Nobody thought it would be one of the kids

Nobody probably thought the Boat Crew would last this long, actually.

When four young couples from the same Cedar Rapids Lutheran church rented a houseboat and sailed up and down the Mississippi River for a long weekend in the summer of 1971, nobody probably even thought it was more than a one-time vacation.

But the couples invited more couples and did it again the next summer, and the next. Over time, a few couples came and went, but the tradition lived on summer after summer. Eventually a core group of seven couples emerged, and the Boat Crew was established … and a vital extended family was born.

Unofficially (or officially, depending on your personal opinion) the group’s name was the Mississippi River Marching and Drinking Society. But “Boat Crew” was easier to say. And less complicated to explain to the couples’ children, who were all about the age of the Boat Crew tradition itself.

As lives and careers evolved, many of the couples moved away … but everyone came back summer after summer for what had become an annual gathering of Boat Crew family with bonds as strong as any biological family.

And that family bond extended beyond the relationship between the seven couples; their children often spent the Boat Crew weekends together in one couple’s house, under the probably exhausted watch of two or three weekend-long babysitters.

Naturally, the kids developed a family bond as strong as their parents’. They were unofficial siblings in an extended family network, and they felt confident in the parental love they received from every member of the Boat Crew.

As the summers passed, the Boat Crew bond continued to grow and strengthen, especially over a developing collection of in-jokes, funny stories and traditions that became almost sacred. The most prominent tradition was Joy. It started when one couple brought a large white flag emblazoned with the word Joy in bright colors and displayed it on the ship’s mast. The flag appeared every summer, and eventually it inspired the regular exchanging of Joy-festooned knickknacks, shirts, Christmas ornaments (all collectively over the years described as "Joy shit") and even one summer little bottles of Joy dishwashing soap.

Music—an integral part of the Lutheran church where they all met—was just as important to the Boat Crew. The group contained many talented singers, and as they gathered under the stars with a guitar and a couple bottles of wine each summer, they sang hymns and folk songs and show tunes and whatever else they could think of. Their unofficial anthem was “Beautiful Savior,” which they sang together—in full, glorious harmony—on every gathering.

As the kids grew over the next four decades, the Boat Crew also started convening off-season for confirmations and graduations and weddings and grandchildren and the occasional family tragedy … and the inevitable deaths of the Boat Crew couples’ elderly parents.

And through it all, the Boat Crew became a bit of a statistical anomaly: seven couples who lived into their 50s and 60s and 70s and now 80s … and stayed friends … and stayed married … and stayed alive.

As they started to retire from their jobs and prioritize grandparent obligations over Boat Crew gatherings, the group wasn’t always able to find a summer weekend that all seven couples could attend. And the “boat” part of Boat Crew became a bit of an anachronism; the summer reunions were happening now in Bed and Breakfasts overlooking the Mississippi instead of boats on the Mississippi.

And as they started to navigate the medical infirmities and physical indignities that come with age, the Boat Crew members started to contemplate their own mortality. Never ones to face life with fear or even reverence, they were realistic that eventually they were going to start dying … and they were not above having betting pools over who would go first.

But it never occurred to anyone that the first to die might not be one of the adults.

Robbie (who as an adult called himself Robert but I’d known him since we were toddlers and I could never think of him as anyone but Robbie) was 42, pretty much right in the middle of the range of ages of the Boat Crew kids. He started getting sick seven years ago last summer, but he didn’t think it was much to worry about: just some lower back pain, fatigue and abdominal discomfort. But then the guy behind the Chicago neighborhood deli counter where he went every day told him he looked yellow. And he became painfully constipated. And on a trip home to see his parents in Iowa, he decided to see a doctor.

And that’s where he found out.

Colon cancer.

Stage 4.

Colon cancer patients at stage 4 have an 8-15% chance of being alive five years after diagnosis. And Robbie, forever the optimist, dove right into surgery and chemotherapy while his parents took care of him in their home.

But it quickly became obvious that he was losing the battle. And as he eventually slipped into a coma, his parents—buoyed by the love and calls and texts and emails of Boat Crew members across the country—kept a vigil by his bed.

