My mom went into labor with my only brother on her own birthday, which always falls around Thanksgiving. I woke up that night--totally oblivious to her situation--and walked clear across the house to tell her I felt sick before throwing up all over her carpet. I can’t remember who cleaned it up or when my parents left for the hospital, but Mikey was born later the following day. Before my mom eventually left the hospital, she called the house ahead of time, asking whatever adult was watching us to put another leaf in the dining room table; Thanksgiving dinner would be going on as planned. The additional leaf was probably needed to accommodate extra relatives stopping by to see the new baby, but I just assumed the extra space was for my infant brother--as if he’d breeze in from the hospital a fully formed child in a size 4T pea coat and scarf, ready to establish his seat at the table. Little did I realize at the time how appropriate it was to assign mature characteristics to such a young person. Mikey’s always been an old soul.
My dad recently showed me a home video he took in the aftermath of Hurricane Fran. It was meant to document the devastation of our surrounding woods and to highlight the happy accident that our home was nearly untouched, not even by the diseased Dutch Elm that waivered with its heavy, sickly branches at the front of our house like a drunk who could pass out at any minute and crush anything it fell on. Not long into the video, we see my Mikey getting off a big, yellow school bus at the end of our long, winding driveway. He was 3 months away from 10 years old, with a giant back pack that extended out behind him like a turtle shell made of text books. He looked SO young and yet exactly how I remember him.
As the youngest and the only boy, Mikey was like a specimen in a petri dish being analyzed by scientists with intermittent attention deficits. At times, we scrutinized and memorized his every move--but then, we'd get distracted by our own pre-teen endeavors and completely miss entire chunks of his development, so that our cumulative memory of him was a series of disjointed screen shots taken at different stages--his high school self, the 3-year-old that drove around in his battery operated car, and this guy. Nine years old going on 30, getting off the bus with his book bag, ready to survey the damage from a recent hurricane like a local news anchor on location. As I watched him on camera more than 20 years later, gesturing maturely to sawed-off trees using words like "debris" and "micro-tornado", the suspicion amassed by family lore and my own memories was confirmed--Mikey's been old forever.
About 5 years after the filming of that video, Ray and I took Mikey to see Brand New at the Cat's Cradle. Mikey had taken on his high school form now and this would be one of the first shows my brother had ever been to (possibly the first). Tiffany with special guests New Kids On The Block was my first show way back in 5th grade--a good bit before Tiffany tanked and posed for Playboy and about two seconds before the "New Kids" bored into brains of preteen girls like flesh-eating bacteria. At that point in time, any concert I would've heard about was performed at the local basketball arena, so huge for that era that binoculars were generally required in order to discern facial definition on the sparkly blobs that bounced around on a stage quite possibly in a different zip code from your seats.
Little did I know, in the age of Debbie Gibson on audio-cassette, that my own hometown was a vibrant music scene, literally teaming with lesser known acts that were nonetheless good enough to stick around long after Debbie had retired her black bowler hat and the creepy face drawn on her knee. They performed in bars and fraternity houses--and clubs smaller than the bedroom where I hung my Paula Abdul poster. They played on stages close enough to sweat on you or at the very least peg you in the forehead with any guitar pic or drumstick they hurled out during the show. And while you might be wishing you'd worn earplugs 10 years later when you were stone-deaf, binoculars were completely unnecessary in such venues. The place Mikey wanted to go to was one of those storied holes in the wall and we jumped at the chance to bring him into a live music tradition we enjoyed so much ourselves.
Still in high school but almost able to drive, Mikey's access to live music was about to bust wide open. But for the moment, he needed an escort--and we were happy to oblige. For years already, I'd been riding Ray's coat tails into obscure shows at the cool venues I'd overlooked as "gross" and "scary" in elementary school--but without him, it's unlikely this formerly fervent Top 40 fan would have recognized any band my millenial brother was listening to. Ray's influence, however, was keeping me young enough to be well-versed in what the "kids" were listening to, Brand New included. The lead singer--who often wore one of those ironically skinny neckties you couldn't go near a college without tripping over in the early aughts--kinda resembled my brother to me, possibly because my Mikey also wore ties a lot, but in a much more Future-Business-Leaders-Of-America kinda of way. Either way, it seemed somehow appropriate that we were taking Mikey to see the emo/punk-version of himself.
