I’m taking a break from blogging here until Monday so I can focus on family business — specifically tonight’s wake and tomorrow’s funeral for Nana Ruth. If you knew Ruth Robinson and haven’t yet seen the Facebook page we created for her, please head over and “like” it. Thanks.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Erin’s grandmother, Ruth Robinson, since she passed away Friday morning. I have lots of memories, all cherished.
Whenever I think of family, there’s always a lot of dysfunction to go with the joy. It’s like that in every family, and the dysfunction can be good, the stuff that goes into the humorous aspects of family lore. But when I think of Nana Ruth, I always see that smile. That smile could put the most uptight, cantankerous people at ease and fill them with warmth.
I know this because when I first started dating Erin 19 years ago, I was an uptight kid with a chip on his shoulder. Being the negative type, I always thought of my own family gatherings as battles to be survived. It didn’t occur to me at that point that you could or should enjoy time with family. I always chose to run. I don’t blame my family for that. It’s just how I was back then.
My perception started to change when I met Erin’s family. I didn’t feel like I had to be on my best behavior or watch what I said. I felt comfortable in my own skin. Nana Ruth really personified that environment. Hanging out with her was like soaking up the warmth of a roaring fireplace. She and Erin would talk for hours whenever we visited. Erin inherited a lot from her Nana: a love of knitting, endless worrying about other people, that smile.
Nana was big into family history. She’d spend hours telling us about the Sawyers and the extended Robinsons. At Robinson family gatherings we’d laugh and laugh. All the girls of the family had traits Nana passed down to them. There’s my mother-in-law Sharon’s serene nature, Cousin Martha’s sense of humor and everyone’s faith in God.
Of course, she rubbed off on the Robinson boys, too. I think of Uncle David and Cousin Andy — two guys who are always generous with their time and talents. Uncle David once got rid of a dent and paint blemish on my car for free. Andy designed the art you see atop this blog, and didn’t seem to care if I ever paid him. I did — two years after he did the first design.
It all goes back to Nana Ruth. Her kindness rubbed off on everyone, including our kids.
Sean and Duncan are still young, but Sean remembers Nana Ruth getting down on the ground to play with him and his trains. She did so for a whole week once, keeping Sean occupied so Erin could continue working while I recovered from a back injury. She played with Sean on the living floor for hours as I lay on the couch a few feet away, passed out on pain meds.
We have to say goodbye to her this week, but all that warmth, kindness, laughter and beauty will be with us forever. I’d like to think she’s helped make me a better person, though that’s for others to judge.
At the very least, her influence — just like that of the grandaughter I married — makes me want to be a better man. I’ll keep trying, and I know she’ll be watching.
Things I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving and every day:
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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
As regular readers know by now, I’ve been taking a class on how to keep my attention on the present. Saturday was an all-morning session that included a silent, hour-long walk through Oak Hill Cemetery in Newburyport, Mass. A lot of us tend to see cemeteries as a place of death. But I found a lot of life there, instead.
Mood music:
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This wasn’t a new experience for me. There are three cemeteries within walking distance of my house, and I’ve walked through all of them. I tend to look at the date of death and consider the myriad ways the person passed. If it’s 1918, for example, I find myself wondering if he or she died in the Spanish Flu pandemic. If a veteran died in the vicinity of early June 1944, I ponder the likelihood that this person died in the carnage of D-Day during WW II.
In Oak Hill Cemetery, I was stopped in my tracks by a gravestone with the death date of Sept. 11, 2001. I looked up the name, Thomas Pecorelli, and learned that he was on American Airlines Flight 11, which terrorists flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was 30 when he died and was carrying the ultrasound image of his unborn child, headed home to his wife.
He lived a hell of a life. He was a cameraman with Fox Sports and E! Entertainment Television, the obituaries said.
Thieves stole his original gravestone, but a new one is in its place, complete with two benches and a garden with bird feeders.
There’s a lot of life to be found in these graveyards. But you might miss it if you jog through. You have to walk through slowly and silently.
If you have a mind that sometimes gets stuck on one obsessive thought or often drifts when someone is talking to you, the occasional cemetery stroll is worth working into your life.
Few things will get you out of your own head like a study of other people’s lives.