And six weeks after his diagnosis—six weeks after driving himself and his two cats seven hours from Chicago to his parents’ house, five weeks after walking into the doctor’s office with what he thought were just stomach pains, three weeks after cheering on friends in the Chicago Marathon via Facebook—Robbie drew his last breath, sending waves of shock and devastation throughout his extended Boat Crew family.

Robbie’s father had died of cancer 40 years earlier, before the Boat Crew had been officially established. His widowed mother and the man who eventually became her next husband had been regular Boat Crew members from nearly the beginning.

While she was still single, though, she and Robbie had taken vacations with our family a number of times, often to Adventureland amusement park in Des Moines, Iowa, and once on a Bicentennial road trip to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell and to Washington, D.C., to see pretty much everything else associated with America’s birth.

Robbie and I went to different high schools and colleges, but we eventually both found our ways to Chicago. We kept seeing each other at Boat Crew gatherings, but we’d slowly drifted apart … as had many of the Boat Crew kids as we scattered about the country and built our own families.

Robbie’s parents and mine, of course, had stayed fast Boat Crew friends. And when Robbie was facing the first weeks of his cancer treatments, my parents made a trip to Des Moines to stay with them.

Robbie died eight years ago today. Even though I knew it was inevitable, I was more choked up than I’d expected to be when I got the call. We hadn’t seen each other in probably eight years. And I knew that he was no longer suffering through an excruciating illness. But his death—especially as a Boat Crew kid and not an adult—was a shock to all of us … and an indescribable devastation to his parents. And though nobody in the extended Boat Crew family has died since Robbie did, we are all tacitly preparing ourselves for the next passing.

But for the first time in many years, the entire Boat Crew—along with a handful of Boat Crew kids—dropped everything in their lives and appeared at the funeral. Forever part of the family, we walked in with Robbie’s parents and biological family members and were seated right behind them. And when the congregation sang “Beautiful Savior,” the Boat Crew’s beautiful harmonies rose above the music as if to lift Robbie to whatever awaited him in the afterlife and remind him of the loving extended family he’d been a part of on earth.

His parents asked me to be one of his pall bearers, which I accepted as an honor. Escorting a lifelong friend to his grave is overwhelming—especially when we’re both so young—but I felt giving him a solemn, respectful final journey was the best gift I could give him. He was family, after all.

SHIT!

I WAS GOING TO GET SO MUCH DONE THIS WEEKEND.

I was going to finish all the final details on my bedroom and finally be back in my own bed by tomorrow night. I was going to start and finish a little caulk-and-touch-up project in my bathroom while I had all my supplies out. I was going to get rid of the last of the little stuff in my storage unit so all I’d have left would be the big pieces of furniture. I was going to help a friend move some stuff.

But NOOOOO.

As the anesthesia wore off this afternoon I found myself getting nauseous and profoundly exhausted. So I left work early to crash for an alarming FIVE HOURS in not-my-bed and miss our office’s fun summer party tonight. And since I’m forbidden from lifting anything heavier than a gallon of milk FOR TWO WHOLE WEEKS—no hauling boxes, no helping friends move, no throat-punching Mitch McConnell, apparently no putting my pants back on after my nap—I’m left with no options but to stuff myself with pain meds and cookies and watch MSNBC. With no pants.

OUCH!

The football field that Dr. McDreamy hacked out of my wrist has almost as much acreage as the care instructions the nurse gave me—on a piece of paper that at the moment is really hard to hold without dropping. I hope the function in my fingers comes back sometime soon.

EEK!

After a massive FIVE-WEEK wait to get on the dermatologist’s schedule, I’m finally having my scabby, itchy wrist mole—which turned out to be a squamous cell carcinoma, which it turns out is not, in fact, Bigfoot’s drag name—removed.

I tried to take a picture of Mickey looking terrified of it, but twisting my arm to show the mole next to his face looks more like I was trying to take a gratuitous flexy selfie. But the dermatologists is totally cute, so I do not regret this gross-mole-canceling serendipity.

Happy birthday to my mom!

Happy 78th birthday to my tirelessly awesome mom who--not to make this about me after only nine words--has made it her personal mission to coordinate doctors, dole out ever-changing (seriously--they have a history of changing pretty much every week, though they seem to have leveled out for the time being) prescriptions, endure hours of medically related on-hold music, battle insurance companies, dig deep into online drug-interaction research, and sometimes just pour orange juice and fold laundry for her eternally grateful--though sometimes exhaustedly unable to show it--big ol' bipolar son, who undeniably couldn't survive this train ride without her.