A few years later, Mikey made the jump to college student 5 minutes down the road in the prominent university town where we grew up. That town would become much more his than its bars and clubs ever were to me or to Ray--where he'd meet his future wife, earn two degrees, and make a life-time's worth of friends. Ray and I still checked into the Cat's Cradle on our own when anyone of interest came through, then walked our happy asses up the street to Mikey's apartment, where we'd take in little slices of Mikey's college experience, an era Ray and I still felt nostalgically close to in our own increasingly "adult" lives.
Toward the end of Mikey's high school years and the beginning of his college career, people still burned CDs for each other using a method I was lazy enough to never learn--and lucky enough to never need once IPods, IPhones, and ITunes took over the world. Mikey gave me a few of those shiny, generic discs etched with permanent marker in that era: a Taking Back Sunday album with a random bit of Keane hidden like an Easter Egg at the end; Cold Play's X&Y, and Sam's Town by The Killers.
Taking Back Sunday was cool--but I had to admit not knowing them well enough to notice Mikey's Easter Egg was actually Keane and not them, a song called "Somewhere Only We Know." It turned out to be my favorite song on the disc and will always make me think of Mikey--especially now, since Mikey and his wife moved semi-temporarily to the West Coast, far away from both their families to a place that will likely be the "somewhere only we know" they fondly look back on in years to come.
X&Y was what I listened to on my morning commute the entire summer of 2005, making it the soundtrack to paying off my credit cards and saving for my upcoming wedding. Say what you want about Cold Play's recent foray into club music--"Fix You" is a damn good song and X & Y is a solid album front to back that will always remind me of that exhilarating and emotional time of my life.
Sam's Town was a kind of concept album, with little 15 second vignettes peppered throughout that helped to reveal a story of sorts... Or at least, that's what I'm told. Mikey accidentally recorded my copy in reverse--which probably disrupted the intended narrative a little, but didn't take anything away from a band whose music has had unrelenting sentimental value to me ever since Ray and I listened to the Hot Fuss album on repeat the entire weekend we got engaged. Backwards or forwards, Sam's Town was a great album, too. And when I found out that Mikey was known among friends for his drunken homages to Brandon Flowers, it was gratifying to know that we could be seven years apart in age, but still overlap in the music innervating our memories as we simultaneously formed them in our separate spheres of experience.
I'd always imagined we'd take Mikey to a Killers show, but by the time they finally came around, Mikey had a grown-up job half a state away--and with 2 kids of our own at that point, it was all Ray and I could do to get ourselves to that show (which was well worth the wait, as it turns out). Nowadays, the only "show" I can promise to share when Uncle Michael and Tee-Tee Deborah come to visit is whatever Nick Jr cartoon his young nephews are into (or the "address song" I taught them for safety reasons). Where Mikey lives now, he has access to untold wonders of sight and sound, so the best I can do is hope that he takes full advantage while he can and lets me live vicariously through his photos and texts when he goes somewhere cool.
It seems crazy that Mikey, who's worn "professional dress" since preschool, is just now turning 30--but today, that's most definitely the case. We've watched that toddler, on a mission to change the invisible oil in his "car", grow from a kid who somehow looked like he could do your taxes--to a full-grown adult whose actual profession is often associated with doing people's taxes--although, he'll be quick to tell you that's not what he, personally, does. In an era where most guys his age are working from home in their hoodie and pajama pants, Mikey commutes to a physical building every day dressed like Don Draper. Lucky for the health and safety of him and his marriage, he bypasses the liquid lunches and chronic adultery of Mad Men fame--but he and Deborah did look damn convincing in their Don & Betty couples costume a few Halloweens back.
