My Brother

 

 

Wednesday was the first day in 15,498 days where the sun rose and my brother, Jason Magrane, wasn’t around to see it. He passed away on Tuesday November 10, 2020 at 12:42 pm at Portsmouth Regional Hospital in Portsmouth, NH surrounded by his mother, father and me.

 

That last sentence is the type of “just the facts” information that I would throw down when I was a reporter writing obituaries. It’s not very personal and it doesn’t give much of a picture of who the deceased was, it was more of a record that this person existed for a time and then departed the world.

 

Like you, I’ve experienced death before, but the passing of Jason has hit me hard. He was much more than a range of dates, he was a father, a son, a husband, a friend, an employee, a boss, but most importantly to me, he was a brother. As I’m writing this blog post on November 12, I can only think of the future and the past. Jay is going to be laid to rest two days from right now but three years ago to the day, I gave the best man’s speech at Jason’s wedding. Below is a portion of what I wrote, this was supposed to be a toast to Jason’s nuptials, never did I envision it becoming part of a eulogy:  

 

“According to Magrane lore, when my mother came home and told me that she was going to have another baby and it was going to be a boy, I was inconsolable. I wanted a sister and the thought of having a brother muscling in on my territory and sharing my toys was too much.

 

Despite my best wishes, Jay never turned into a girl, so I was stuck with a brother for my childhood. And it turned out to be pretty awesome. Growing up, Jay and I were pretty much alone at any extended family gathering—and we used to see our family a lot. I would think about friends who had dozens of cousins and how they’d talk about hanging out with them at family gatherings and it sounded pretty great.

 

But with Jay and I growing up together, we had to be each other’s best friends. Whether it was at my grandmother’s house or Aunty Rita’s or at Cousin Kathy’s in New York, it was just him and me. That meant he and I would play He-Man and GI Joe, read comics, or draw or play Wiffle Ball. It was always Jay and By or By and Jay. With us being together that much, it could have gone a few different ways, but we became close.

 

A few years later, as I got into high school and had my own group of friends; I began to notice that my friends—all of them—took a liking to Jay. Was I happy about this turn of events? No, I was not. It used to drive me crazy that my friends always invited Jay to come with us whenever we did something, whether it was hoops or pond hockey, Indian ball or football, Jay was always a part of the crew. And not only that, but my friends genuinely liked him and respected him.

 

It wasn’t until a few years later that it dawned on me: some of my friends had younger siblings and they were never invited to do stuff with us. Jay was included because he was funny and smart, athletic and loyal; he was included because he was one of us.”

 

It’s funny, when you grow up with a brother, you’re inundated with a lot of media about how close brothers have to be: from Wally and the Beav to Greg, Peter and Bobby to Willis and Arnold, all of those brothers were the best of friends.

 

But real life isn’t like that. Life isn’t scripted, each person doesn’t know exactly what the other person is always thinking and problems aren’t solved in 30 minutes (minus time for commercials). The idea that two people could be complete and total best friends forever and ever and ever without any disagreements is a silly, unrealistic myth.  

 

As we grew into adulthood, Jay and I were close-ish. We were both independent men who had their own life and their own life’s philosophies. Mine was a bit more conservative in regard to risk and rewards. Jay was the opposite. Jay lived his life the way he wanted to live his life, which I found admirable and a little concerning, but that wasn’t how my brain worked. Jay could talk to literally anyone—he had no fear in that department, made everyone feel comfortable—which is an awkward endeavor was for his older brother, was fun, constantly laughing and wondering when the next good time was going to happen.

 

As we grew up we worked through our differences and over the last few years, we began to get closer. While we didn’t agree on everything, I could at least understand why Jay was doing what he was doing. And I think he could see things from my point of view too. Even though we were closer, Jay still wouldn’t (or couldn’t) tell me what was bothering him when asked. And it wasn’t just me, Jay didn’t want to burden anyone with what he considered his “trivial problems”.