When she's not enjoying that little hobby, she's a devoted grandmother to the--and I swear I'm being empirically objective here--smartest, awesomeist, above-averageist, talentedist children ever to exchange inappropriate texts with their compulsively corrupting uncle who once again managed to make this tribute about himself. She and my dad are also emotional and moral and eternally inspiring community pillars who waste no time securing donated coats or shoes or furniture or shelter or food or transportation or bipolar-caregiver emotional support for sometimes complete strangers who desperately need it. In that vein, she also sometimes brings unnecessary butter to my sister's house; buys my dad an ever-expanding library of V-neck sweaters in a gradient palette of dark dad colors; dotingly acquiesces to our relentlessly bellicose cat's increasingly finicky tastes in wet food, blankets and inconvenient places to vomit; and occasionally indulges herself in post-season vests from the Talbots clearance rack. She loves her family unconditionally and we love her unconditionally back, even though she dances with her wrists out and puts onion salt in everything she cooks.

Last year she celebrated being a 40-year breast-cancer survivor, and I'm posting this picture from her everyone-had-to-wear-pink 30-year survivor celebration not because we all look young and attractive in it--but now that you mention it, I guess we do--but because it radiates the profound joy she brings to her family, her community and everyone she comes in contact with. Except the cat, who demands that her tuna be prepared only with the white sauce from the pink can, which is laboriously difficult to find.

Thirty years ago today ...

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different ... something so random and so unexpected that the shock of the words literally didn't make sense to me: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the 1988 autumn semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and what ended up being a definitive revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away. Dimly seeing what we could of it and haltingly learning more and more about it over the next hours was at once horrifying and comforting, filling us with both hopefulness and helplessness.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the murdered Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last thirty years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about catastrophic tragedies like the 9/11 attacks and the Stoneman Douglas massacre and the devastating 2018 wildfires ... though I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Thirty years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Thirty years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Thirty years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour news cycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are robbing you of a precious and very limited possession, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak both do and don't make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should work to find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Thirty years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for eight presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and eight houses and eight jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful (more or less), confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, even though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves ... and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you experience when you finally see images of the bloodied, abused corpse of Moammar Gadhafi—who denied to his last hopefully excruciating, terrified breath every credible report that he'd ordered the Pan Am bombing—feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Tony-winning actor? International journalist? Have-it-all mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m the only one in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and befriended her kids on Facebook and marched in pink hats with her in Washington and lost countless hours texting ridiculous memes back and forth with her.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Thirty years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken—and strengthened—my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

I'm so thankful our family comes from hearty stock

I still have vivid memories of the night Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, the moment 30 years ago today that she came out of her anesthesia after her mastectomy, sitting with her at chemo, and repeatedly watching her take off her wig and remove her prosthetic after chemo so she could collapse into the sleep she needed to keep up the fight. But more importantly, I remember how she wouldn't let breast cancer control her life. I have even fonder memories of her traveling to DC--one of her favorite cities--with us, unflinchingly bearing the slight orange tint of a chemo patient. Of her volunteering for Reach to Recovery, a program that paired breast cancer survivors with new breast cancer patients to answer questions and act as survivor role models and give hope where often there didn't seem to be any. Of the pink-clothed and pink-fooded and the pink-everythinged celebration we had with family and friends to celebrate her 20-year survival milestone. And most importantly, I remember how we all chose to laugh instead of cry at the situation. It turns out that prosthetic breasts can be very funny, especially when they're used as a giant nose on a drawing of a face, when they make uncontrollable farting sounds against sweaty skin on a hot day, and especially when they're put away for the night on a stack of hotel towels, only to fly across the room and SPLAT! against the wall when the top towel is unknowingly pulled off the pile in semi-darkness. We're lucky as a family to have all of this--and to still have Mom with us as a living example for everyone that breast cancer CAN be beaten.

Nobody thought it would be one of the kids

Nobody probably thought the Boat Crew would last this long, actually.

When four young couples from the same Cedar Rapids Lutheran church rented a houseboat and sailed up and down the Mississippi River for a long weekend in the summer of 1971, nobody probably even thought it was more than a one-time vacation.

