fountain retreat he’d built with his
very big and rough hands on a reasonably hot Nashville day.
Pulled pork and fixings -- or maybe it was Mexican food, with beans, rice and guac? (Doesn't matter now) -- filled the counter in the outdoor
kitchen he’d constructed next to that oasis, presided over by The Buddha. Eric
was no Buddhist, but that statue did kind of favor him on a good and healthy
day when he would have been sitting in black T-shirt and sweatpants in this
green-grass paradise of stones, water and landscaping.
Water and sodas and beer filled coolers in that outdoor
kitchen. The brown whiskeys – mourners brought some and Maria put it all (save
for the special bottle, I believe) on the counter below the whiskey shelf.
I mostly sat there, in the shade of outdoor kitchen,
trying to converse pleasantly, but mostly a mourning quiet man, realizing
Brother was gone for good.
Sometime as that long, sad spring day turned into a night
of laughter and tears, the special bottle was discovered and put on the whiskey
counter. At least that’s the way I figure it.
For the most part, the bottle was as drained as were those of us
who had spent a morning at a funeral home and many, many hours laughing through
melancholy, which is what you are supposed to do at an Irish wake for an
Italian-American who saw himself in John Wayne’s gentle giant who won Maureen
O’Hara’s heart.
I went upstairs to visit with my son Joe and
Maria and Michael, when I saw the special bottle had been ransacked.
Eric, who was somewhere in the clouds or chirping with
the crickets, depending on what you believe, wouldn’t have minded, though.
The bottle was for a special occasion. He wasn’t there,
but his loved ones were, plastic tumblers and shot glasses from his special
collection filled, remembering him and reflecting
on his impact on them.
Unfortunately, I never got to taste from the special
bottle, but that’s OK. I wasn’t planning on coming out of my reckless
retirement on that day. I had too much to think about.
I sure as hell miss my
brother. I’m still waiting for him to drive his tan pickup truck over here to
pick me up for lunch at Brown’s Diner. Maybe I’ll have a beer with my
cheeseburger this time. I think it’s my turn to buy.
#####
I was the eulogist at the funeral at Woodlawn, where the
kindly undertakers allowed family a few minutes to see Eric’s earthly remains
before planned cremation.
If you are interested, you might like to read
that eulogy. Eric would have laughed his ass off and made fun of me:
The long, black cloud settling in on the ICU room a few
days ago, I knew my brother was listening to what people were saying, so I
leaned close to his left ear.
“I love you, Eric. More than you may know. I’m going to
miss you. But I still wish you hadn’t
pushed me down when I was taking my first steps.”
Eric stirred a little. I think others in the family were
worried that he was moving too much, for a man on the brink, to be healthy.
So, I was asked not to say any more right then, so he’d
calm down. There still was hope, of
course, but it was dimming.
But that motion by my big brother as he lay there? I swear he was laughing. About me reminding
him of his jealous cruelty to his baby brother more than 70 years ago.
He always laughed when I recounted that incident that our
Dad captured on his Super 8mm movie camera back in 1953.
I’ve seen it countless times. I was taking my first steps
on the sidewalk in front of our house at 1812 Beverly Road in Sylvan Lake,
Michigan.
I don’t know how old I was. Less than 2. Just as I begin those steps for posterity, a
to-then-unparalleled achievement by me, Eric comes from behind and pushes me
down. Then he walks to the camera, smiling.
That kind of defined our relationship until we got into
our teens, really. Eric simply didn’t take kindly for a long time to the fact
Mom and Dad brought this beautiful specimen home from St. Joseph Hospital in
Pontiac, Michigan.
He never apologized, by the way. But I more than forgave him. He looked up to me for my accomplishments. I
looked up to him, not just for his accomplishments but for how nice he was.
Yes, this guy who pushed his fragile and sweet baby
brother down on the sidewalk went on to become my best friend, other than my
wife.
If I was shook up for any reason, personally or
professionally or financially or simply because I’m a guy who gets all shook
up, I’d call him or see him. He had
simple, practical, to-the-point advice.
I’d like to think that I was something of a lifelong
security blanket to him, after he stopped pushing me to the concrete, rubbing
my face into a rug or slugging me in my left arm. Always the left.
When my arm aches, I’ll generally blame it on a lingering
after-effect of a COVID or flu shot. Perhaps. More likely deep bruises left by
my brother, right up into our mid-teens when we squared off, in one of those
kicking, punching, spitting, hair-pulling fights on our parents’ front lawn in
the Chicago area. Neighbor kids came to watch. They probably were too young to
bet, but if they did, I’m sure they’d have picked Eric to leave me dazed and
confused.
I figured I was going down myself, but I’d started the
fight because I finally had enough. I did beat him that day. And when he stood back up, he smiled. He was proud of me. We never had a fistfight
again. In fact, we became each other’s biggest advocate.
I always was so proud that Eric was my brother, even
during the early, bully years. He was smart. He was athletic. He was a great
football player to my mediocrity. My Dad liked him a lot better than he liked
me…..
That’s true, of course.
That was one thing Eric and I agreed on.
We also agreed on a lot of things about Dad and his peculiarities. We loved him like we had loved our mother,
who had her own quirks.
I’m not going to go any further on this subject, but last
Saturday, when my wife and I were in Eric’s hospital room, his daughter, Ana,
called. He spoke with her and his two grandsons on Face Time. He had no
favorites between these beautiful, beautiful, beautiful darling boys. But he
asked Ana to call back in an hour or so.