Years are just numbers, of course--and Mikey knows more about numbers than the average guy, for sure. But it's good to see the age of the vessel finally caught up with the age of old soul that's been riding around in it all this time. Thirty years after my mom added another leaf to her table, Mikey swooped into my house in man-sized pea coat and scarf, and we added a seat for him between my two sons--who might as well have walked home from the hospital as fully formed children themselves, for as quickly as they've grown from babies to miniature men. Mikey lives far away now and we'll all be just a little bit older the next time he sits at my table. But for now, he's 30, my sons are 3 and 5--and everyone who wants one gets a cupcake.
My dad recently showed me a home video he took in the aftermath of Hurricane Fran. It was meant to document the devastation of our surrounding woods and to highlight the happy accident that our home was nearly untouched, not even by the diseased Dutch Elm that waivered with its heavy, sickly branches at the front of our house like a drunk who could pass out at any minute and crush anything it fell on. Not long into the video, we see my Mikey getting off a big, yellow school bus at the end of our long, winding driveway. He was 3 months away from 10 years old, with a giant back pack that extended out behind him like a turtle shell made of text books. He looked SO young and yet exactly how I remember him.
As the youngest and the only boy, Mikey was like a specimen in a petri dish being analyzed by scientists with intermittent attention deficits. At times, we scrutinized and memorized his every move--but then, we'd get distracted by our own pre-teen endeavors and completely miss entire chunks of his development, so that our cumulative memory of him was a series of disjointed screen shots taken at different stages--his high school self, the 3-year-old that drove around in his battery operated car, and this guy. Nine years old going on 30, getting off the bus with his book bag, ready to survey the damage from a recent hurricane like a local news anchor on location. As I watched him on camera more than 20 years later, gesturing maturely to sawed-off trees using words like "debris" and "micro-tornado", the suspicion amassed by family lore and my own memories was confirmed--Mikey's been old forever.
About 5 years after the filming of that video, Ray and I took Mikey to see Brand New at the Cat's Cradle. Mikey had taken on his high school form now and this would be one of the first shows my brother had ever been to (possibly the first). Tiffany with special guests New Kids On The Block was my first show way back in 5th grade--a good bit before Tiffany tanked and posed for Playboy and about two seconds before the "New Kids" bored into brains of preteen girls like flesh-eating bacteria. At that point in time, any concert I would've heard about was performed at the local basketball arena, so huge for that era that binoculars were generally required in order to discern facial definition on the sparkly blobs that bounced around on a stage quite possibly in a different zip code from your seats.
Little did I know, in the age of Debbie Gibson on audio-cassette, that my own hometown was a vibrant music scene, literally teaming with lesser known acts that were nonetheless good enough to stick around long after Debbie had retired her black bowler hat and the creepy face drawn on her knee. They performed in bars and fraternity houses--and clubs smaller than the bedroom where I hung my Paula Abdul poster. They played on stages close enough to sweat on you or at the very least peg you in the forehead with any guitar pic or drumstick they hurled out during the show. And while you might be wishing you'd worn earplugs 10 years later when you were stone-deaf, binoculars were completely unnecessary in such venues. The place Mikey wanted to go to was one of those storied holes in the wall and we jumped at the chance to bring him into a live music tradition we enjoyed so much ourselves.
Still in high school but almost able to drive, Mikey's access to live music was about to bust wide open. But for the moment, he needed an escort--and we were happy to oblige. For years already, I'd been riding Ray's coat tails into obscure shows at the cool venues I'd overlooked as "gross" and "scary" in elementary school--but without him, it's unlikely this formerly fervent Top 40 fan would have recognized any band my millenial brother was listening to. Ray's influence, however, was keeping me young enough to be well-versed in what the "kids" were listening to, Brand New included. The lead singer--who often wore one of those ironically skinny neckties you couldn't go near a college without tripping over in the early aughts--kinda resembled my brother to me, possibly because my Mikey also wore ties a lot, but in a much more Future-Business-Leaders-Of-America kinda of way. Either way, it seemed somehow appropriate that we were taking Mikey to see the emo/punk-version of himself.