But the couples invited more couples and did it again the next summer, and the next. Over time, a few couples came and went, but the tradition lived on summer after summer. Eventually a core group of seven couples emerged, and the Boat Crew was established … and a vital extended family was born.

Unofficially (or officially, depending on your personal opinion) the group’s name was the Mississippi River Marching and Drinking Society. But “Boat Crew” was easier to say. And less complicated to explain to the couples’ children, who were all about the age of the Boat Crew tradition itself.

As lives and careers evolved, many of the couples moved away … but everyone came back summer after summer for what had become an annual gathering of Boat Crew family with bonds as strong as any biological family.

And that family bond extended beyond the relationship between the seven couples; their children often spent the Boat Crew weekends together in one couple’s house, under the probably exhausted watch of two or three weekend-long babysitters.

Naturally, the kids developed a family bond as strong as their parents’. They were unofficial siblings in an extended family network, and they felt confident in the parental love they received from every member of the Boat Crew.

As the summers passed, the Boat Crew bond continued to grow and strengthen, especially over a developing collection of in-jokes, funny stories and traditions that became almost sacred. The most prominent tradition was Joy. It started when one couple brought a large white flag emblazoned with the word Joy in bright colors and displayed it on the ship’s mast. The flag appeared every summer, and eventually it inspired the regular exchanging of Joy-festooned knickknacks, shirts, Christmas ornaments (all collectively over the years described as "Joy shit") and even one summer little bottles of Joy dishwashing soap.

Music – an integral part of the Lutheran church where they all met – was just as important to the Boat Crew. The group contained many talented singers, and as they gathered under the stars with a guitar and a couple bottles of wine each summer, they sang hymns and folk songs and show tunes and whatever else they could think of. Their unofficial anthem was “Beautiful Savior,” which they sang together – in full, glorious harmony – on every gathering.

As the kids grew over the next four decades, the Boat Crew also started convening off-season for confirmations and graduations and weddings and grandchildren and the occasional family tragedy … and the inevitable deaths of the Boat Crew couples’ elderly parents.

And through it all, the Boat Crew became a bit of a statistical anomaly: seven couples who lived into their 50s and 60s and 70s and now 80s … and stayed friends … and stayed married … and stayed alive.

As they started to retire from their jobs and prioritize grandparent obligations over Boat Crew gatherings, the group wasn’t always able to find a summer weekend that all seven couples could attend. And the “boat” part of Boat Crew became a bit of an anachronism; the summer reunions were happening now in Bed and Breakfasts overlooking the Mississippi instead of boats on the Mississippi.

And as they started to navigate the medical infirmities and physical indignities that come with age, the Boat Crew members started to contemplate their own mortality. Never ones to face life with fear or even reverence, they were realistic that eventually they were going to start dying … and they were not above having betting pools over who would go first.

But it never occurred to anyone that the first to die might not be one of the adults.

Robbie (who as an adult called himself Robert but I’d known him since we were toddlers and I could never think of him as anyone but Robbie) was 42, pretty much right in the middle of the range of ages of the Boat Crew kids. He started getting sick seven years ago last summer, but he didn’t think it was much to worry about: just some lower back pain, fatigue and abdominal discomfort. But then the guy behind the Chicago neighborhood deli counter where he went every day told him he looked yellow. And he became painfully constipated. And on a trip home to see his parents in Iowa, he decided to see a doctor.

And that’s where he found out.

Colon cancer.

Stage 4.

Colon cancer patients at stage 4 have an 8-15% chance of being alive five years after diagnosis. And Robbie, forever the optimist, dove right into surgery and chemotherapy while his parents took care of him in their home.

But it quickly became obvious that he was losing the battle. And as he eventually slipped into a coma, his parents – buoyed by the love and calls and texts and emails of Boat Crew members across the country – kept a vigil by his bed.

And six weeks after his diagnosis – six weeks after driving himself and his two cats seven hours from Chicago to his parents’ house, five weeks after walking into the doctor’s office with what he thought were just stomach pains, three weeks after cheering on friends in the Chicago Marathon via Facebook – Robbie drew his last breath, sending waves of shock and devastation throughout his extended Boat Crew family.