 

“By, you have a family, focus on them,” he’d always say. But what I don’t think that Jay got was that even though I have a wife and two children, Jay was my family and I did want to focus on him. But his carefree persona or his pride or whatever he felt at the time wouldn’t allow him to tell me what was really going on. Would I have helped him? Would Jay be here today? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s a question that I’ll have to live with.

 

The thing is, Jason was 42-years-old and you could ask him what’s wrong, I could ask him what’s wrong, Bo Jackson could ask him what’s wrong and Jay wasn’t obliged to give us an answer. Jay’s stubbornness knew no bounds. He was the Michael Jordan of stubborn. Things were easier when we were kids and if I wanted to really know what his problem was, I could jump on him (I always weighed more than him), sit on his chest, put my knees on his biceps and tickle him until he told me his deal. I wish I thought of doing that a few months ago, but that approach seems sort of weird now that I think about.

 

You’re never going to get a straight answer out of tickle torturing someone and just because you ask someone to do something, doesn’t mean that they’re going to do it. For example, Jay went into the hospital last Monday and that prognosis looked grim even back then. While I was putting away that evening’s dishes, I decided to try and honor my brother by playing the Grateful Dead Pandora station. The Dead were Jay’s favorite band (he saw them at the old Boston Garden in 1994) and he was always trying to get me to listen to them. Aside from a few albums and a couple of singles, the Dead and jam bands never appealed to me. But last Monday night, I was going to listen to the Dead in honor of my brother.

 

I made it three minutes. I’m sorry Jay, and I know that you understand, but I just couldn’t do it.

 

Alas.

 

There’s a lot of things that suck about my brother’s untimely passing, but I think that the biggest one is that he and I are never going to get the chance to be as close as we were when we were kids and that truly makes me sad. I was looking forward to the day when Jay and I take our kids to a Sox game. Or he could ask me for the millionth time why I don’t like Bill Simmons anymore. Or when we could have a moment and remember long-passed relatives who seem to exist in the fogs of our minds. Or he could recommend a podcast to me. Or when a tragedy happens and I need someone beside my wife to talk to, so that I can get through the latest malady without losing my mind.

 

All of that has been taken from me and it makes me very sad.

 

Earlier this morning I was thinking about a random memory of Jay and me. It had to be during the spring of 1990 and I was in my room probably obsessing over my baseball cards or reading a magazine while listening to Public Enemy’s newest tape “Fear of a Black Planet”. There’s a song on that album called “Welcome to the Terrordome” and if you know anything about PE—and especially that album—you know that it’s a wall of sound. It’s literally a pastiche of samples and cuts laid upon one another to make new beats.

 

At 1:47 into the song there is a horn that wails unsettingly loud and shrill. That day in 1990, I thought it was my brother calling, “Byyyyyyyyron!” from downstairs. And it wasn’t just that day, for like the first 10 or 15 times I listened to that song, hear that sound, amble over to my stereo, shut off my tape and yell, “WHAT DO YOU WANT JAY?” And he’d always say that he never called me, I’d press play and grumble to myself about Jay being a pain in the ass.

 

Today I listened to that song and in particular that shrill horn and it made me smile and cry. Jay may be gone, but he’ll never be forgotten.

48. Head of the Class

Edit: I think that making fun of a decade's fashion faux pas are about the hackiest thing one could do, but this picture is just awesome.

I purposely stayed away from 1980s sitcoms for one simple, reason: they mostly suck. It's a hard fact to grasp, especially if you grew up during that time and you revolved your TV-watching schedules around Arnold Jackson, Webster Long, Ricky Straton and Blair Warner like I did. But the truth is, if you get the opportunity to check these shows out now, there's really not much in terms of plot or laughs.

Actually the laugh track could be one of the worst inventions ever created for television. Why do you need canned laughter to let you know what's funny? Shouldn't this be a discovery you make on your own? Have you ever watched a show without a laugh track with people who depend on a laugh track? Whenever something hilarious happens they look around and wait to be prompted to guffaw. This is one of my least favorite inventions.

For example, on “Diff'rent Strokes” the entire show is one long build up to Arnold (Gary Coleman) busting out his catch phrase, “Watchotalkinbout Willis?” Each episode was so formulaic that oftentimes logic took a vacation in order to wrap the show up in 30 minutes. The writing is stilted, the acting is often wooden and there is no real substance at all.