Now that I’ve learned something about giving my present attention to the dead, I’m eager for the next step: learning to give present awareness to the living.
Erin’s maternal grandmother, Ruth Robinson, has always been one of my favorites among the in-laws. Her smile is contagious. She loves unconditionally. She’s always there for all of us. Now, she needs all of us to be there for her.
Nana Ruth has been in the hospital for the last couple weeks, and a few days ago she suffered a stroke.
I don’t think she’s ever used a computer in her life, so she won’t see this post. But that’s not the point.
The point is that I’d like all of you to pray for her as she fights the increasingly powerful beast we call aging.
If you could do that, I’d be grateful.
Thanks.
My Aunt Robin has been valiantly fighting breast cancer for the last several months, and I wanted to take a moment and thank her for showing us all how to do it with humor, grace and grit.
Mood music:
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She’s always been a tough one. Why cancer chose to pick a fight with her is beyond me. It obviously had no idea who it was fucking with.
I’m not the best nephew when it comes to picking up the phone or driving down for a visit. No excuses there. But I want her to know that I admire her.
And I want you to help her and the millions of others who fight this scourge. A friend of hers is doing a walk Sunday to raise money for breast cancer research and treatment. As my aunt says, “Five years ago there was no cure for my type of cancer. But because of these walks there is now hope with herceptin. Help another woman have hope in the future.”
Thanks.
Last Friday started in a brutal fashion. I woke up more than an hour late after a lousy night’s sleep. As a result, I fell way behind with work. To top it all off, the kids had the day off and were making all kinds of noise.
Mood music:
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For the first two hours of the day, my mood was bleak. My head pounded, I felt disoriented and I was convinced my day was going to suck on every level.
Two hours later, I had caught the workload up to where it was supposed to be, the kids had settled into some activity, and I was sitting on a sun-kissed deck with my beloved, drinking a fresh cup of Starbucks she bought me on the way home from a doctor’s appointment.
The rest of the day was pretty pleasant. I even found a couple of hours to practice my guitar playing, using some nifty online lessons I found on YouTube.
Which brings me to the point of this post: If you’re having a shitty morning, don’t write off the rest of the day. Most days are like New England weather: Wait five minutes and it’ll change.
I used to let a couple of bad hours destroy the entire day. Truth be told, I still do sometimes, especially in the winter, when I’m more susceptible to mood swings because of the shorter windows of sunlight.
I wasted a lot of good life that way. I went on many addiction-fueled binges because of it.
Fortunately, I’m much better at catching myself in those downward moments. Friday was a good example of that.
It makes for a much better existence.
Sunday is my 42nd birthday, which happens near a bunch of other birthdays in the family and at work. Inevitably, when discussing this, someone admits they’re depressed about being a year older.
Mood music:
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I have a different outlook, which is that when you reach another year without having dropped dead, that’s cause to celebrate.
When I was sick with the Crohn’s Disease as a kid, I lost a lot of blood and developed several side ailments. I’m told by my father that the doctors were going to remove the colon more than once. It didn’t happen. I felt close to death a few times, though I doubt it was ever that serious. Either way, here I am.
When the OCD was burning out of control, I often felt I’d die young. I was never suicidal, but I had a fatalistic view of things. I just assumed I wasn’t long for this world, and I didn’t care. I certainly did a lot to slowly help the dying process along. That’s what addicts do. We feed the addiction compulsively knowing full well what the consequences will be.
When I was a prisoner to fear and anxiety, I really didn’t want to live long. I had isolated myself. Fortunately, I never had the guts to do anything about it. And, like I said, suicide was never really an option.
I spent much of my 30s on the couch with a shattered back and escaped with the TV. I was breathing, but I was also as good as dead some of the time.
I’ve watched others go before me at a young age. Michael. Sean. Even Peter. Lose the young people in your life often enough, and you’ll start assuming you’re next.
When you live for yourself and don’t put faith in God, you’re not really living. When it’s all about you, there’s no room to let all the other life in. So the soul shrivels and hardens. I’ve been there.
I also had a strange fear of current events and was convinced at one point that the world would burn in a nuclear holocaust before I hit 30. That hasn’t happened yet.