Robbie’s father had died of cancer 40 years earlier, before the Boat Crew had been officially established. His widowed mother and the man who eventually became her next husband had been regular Boat Crew members from nearly the beginning.

While she was still single, though, she and Robbie had taken vacations with our family a number of times, often to Adventureland amusement park in Des Moines, Iowa, and once on a Bicentennial road trip to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell and to Washington, D.C., to see pretty much everything else associated with America’s birth.

Robbie and I went to different high schools and colleges, but we eventually both found our ways to Chicago. We kept seeing each other at Boat Crew gatherings, but we’d slowly drifted apart … as had many of the Boat Crew kids as we scattered about the country and built our own families.

Robbie’s parents and mine, of course, had stayed fast Boat Crew friends. And when Robbie was facing the first weeks of his cancer treatments, my parents made a trip to Des Moines to stay with them.

Robbie died seven years ago today. Even though I knew it was inevitable, I was more choked up than I’d expected to be when I got the call. We hadn’t seen each other in probably eight years. And I knew that he was no longer suffering through an excruciating illness. But his death – especially as a Boat Crew kid and not an adult – was a shock to all of us … and an indescribable devastation to his parents. And though nobody in the extended Boat Crew family has died since Robbie did, we are all tacitly preparing ourselves for the next passing.

But for the first time in many years, the entire Boat Crew – along with a handful of Boat Crew kids – dropped everything in their lives and appeared at the funeral. Forever part of the family, we walked in with Robbie’s parents and biological family members and were seated right behind them. And when the congregation sang “Beautiful Savior,” the Boat Crew’s beautiful harmonies rose above the music as if to lift Robbie to whatever awaited him in the afterlife and remind him of the loving extended family he’d been a part of on earth.

His parents asked me to be one of his pall bearers, which I accepted as an honor. Escorting a lifelong friend to his grave is overwhelming – especially when we’re both so young – but I felt giving him a solemn, respectful final journey was the best gift I could give him. He was family, after all.

The Gays Do Galena reunion weekend is over and all that’s left are memories, photos, surplus Diet Cokes and lingering exhaustion from staying up too late gabbing

Twenty years ago we talked about which clubs to go to, celebrated six-month-iversaries with our new boyfriends, and shopped the clearance pages of the International Male catalog for super-cute wrap shorts and terry jumpers that we could afford on our fledgling-career incomes. This weekend we celebrated double-digit anniversaries, talked about our growing invisibility both socially and professionally, used grownup words like “escrow” and “lumbar region,” and wondered how we all suddenly found ourselves hovering around the 50-year range. Here are just a few of the health and old-man problems we discussed about our lives in the last 36 hours:

• Bipolar disorder
• Falling asleep on the couch at 8 pm 
• Sharing little-known AARP discounts
• Not being able to bend over to tie our shoes
• Hearing aids
• Having to pass around a jar of salsa until one of us could finally open it
• Not being able to eat the salsa because our stomachs are having a difficult time tolerating spiciness lately
• Forgetting to write down all the good drag names we think of
• Worrying that some of the drag names we think of are perhaps too racy and inappropriate to post on Facebook
• A collective growing fear of hobos peeking in our bedroom windows 
• Lamenting over the Trivago guy’s wasted heterosexuality
• Getting Xanax and statin pills mixed up because they look the same
• Realizing we all know who Lola Falana is 
• No wifi 
• Constipation 
• Marc thinks “Boys in the Band” is a good movie
• Remembering Gary’s old boyfriend’s name
• Cancer

Mom is 30 YEARS CANCER FREE!

We’re celebrating this morning with 10,000+ survivors, families and friends in the Especially For You Race Against Breast Cancer run/walk.

After surviving an invasion by a foreign royal lineage, beheading the Groom of the Stool (it’s a legit title! look it up!), tooting the court jester’s horn and making a gratuitous dictatorship pun,

I have hereby abandoned the royal wee, abdicated the porcelain throne and rejoined the peasantry in the Commonwealth of Arby’s.

All Liquids Day!

(I’m capitalizing it now because it’s fast-tracked to be designated a national holiday and I don’t want to have to search through my archives to update this post.)