“Tim is here with Suzanne,” he told her. “We want to make
fun of Dad for a while.”
It was one of our favorite topics when we’d go out to an
occasional lunch at Brown’s Diner or maybe when he called me from his backyard
garden and just wanted to talk and laugh and to offer up a toast to Dad’s
memory.
I need to add that Eric liked to get me in trouble.
Eventually I figured out how to reverse the score. I remember one time his
bullying backfired mightily, embarrassing Mom and Dad. I don’t think a switch came out, but there
was anger in the air after Eric locked us both in Davy Crockett’s boyhood cabin
on the Nolichucky.
I was maybe 3, Eric 5, when our parents decided to take
us on a road trip – we took one every summer – to the South. We saw D.C. We saw the changing of the guard
at Arlington. We saw Gettysburg.
But it was at Davy Crockett’s cabin that Eric came up
with the wise idea that he was going to scare his little brother by locking me
in the cabin with the big, wooden sliding lock. Problem was he hadn’t thought
it through well. Sure, I was scared by being locked in. Just me and my brother.
I couldn’t open the door.
But you see, Eric couldn’t lift that wooden bar either.
We both were locked in. Outside, we could hear Mom and Dad yelling for us, as
if we were lost. It fell on Eric – who
was taller than me – to holler through the open window.
The park ranger crawled through that window and unlocked
the door, angrily escorting us out and I’m sure telling Mom and Dad to keep the
little beasts under control.
Oh, we also got in trouble together, I should note. One time, in Chicago, Eric and a friend of
ours and I were out blowing off illegal firecrackers on the Fourth. The biggest booms came when we tossed a batch
of Lady Fingers near a school. The firecrackers echoed. Apparently, phones were
dialed.
Suddenly, there were sirens coming our way. We ran
through the backyards, trying to find sanctuary from the police. Just as they turned onto our street, we came
upon my mother, who had our dog, Misty, out on a leash. When she had heard the
sirens, she figured they were for us, so she was out in the dark giving us an
alibi. “Just pet Misty and be quiet,”
she instructed us. “And we’ll walk home.”
The cops saw this Norman Rockwell scene of a mother
walking three young boys and a dog on the Fourth of July and they figured we
were not the suspects in the harmless, but noisy explosions.
I talked with my best college friend the other day,
telling him Eric had died. Eric seldom joined us in our all-night weekend
adventures on the streets of Ames, Iowa.
But my friend, like Eric, was a football player at Iowa State
University.
“He was a real good fellow,” said my friend, Jim Mraz.
Then we laughed about the day we left our dorm to go across campus to see Eric
compete in a campuswide pie-eating contest. They were blueberry pies. Eric
won. Jim and I laughed at the memory of
the big guy with blueberries filling his beard and hair as a price of
winning.
So many stories. The New Year’s Eve we went to downtown
Chicago to see the film The Great White Hope, only to find out that the rest of
the theater – except us – were fully uniformed Black Panthers. We stayed, but when one of the Panthers got
up to go get some popcorn, he stomped his boot, accidentally, on my foot.
“Oh, man, I’m so sorry,” I told the guy. Eric was just
watching, holding in a laugh that out of fear I had apologized to the guy who
should have been apologizing to me.
Younger days shouldn’t be forgotten. There was the Camp
Spikehorn gang, me, Eric, and our cousins Marc and Jeff. We were all in single
digits age-wise, and Marc and Jeff, who spent chunks of their summers with us,
went to Camp Spikehorn day camp a couple of summers when we lived in Grand
Rapids, Michigan.
Marc’s gone now. And Eric has joined him. But Jeff’s
still around. And he may or may not remember that the biggest thing we got out
of the camp was the song “Up in the air, the junior birdman, up in the air
upside down, up in the air, the junior birdman, with your noses to the
ground.” There are hand motions and
hand-goggles to go with it. I’m not sure if Jeff remembers it or not. The only reason I do is that Eric would break
into that song, from a dead silence, all of his days.
And when you
hear the grand announcement
That your wings are made of tin,
You will know the junior bird men
Have turned their box tops in.
For it takes
five box tops,
Four bottle bottoms,
Three wrappers,
Two labels,
And one thin dime.
I can’t help
but smile when thinking how that song would have sounded coming from the mouth
of a 90-year-old Eric.
I’ll not
find out, of course.
And I’m a
little angry.
Eric, what a
fine mess you’ve gotten me into this time.
For all of
our early bickering, that nasty downward shove to this toddler, all the “I’ll
tell Mom” threats, mostly unrealized, as we knew we’d both get in trouble, I
loved you more than just about anything.
For my 72½
years, you were there. My big brother. The football hero who Dad loved best.
The guy who collected abandoned cats like they were baseball cards. The kindest
and nicest guy I ever knew.
Eric: I fully anticipated that this would be you up here
talking about your crazy brother. I was sure you would outlive me. I told you
so. It didn’t work out that way, so I’m going to pledge to stick around as long
as I can, at least long-enough to teach your grandsons, the lights of your
life, Emilio and Sabatino, the Junior Birdman song.
Sixty or 70 years ago, there was this nice family, basic
middle-class Midwesterners. Mom and Dad at the ends of the table, Eric and me
on either side. We had the basic Beaver
Cleaver All-American conversations while we choked down brussels sprouts and
liver, if that was the meal of the day.
Most days, of course, the food was delicious.
And they were beautiful dinners. An All-American Family.
Four people loving each other more than anyone else in the world.
That’s in my memories, and that’s good. In reality,
there’s only one still sitting at that table.
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