So now I’m 42, and it’s almost comical that I’m still here.
I’m more grateful than you could imagine for the turn of events my life has taken in the last six years.
I’ve learned to stop over-thinking and to manage the OCD. When you learn to stop over-thinking, a lot of things that used to be daunting become a lot easier. You also find yourself in a lot of precious moments that were always there, but you didn’t notice them because you were sick with worry.
I notice them now, and I am blessed far beyond what I probably deserve. I have a career that I love. I have the best wife on Earth and two boys that teach me something new every day. I have many, many friends who have helped me along in more ways than they’ll ever know.
Most importantly, I have God in my life. When you put your faith in Him, there’s a lot less to be afraid of. Aging is one of the first things you stop worrying about.
These days, I fell a lot better about myself than I did a decade ago. In fact, 32 kind of sucked.
I’d be in denial if I told you everything was perfect. I wouldn’t tell you that anyway, because I’ve always thought that perfection was a bullshit concept. That makes it all the more ironic and comical that OCD would be the life-long thorn in my side.
In recovery, I have good days and not-so-good days when I’ve come close to relapsing. I’ve had to work harder at being a good man. All of that is OK.
I’m still very much the work in progress, just like everyone else. The scars are merely the scaffolding and newly inserted steel beams propping me up.
I don’t know what comes next, but I have much less fear about the unknown.
And so I think will have a happy birthday.
Hard to believe, but it’s been two years since the death of Joe “Zippo” Kelley. I’ve been listening to Zippo Raid’s Punk Is In Season disc a lot lately and I smile every time. I’ve made some wonderful friends these last two years and Joe is our common link. Sometimes it seems strange to me, because at the time of his death I hadn’t talked to Joe in years.
Mood music:
I’ve gotten to know his awesome parents, Joe and Marie, and a lot of other people from other local bands. I’m richer for that. It would have been a million times better if I was making these new friends with Joe still around, but there’s no use in trying to figure out God’s master plan.
We fell out of touch after college because I let my demons turn me into a recluse for a long time. What’s done is done.
There’s a great lesson for all of us, though, one that has gotten clear as the months have gone by. The soul of a person who lives to the full and impacts so many people for the better never really dies.
Joe’s presence has been at every local rock show I’ve been to, most notably the handful of benefit shows in his honor. He’s very much with us whenever we listen to his music.
One of my favorite songs on the Punk Is In Season disc is about Greg Walsh, drummer of Zippo Raid, Pop Gun and other acts. I’ve known Greg for almost as long as I knew Joe. We worked together at my first reporting gig in Swampscott and Marblehead, Mass. The first time I heard the opening lines, I laughed till I hurt:
Greg couldn’t make it to the fuckin’ show
It was rainin’ wasn’t even fuckin’ snow
What else can we say
Greg is a fuckin’ pu-sey!
Greg knew how well that lyric nailed him, and during the chorus you can hear him gleefully chanting: “Oye! Oye! Oye!”
That’s the Joe I remember. He could poke fun at you and make you feel like one of his best buddies in the same breath. In fact, if he needled you, you knew he liked you. When you hung out with him, you always knew you were in the presence of someone with a heart of gold.
That’s how it was at Salem State, when we’d stand outside the then-commuter cafe smoking cigarettes and talking about Nirvana. He could take to people effortlessly, even a guy like me who often had trouble knowing how to act in front of other people.
It’s been said that when you went to a Zippo Raid show, everyone who showed up was in the band. That’s just another telling example of how welcoming a presence he was.
I’ve become a fan of many of the musicians who showed up at those shows to pay homage to Joe. And that experience has rekindled a love of the Boston music scene that had gone cold for a long time.
Thanks, Joe.
In our house, a cool nightly ritual has taken hold. We all gather on my bed and read until the kids reach their bedtime and the grown-ups (me specifically) pass out.
Mood music:
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Here’s what I love about it:
Sometimes the children and I pass out in the middle of family reading time. One time, Erin was out at an event during the usual family reading time and came home to this:
Eventually, the kids go to bed and it’s just me and Erin. We’ll keep reading until I inevitably fall asleep first. Sometimes, before that happens, we’ll talk and snuggle.
Good times? Absolutely.