One show was different and that was “Head of the Class” starring a post “WKRP in Cincinnati” Howard Hessman. Though he played a former hippie in this show as well, his character was a different beast than the iconic Dr. Johnny Fever. While Fever was the ultimate FM DJ, Hessman's Mr. Moore was the best teacher that a student could wish to have.

What made HotC different from its sitcom brothers and sisters? It's hard to say, because a lot of times the episodes were formulaic and the students were straight out of central casting (the fat one, the uber nerdy one, the conservative, the foreigner, the hippie, the artsy one, the bad ass, the precocious kid genius, the black one and the nice one—who was also black). However, there was a certain intelligence to the show that you weren't going to find on “Who's the Boss?”—and if that isn't the definition of a back handed compliment, then nothing is. None the less, it's true. The show didn't always take the easy way out, there are times where the main characters actually didn't succeed.

The writers also didn't always go for the simple joke or the “funniest” pun. Despite being archtypes, most of the show's jokes were based on the characters' different personalities. With ten students in the class, some characters were more developed than others, but I often thought that development was based on the actor rather than the character.

For example, Arvid was probably the most popular character because of the way he looked and acted. The guy who played him (Dan Frischman) never portrayed him as a “Revenge of the Nerds” type nerd; which would've been easy as the movie had just been released two years prior to this show and was fresh in the collective conscious of the American public. Frischman chose to portray him as a smart guy who happened to be different in his looks and his interests. In the world of the 1980s sitcom, that is “Hamlet”-like depth.

Most of the show's plots reflected the dichotomy that is the high school jungle: the kids who made up the cast of HotC were the brightest of the school (their class was the Independent Honors Program or IHP), yet they were perceived by their classmates as losers. Most of the student body never took them seriously and the class was either mocked or held in contempt. The class worked and studied hard because they had nothing else going for them. That is until Hessman's character, Charlie Moore began teaching them.

Originally a substitute teacher, Moore was only supposed to be in the class for a few days and move on with his life. For some reason, he took a liking to the class and began teaching them about the other side of history—the stuff that you can't find in books. He also made them try new things and to expand their horizons outside of the library. The kids learned a lot and to the dismay of the vice principal (Dr. Samuels, who saw this group of kids as a learning machine) Moore was named the permanent history teacher for the Honors program.

This is the most basic template for most high school-related television shows; teacher shows the kids something that they never know, kids learn something other than school work and teacher learns something too. The fact is, it's a template because it works. With “Head of the Class” there was a Jeter-like intangible that made this show better than all those other shows like “Welcome Back Kotter”.

Kotter was a loud and obnoxious show that was filled with lies and hammy actors all mugging for the camera. HotC had a sense of sincerity and it wasn't loud or relied on cheap jokes and catch phrases to get laugh. To the 12-year-old, it seemed like it could've been shot in any number of high school. “Head of the Class” was more honest than anything that I was watching on television at that point in my life.

Even when I was eight, I knew that “Diff'rent Strokes” and “Silver Spoons” were bullshit shows. They were enjoyable bullshit shows, but there was no way that any of the plots could happen. On HotC, there was a possibility that most of the plots were built around a kernel of truth. I wanted to know that there are teachers in the world who really care about their students and high school is filled maladjusted social retards looking to break out of their shells.

At least that's what I was hoping for.

At the time this show was popular, I was in the midst of three years in hell—otherwise known as junior high school. None of my teachers were as interested in their students' lives as Mr. Moore was (it was more of adversarial relationship—or at the very least a I-won't-bother-you-if-you-don't-bother-me truce) and being in the “smart classes” I had an affinity for what the students went through, especially because I felt I was a maladjusted, social retard. “Head of the Class” provided some sort of faint hope that going to high school was going to be a different ball game than being stuck in junior high without any hope for parole.

And while Amesbury High School wasn't anything like Millard Fillmore High School, it was a better place than Amesbury Middle School.