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.

Nostalgia for Nothing

The above title isn’t indicative of what this post is going to be about, but it was alliterative and reflected the spirit better than Nostalgia for Nihilism, so I went with it.

My wife and I have two daughters under the age of six. The oldest one is five and the youngest one has just turned two. Each kid has their own personalities that will undoubtedly change between now and their teenage years. As their parents, Aly and I worry about them constantly. While a lot of our concerns overlap, there are things that she freaks out about more than I do and vice-versa.

One of the things that I think about is what I’m giving to my children and how it ultimately affects them. If you’ve read this Blog over the years, you’ll find that the one thing I’m a tad obsessed about is nostalgia. I write about it all the time. Most of my jokes and references are rooted in a 70s/80s/90s/early 00s pop culture quagmire that is becoming less relevant to anyone outside of my generation as the days go by. So it should come as no shock that when I talk to my kids and share things with them, most of the time, I’m sharing things that I liked when I was a boy.

This leads me to over-thinking about whether I am making my kids nostalgic for a past that they never had.

To wit: for the longest time, my kids’ favorite song was “The Banana Splits Theme Song”. Do you know how many times they’ve seen that show? The youngest one has never watched an episode and the oldest saw half an episode once but asked me to shut it off because “The Arabian Knights” cartoon was too scary. Yet, they love the Banana Splits song and ultimately the idea of the Banana Splits, especially when I tell them how much I used to love the show as a kid and how I would always wake up from my nap at 1:30 pm so I could flip on TV-56 and watch the Splits* do something funny.

* The interesting thing is that the Banana Splits was a take-off on the Monkees which was a take-off on the Beatles. So while what I was watching was a third-generation version of the original, my daughters are grooving to a fourth (or fifth) generation of the Fab Four. Let’s all do the Banana Split, indeed.

When we read comics, I’m usually reading the old Marvel stuff that I used to love and the girls are reading updated kiddie versions of that same old stuff.

When they hunker down to watch TV they both beg to watch Boomerang, which is Cartoon Network Classic. Or they ask to tune into The Hub, which has old stuff from the 80s like JEM, Transformers, GI Joe* and updated stuff from the same era. Even Nickelodeon (to an extent) and Disney keep churning entertainment built on characters from their past. My youngest is obsessed with Tinkerbell, so much that we have to watch one of the movies (usually the 30-minute short) every night before she goes to bed. And while these movies are new, the character of Tinkerbell has to be about 60 years old now.

* By the way all of the shows we liked as kids suck now. There is literally no rhyme, reason or logic to any of the plots—which are so warmed over and hackneyed they’d make Chuck Lorre blush in their unoriginality.

The toys that they own are things both my wife and I played with when younger: Legos, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Barbie (I’ll let you guess which of the proceeding toys I played with the most – answer below!). Even some of the toys that weren’t around when I was a kid have some sort of mooring to the past. For example, the oldest was on an American Girl Dolls kick a few months ago. These are extremely expensive dolls and accessories that have back stories set in the past*. Some dolls are set during the Revolutionary War, some dolls are from the Civil War, others are part of the Great Depression (so fun!). My oldest loves Julie, who is based in the 1970s.

* There are some dolls that have adventures in the present, but the ones that American Girl seems to focus on and market are the ones from past era.

Many of the toys that are on the shelves today seem to be a derivative of something that sold well in the past. And I know why this is true: nostalgia is big business. If you can tap into a parent’s past and polish it up to look like something current it’s going to serve two masters. One, the parent won’t mind purchasing it (“It’s just like what I used to play with!”) and two, it’s new and shiny and current so the child will crave it. The first part of that last sentence is most important because the parent controls the purse strings and when they’re spending cash, they want to make sure that it will be something that’s “worth it”.

To put it another way, I remember how much fun I used to have playing with Legos when I was a kid. Therefore I have no problem spending a small fortune on buying them Legos. Subconsciously I’m thinking, “I had a great time with these toys when I was a kid, so why shouldn’t my child have the same memories?” The feeling of shared memories—even brokered over decades—is strong and manufacturers understand and exploit this.

And the most important reason for this is: it’s just plain easier (and cheaper) to repackage things that sold well a generation ago than to come up with a brand new idea.

It will be interesting to see what this does to children of this generation. If adults are stalled in an arrested development that trickles down to their, what will the effects be? I am not suggesting that Gen Xers or Baby Boomers* grew up in an idyllic era of completely new products and ceaseless imagination. There are plenty of toys that I played with, television shows that I watch, songs that I listened to that were from my parents’ childhoods. Same with them and my grandparents. However, it seems that this recycling is on a grander scale.

* Who names generations anyway? Is it some sort of pop culture collective that come up with these increasingly ridiculous monikers? Because these names are down-right embarrassing. I wouldn’t even use them if they weren’t so darn handy.

Perhaps because there are more things vying for the attention of children, toy manufacturers need a proven commodity to make money. There is a multitude of television channels that need hundreds of hours of programming. Imagination and originality are a finite (and expensive) resource, no matter what Willie Wonka tells you. On average, our kids may be getting more original programming but it’s getting lost in the non-stop caterwauling of children’s television. Just by simple necessity, the old stuff outweighs the new stuff by at least three-to-one.

The final piece to this puzzle is accessibility. When my dad or mom would tell me about things they enjoyed from when they were children, it was a story and once it was done, it was lost in the ether. Unless one of my grandmothers kept one of their toys, I wasn’t going to be able to see it, hold it, experience it. They may as well have been telling me about the first steam engine. Same thing goes for their TV shows. Every once in awhile I’d tune in to the original “Mickey Mouse Club” or see an old cartoon, but very rarely would my parents and I talk about the show and I’d see it immediately.

There was no real tangible connection.

In this era, if we can remember it, we can see it. A few days ago I was humming a seemingly long-forgotten song from an Charlie Brown show that somehow wormed its way to the front of my brain. My daughter wanted to know what I was humming, I told her, she laughed and within seconds we were on YouTube checking it out. Now her memory is of watching this show after my brain regurgitated a once lost memory. In effect, I had to experience this first before she could.

I don’t think that’s the way it has always been this way.

At the beginning of this piece I wrote about how my kids have never seen a full episode of the Banana Splits, but love the song and idea of the show; especially when I talk about it from my perspective. While it’s true, they’ve barely seen the show, they’ve seen the opening theme/introduction to the show probably well over one thousand times. In fact, my oldest runs up the playground slide backwards and playfully falls on her side because she’s seen Drooper do it so many times.

Because of the instant accessibility of our childhood combined with the repurposing of old toys and TV shows, I worry that our kids are going to have false memories. I can picture my daughter telling her friends about how she used to run up the slide backwards and fall because she remembers a anamorphic lion from a program that she used to watch “all the time” doing the same thing. But the fact is she didn’t watch the show, she watched only a part of the show though she may not intrinsically know, or really understand, this fact.

Perhaps we as a culture will one day decide that “true” memories aren’t valid or even necessary anymore. These new societal mores may eventually pave the way for a scenario that echos the beginning of the movie/short story “Total Recall”. Specifically the scene when the main character Douglas Quaid (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger because fuck Colin Farrell in the remake – and yes, I get the irony in relation to what I’m writing about) enters the travel agency to has his brain implanted with memories of a vacation he never took may not be science fiction.

Then we’ll be that much closer to finding a woman with three boobs.