A few years later, Mikey made the jump to college student 5 minutes down the road in the prominent university town where we grew up. That town would become much more his than its bars and clubs ever were to me or to Ray--where he'd meet his future wife, earn two degrees, and make a life-time's worth of friends. Ray and I still checked into the Cat's Cradle on our own when anyone of interest came through, then walked our happy asses up the street to Mikey's apartment, where we'd take in little slices of Mikey's college experience, an era Ray and I still felt nostalgically close to in our own increasingly "adult" lives.
Toward the end of Mikey's high school years and the beginning of his college career, people still burned CDs for each other using a method I was lazy enough to never learn--and lucky enough to never need once IPods, IPhones, and ITunes took over the world. Mikey gave me a few of those shiny, generic discs etched with permanent marker in that era: a Taking Back Sunday album with a random bit of Keane hidden like an Easter Egg at the end; Cold Play's X&Y, and Sam's Town by The Killers.
Taking Back Sunday was cool--but I had to admit not knowing them well enough to notice Mikey's Easter Egg was actually Keane and not them, a song called "Somewhere Only We Know." It turned out to be my favorite song on the disc and will always make me think of Mikey--especially now, since Mikey and his wife moved semi-temporarily to the West Coast, far away from both their families to a place that will likely be the "somewhere only we know" they fondly look back on in years to come.
X&Y was what I listened to on my morning commute the entire summer of 2005, making it the soundtrack to paying off my credit cards and saving for my upcoming wedding. Say what you want about Cold Play's recent foray into club music--"Fix You" is a damn good song and X & Y is a solid album front to back that will always remind me of that exhilarating and emotional time of my life.
Sam's Town was a kind of concept album, with little 15 second vignettes peppered throughout that helped to reveal a story of sorts... Or at least, that's what I'm told. Mikey accidentally recorded my copy in reverse--which probably disrupted the intended narrative a little, but didn't take anything away from a band whose music has had unrelenting sentimental value to me ever since Ray and I listened to the Hot Fuss album on repeat the entire weekend we got engaged. Backwards or forwards, Sam's Town was a great album, too. And when I found out that Mikey was known among friends for his drunken homages to Brandon Flowers, it was gratifying to know that we could be seven years apart in age, but still overlap in the music innervating our memories as we simultaneously formed them in our separate spheres of experience.
I'd always imagined we'd take Mikey to a Killers show, but by the time they finally came around, Mikey had a grown-up job half a state away--and with 2 kids of our own at that point, it was all Ray and I could do to get ourselves to that show (which was well worth the wait, as it turns out). Nowadays, the only "show" I can promise to share when Uncle Michael and Tee-Tee Deborah come to visit is whatever Nick Jr cartoon his young nephews are into (or the "address song" I taught them for safety reasons). Where Mikey lives now, he has access to untold wonders of sight and sound, so the best I can do is hope that he takes full advantage while he can and lets me live vicariously through his photos and texts when he goes somewhere cool.
It seems crazy that Mikey, who's worn "professional dress" since preschool, is just now turning 30--but today, that's most definitely the case. We've watched that toddler, on a mission to change the invisible oil in his "car", grow from a kid who somehow looked like he could do your taxes--to a full-grown adult whose actual profession is often associated with doing people's taxes--although, he'll be quick to tell you that's not what he, personally, does. In an era where most guys his age are working from home in their hoodie and pajama pants, Mikey commutes to a physical building every day dressed like Don Draper. Lucky for the health and safety of him and his marriage, he bypasses the liquid lunches and chronic adultery of Mad Men fame--but he and Deborah did look damn convincing in their Don & Betty couples costume a few Halloweens back.
Years are just numbers, of course--and Mikey knows more about numbers than the average guy, for sure. But it's good to see the age of the vessel finally caught up with the age of old soul that's been riding around in it all this time. Thirty years after my mom added another leaf to her table, Mikey swooped into my house in man-sized pea coat and scarf, and we added a seat for him between my two sons--who might as well have walked home from the hospital as fully formed children themselves, for as quickly as they've grown from babies to miniature men. Mikey lives far away now and we'll all be just a little bit older the next time he sits at my table. But for now, he's 30, my sons are 3 and 5--and everyone who wants one gets a cupcake.
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