I’m more than happy to spend the day consuming nothing but not-alarming-when-it-comes-back-out-red liquids, but it would be immeasurably easier if the hospital’s instructions didn’t make things on its do-not-eat list sound so deliciously tempting:

And so it begins:

The Fiber Finals. The Pulp Probation. The White-Bread Warm-Up. The Mushy-Foods Marathon. The Deliciousness Death March. The Canned-Food Commencement. The Plain-Jell-O Purgatory. The Soft-Bananas Smackdown. The Hearty-Foods Hunger Games. The Pudding Punishment. The Corn-Flakes Correction. The Wet-Noodles Weariness. The Plain-Crackers Plague. The Clear-Broth Commencement. The Full-Grain Forfeiture. THE COLONOSCOPY COUNTDOWN.

Happy birthday to my mom!

Happy 77th birthday to my tirelessly, modestly awesome mom who -- not to make this about me after only ten words -- has made it her personal mission to coordinate doctors, dole out ever-changing (seriously -- they change pretty much every week) prescriptions, endure hours of medically related on-hold music, battle insurance companies, dig deep into online drug-interaction research, and sometimes just pour orange juice and fold laundry for her eternally grateful -- though sometimes exhaustedly unable to show it -- big ol' bipolar son, who undeniably couldn't survive this train ride without her.

When she's not enjoying that little hobby, she's a devoted grandmother to the -- and I swear I'm being empirically objective here -- smartest, awesomeist, above-averageist, talentedist children ever to exchange inappropriate texts with their compulsively corrupting uncle who once again managed to make this tribute about himself. She and my dad are also emotional and moral and eternally inspiring community pillars who waste no time securing donated coats or shoes or furniture or shelter or food or transportation for sometimes complete strangers who desperately need it. In that vein, she also sometimes brings unnecessary butter to my sister's house; buys my dad an ever-expanding library of V-neck sweaters in a gradient palette of dark dad colors; dotingly acquiesces to our relentlessly bellicose cat's increasingly finicky tastes in wet food, blankets and inconvenient places to vomit; and occasionally indulges herself in post-season vests from the Talbots clearance rack. She loves her family unconditionally and we love her unconditionally back, even though she dances with her wrists out and puts onion salt in everything she cooks.

Last summer she weathered major shoulder surgery and months of recovery in a borrowed recliner in the living room with tenacity and courage and grace and humor and mountains of food and organized rides from a lifetime of dear, devoted friends. This year she's a 40-year cancer survivor, and I'm posting this picture from her everyone-had-to-wear-pink 30-year survivor celebration not because we all look young and attractive in it -- but now that you mention it, I guess we do -- but because it radiates the profound joy she brings to her family, her community and everyone she comes in contact with. Except the cat, who demands that her tuna be prepared only with the white sauce from the pink can, which is laboriously difficult to find.

Twenty-nine years ago today

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different ... something so random and so unexpected that the shock of the words literally didn't make sense to me: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the 1988 autumn semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and what ended up being a definitive revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away. Dimly seeing what we could of it and haltingly learning more and more about it over the next hours was at once horrifying and comforting, filling us with both hopefulness and helplessness.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the murdered Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last twenty-nine years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about catastrophic tragedies like the 9/11 attacks and the Newtown massacre and the devastating 2017 hurricanes and the Tacoma Amtrak crash ... though I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Twenty-nine years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Twenty-nine years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Twenty-nine years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour news cycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are robbing you of a precious and very limited commodity, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak both do and don't make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should work to find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Twenty-nine years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for eight presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and eight houses and eight jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful (more or less), confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, even though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves ... and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you experience when you finally see images of the bloodied, abused corpse of Moammar Gadhafi—who denied to his last hopefully excruciating, terrified breath every credible report that he'd ordered the Pan Am bombing—feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Tony-winning actor? International journalist? Stay-at-home mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m the only one in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and befriended her kids on Facebook and marched in pink pussy hats with her in Washington and lost countless hours texting ridiculous memes back and forth with her.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Twenty-nine years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken—and strengthened—my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

29 years ago today

I'm so thankful our family comes from hearty stock. I still have vivid memories of the night Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, the moment 29 years ago today that she came out of her anesthesia after her mastectomy, sitting with her as she got her chemo, watching her take off her wig and remove her prosthetic breast after her chemo so she could get the sleep she needed to keep up the fight. But more importantly, I remember how she wouldn't let breast cancer control her life. I have even fonder memories of her traveling to DC -- one of her favorite cities -- with us, and of her smiling in all our pictures with the slight orange tint of a chemo patient. Of her volunteering for Reach to Recovery, a program that paired breast cancer survivors with new breast cancer patients to answer questions and act as survivor role models and give hope where often there is none. And most importantly, I remember how we all chose to laugh instead of cry over the entire situation. It turns out that a prosthetic breast can be very funny, especially when it's used as a giant nose on a drawing of a face, when it makes uncontrollable farting sounds against sweaty skin on a hot day, and most especially -- and this is one of our family's favorite stories -- when it's put away for the night on a stack of hotel towels, only to fly across the room and SPLAT! against the far wall when the top towel is unknowingly pulled off the pile in semi-darkness. 

We're lucky as a family to have all of this -- and while we celebrate that my mom is still with us, we will always mourn the loss of the people who aren't.

76th of Mom's

Happy 76th birthday to my tirelessly, fiercely awesome mom who -- not to make this about me after only ten words -- has made it her personal mission to coordinate doctors, dole out ever-changing (seriously -- they change pretty much every week) prescriptions, endure hours of medically related on-hold music, battle insurance companies, dig deep into online drug-interaction research, and sometimes just pour orange juice and fold laundry for her eternally grateful -- though sometimes exhaustedly unable to show it -- big ol' bipolar son, who undeniably couldn't survive this train ride without her. 

When she's not enjoying that little hobby, she's a devoted grandmother to the -- and I swear I'm being empirically objective here -- smartest, awesomeist, above-averageist, talentedist children ever to exchange inappropriate texts with their compulsively corrupting uncle who once again managed to make this tribute about himself. She and my dad are also emotional and moral and eternally inspiring community pillars who waste no time securing donated coats or shoes or furniture or shelter or food for sometimes complete strangers who desperately need it. In that vein, she also sometimes brings unnecessary butter to my sister's house, buys my dad an ever-expanding library of V-neck sweaters in a gradient palette of dark dad colors, dotingly acquiesces to our relentlessly bellicose cat's increasingly finicky tastes in wet food, blankets and inconvenient places to vomit, and occasionally indulges herself in post-season vests from the Talbots clearance rack. She loves her family unconditionally and we love her unconditionally back, even though she dances with her wrists out and puts onion salt in everything she cooks.

Next year she'll be a 40-year cancer survivor, and I'm posting this picture from her everyone-had-to-wear-pink 30-year survivor celebration not because we all look young and attractive in it -- but now that you mention it, I guess we do -- but because it radiates the profound joy she brings to her family, her community and everyone she comes in contact with. Except the cat, who demands that her tuna be prepared only with the white sauce from the pink can, which is laboriously difficult to find.

I stand corrected

My niece's seventh birthday was not, as I had earlier reported, Hannah Montana-themed. But my niece lives and breathes Hannah Montana, has decorated her room with Hannah Montana posters, dressed as Hannah Montana for Halloween and now lives a secret double life as an international pop star with tragically overprocessed hair ... so you can see how I might have accidentally jumped to conclusions on the birthday theme. NoFo regrets the error.

Instead, the party was cheerleader-themed, complete with actual cheerleaders from my old high school who taught my niece and her friends actual cheers:

After the cheerleaders left and we sent the little girls home to dream big cheerleader dreams, the domestic partner and I both admitted we avoided watching the cheerleaders work with the girls out of fear that they'd think we were ogling them. But then I realized these girls hadn't even been born–hell, there's a good chance their parents hadn't even yet met–when I was attending their high school. And I quickly decided I didn't care if they thought I was straight.

Once we'd cleared out all that proto-estrogen, we scrubbed the house, hauled out the dress-up (meaning not plastic cheerleader-themed) tablecloth and got the house ready for our Mom's pink-themed, 20-year breast-cancer-survivor party. We'd spent the day before making cookies and other pink foods, but the only picture I took was of the sugar cookies whose pinkness doesn't really translate well on my camera phone:

We had toyed with the idea of making boob-shaped cookies and limiting each guest to only one, but in the end we decided that might come off as indelicate. So we went with the hearts. Which are always a safe option. Except maybe for a divorce party. In any case, we rounded out our pink-food collection with salmon, shrimp, pink-chocolate-covered strawberries, and the best reason ever to survive cancer: a pink punch made of Sprite, pink lemonade concentrate and raspberry sherbet. I think I chugged a whole gallon of the stuff. And now I'm growing what looks to be a third breast right in the area where my abs used to be.

My family also all wore pink shirts for the party. And when I get ahold of the pictures, I'll show you how we looked as the Osmonds. In the mean time, we're just thankful that my mom is still alive and healthy 20 years after what scared the living crap out of us. And that raspberry sherbet tastes so darn good melting in a punch bowl of Sprite and pink lemonade concentrate.

Red is dead. Blue is through.

The domestic partner and I are road-tripping to Iowa tonight for a bipartisan* weekend.

* And by bipartisan I mean, of course, two-party. We’re going to two parties!

The first party on our dance card is my niece’s Hannah Montana-themed, sugar-and-screaming-fueled seventh-birthday blowout on Saturday morning. In theory, we can’t wait to jump and dance around and be goofy uncles with a roomful of seven-year-olds. But in all honesty, it’s already giving us a headache.

Once we’ve sent my niece’s little friends home to burn off their residual party energy on their unsuspecting parents, we’re boiling the house, digging out the china and having a second, more sedate, party to celebrate my mom’s 20th cancer-free year.

Mom survived a pretty brutal bout of breast cancer in 1988, and she’s had a few scares but had no relapses since she kicked it. To reflect the breast cancer survivors’ pink-ribbon theme, my sister and I thought it would be fun to have pink food at the party: shrimp, pinkish-reddish fruits, and even kringle—a sweet, soft Norwegian pretzel—dyed pink and baked in a ribbon shape.

Unfortunately, Mom so loved the pink idea that she wanted the whole family to wear pink. Even though Dior says black and rust. And those of you who know me or who have seen pictures of me no doubt have noticed I’m pretty much a black/blue/brown/gray kind of guy. So I had to go buy a pink shirt last night. The only one I could find in my size is actually “dusty rose,” but it fits nicely and I can totally wear it again.

And if I remember to haul out my camera phone at some point on Saturday, I’m sure I’ll post grainy pictures of all the festivities.

Friends of Sally

I remember Sally mostly for her spunky personality. She was a year behind me at Washington High School, and she always brought her big smile and her ready laugh to our choir rehearsals and performances. If I’d been her socially awkward sitcom boss, she would have been my wise-cracking sitcom secretary. And she would have gotten all the fan mail. But though I really liked her, I don’t recall us ever hanging out much beyond cast parties and group trips to Donutland after our show choir finished rehearsing on Monday nights.

I graduated in 1986 and came back the next few years to choreograph for the show choir, but aside from seeing her there, I can honestly say Sally hadn’t entered my mind since probably some time in college.

Sally’s class had its 20th reunion in July, and I emailed my friend Reed afterward to get his full report. He told me the gossip I was hoping to hear about people I hadn’t seen in 20 years—who was married and divorced and gay and probably gay and who had blossomed and who was still hot—and then he said that Sally had been there, looking weak and frail and bald. And that she was struggling against some form of cancer.

A couple days later, my sister—who was two years behind Sally’s class but who is more connected in the Cedar Rapids mom network than I am—sent me an email filling in the details:

Four years ago, Sally had been diagnosed with a rare and extremely aggressive form of breast cancer. Her case was so advanced by the time it was caught that it had already spread to other parts of her body. She had been given about two years to live at the time, but she’d been fighting it so aggressively that she was able to walk into her 20th reunion two years after she was supposed to be dead. But she’d been so sick, she hadn’t been able to work and was forced to go on public assistance. To make matters worse, she was raising two boys, ages 7 and 5, on her own.

Her classmates were so moved by her plight and the plight of her boys that they set up a web site to tell Sally’s story and collect donations on her behalf. The site promises that Sally and her boys will receive 100% of any donations made, though it looks like there is a 1% added fee collected by myevent.com, which hosts the site.

Again, I haven’t seen Sally in 20 years, but I know she’s real and I worry about her and her boys. I just made a donation. And I know there’s no tax incentive or stuffed bear in it for all you strangers out there, but here’s the link if you want to make a donation too:

Friends of Sally