Here is the eulogy I delivered for my brother at his memorial on December 27 at Lakewood Chapel in south Minneapolis. I wish it had been better. I couldn't get at how much it hurt and still hurts. I've spent a lifetime writing but I don't have the words. 

In the summer of 1973, our family was out on the east coast for two months—an eternity when you’re a kid—and for much of it we stayed at our grandmother’s house on Cedarhurst Road in Finksburg, Maryland. Yes, it was like it sounds. She lived on a long, long block without sidewalks, and without many people, and definitely no kids. So what did Chris and I do? We set up a Kool-Aid stand. We didn’t understand why nobody came. We weren’t exactly Business 101.

One day Grammie sent us on an errand to the corner grocer. On the way back we were goofing around, swinging the loaf of bread like it was a baseball bat. And in the middle of one swing, the bottom of the cellophane bag ripped open and bread … went … everywhere. We tried to gather up the slices, but they were dirty now, and the bag was torn, and we couldn’t make it right again. I was usually someone who didn’t get into trouble so this was new territory for me, and I began to cry. Chris always got into trouble, he was used to it, so he knew what to do: lie. Remember what awful businessmen we were? Well, we were worse liars. Our lie was: We were walking, and suddenly the bag burst open. Yeah, nobody bought it. A few weeks later, after visiting friends and relatives in other states, we returned to Grammie’s. It was raining—a huge summer downpour. And as we turned onto Cedarhurst Road in Finksburg, Maryland, Chris, with a thick-as-thieves gleam in his eye, whispered to me: “Look out for soggy bread.” 

I’ve read somewhere that the measure of a good sense of humor is the distance between the setup and the punchline. If so, this was world-class. He was 12.

That’s a shared experience, a shared memory, I had w/Chris. Last month, it became singular. I’m sure there are a lot of shared memories in this room that became singular that night.

He was athletic and I was not. He could do handstands and cartwheels. We went to a day camp, and there was archery, and I couldn’t hit the target while Chris won ribbons. I think our parents signed me up for wrestling because he had done so well with it. I lasted one match, about 10 seconds, in second grade. Chris wrestled through high school.

Then there was Evel Knievel. We went to see the biopic starring George Hamilton at the Boulevard, and afterwards Chris was inspired. At first it was enough to catch air on his sting-ray bicycle. Then he jumped over stuffed animals. Soon he got the kids in the neighborhood to lie down on the other side of the ramp and he would jump over them. Until the first parent looked out the window and saw what he was doing. 

He was better at confrontation. He fought bullies for me. At the same time, he seemed to be holding onto parts of his childhood. He wanted the crust cut off the bread until he was …8? He carried around a blanket. It had once been a big blue blanket, but by the time I knew it, it was just this gray rag. All the adults tried to get him to give it up, probably in ways that were not helpful, but he held onto it. He had trouble throwing things away.

By high school we were drifting apart. I was becoming more of an introvert, he an extrovert. He’d always liked performing: Children’s Theater, “The Crucible” at the Guthrie, Shaun Cassidy at Millwheels. He wanted to be a rock star, and sang along to The Who, and Sabbath, and Zeppelin, on our father’s stereo. He got so good at Shaun Cassidy that when we visited our sister and mother—living in Timonium, Maryland, after the divorce—one of Karen’s friends got Chris on the radio where he pretended to be Shaun Cassidy. They got so many calls from teenage girls in Timonium they had to get him back on the line to admit the lie: No, not Shaun; Chris from Minneapolis.

In high school he became a cheerleader. I remember going to a Friday night football game at Parade Stadium—some big rivalry with Washburn. Whoever won the game got to keep this bell for the next year. Washburn won the previous year but they were losing this game. At one point everyone’s attention was fixated on one end of the field, where the action was, and nobody saw students from the other side creep across until they were dragging the bell, clanging, across to their side of the field in celebratory fashion. Woo, we got your bell! Everyone looked, stunned. Everybody but Chris. He tore after them. He reached them midfield and leaped into the pile, fists flying. Seriously, it was cinematic. It was action-hero stuff. He halted their progress. And other Washburn people joined him, and they got the bell back, and they dragged it up and down our sidelines, bell clanging, celebrating. 

And there was me in the stands—swelling with pride, and confused by it.

And then he got kicked off the cheerleading squad for smoking pot. Then he was drinking and getting drunk. He was throwing parties, and passing out in the basement, and I’d have to drive his friends home. “What a jerk” became “Screw you” became “What’s going on with you? Are you OK?” That took 20 years. For most of it, I was not … there. I went to an Alanon meeting in the early 2000s, and most participants were the opposite of me: women trying to distance themselves from the alcoholic loved one. That wasn’t my issue. I’d always been good at distance. I was 2,000 miles away and probably further in my heart, but now I wanted to help.

But then a familiar cycle: proffered hand, betrayal; proffered hand, betrayal. I patted him on the back once during this period and he felt so …. Insubstantial. Like straw. Eventually, as a family, we decided no more proffered hands.

Chris’ recovery, beginning August 19, 2013, wasn’t exactly smooth. It’s not like he stopped drinking and life became amazing. Life, as it’s very good at doing, kept tossing stumbling blocks in his way. It gave him every excuse to go back to drinking.

He moved in with our mother—who still drank. Then she had a stroke and lost her voice. We lost her in 2019. Chris lost all of his teeth, a result of the alcoholism, and the dentures never fit right. He had trouble finding work. He had trouble getting credit. He was trying to begin grownup life at 52 rather than 22. It’s hard enough at 22. Try it in your 50s with no credit and no teeth.

We had a worldwide pandemic that isolated us all, and many, including me, used this as an excuse to drink. Not Chris. He quit smoking, he found work, he found better work. He became very methodical. I think he liked staying within the confines of his routines: going to AA every Saturday morning, then taking the bus to visit our mother at the nursing home; calling my father every Sunday at 11 AM. He was playing guitar, lifting weights, taking trips.

One of the things he hated about his alcoholic life was the impotence of not being able to pay for things. So sober Chris was always paying for things. No, I’ll pay for me. No, I’ll pay for Dad’s tickets to the Twins game. He hated not having money for Christmas gifts, so he wound up giving some of the most thoughtful gifts.

He still held onto things. There’s a bit of a hoarder mentality in our family. A common refrain from me during the last 10 years was “You still got that?” He had this blue felt Peanuts banner from the early 1970s: Snoopy on his doghouse, and the words: THE SECRET OF LIFE IS TO REDUCE YOUR WORRIES TO A MINIMUM. It was a bit ragged along the edges but for blue felt it was in pretty good shape. I thought of him, and those words, this past week when our family was going through our various COVID crises. When I got depressed about how we were screwing up Chris’s memorial, or COVID was, I’d think of Chris’ reaction. A shrug. A joke. He has a Maya Angelou quote taped to his refrigerator: “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” He lived that. Lose your teeth? Call your dentures “chompers.” Your mother is in a nursing home unable to speak? Visit her every Saturday and make her laugh. Bring the tuna fish sandwiches she misses and that you can eat without teeth. Take two buses to work, greet people enthusiastically. He was small but entered rooms big.

For some reason, October became the month he came out to see me in Seattle. In 2019 I took him to the local sites. We went on a hike up Tiger Mountain. This October we expanded it: The ferry over to Port Townsend. Paradise trail on Mount Rainier. It was early October and he was already buying Christmas presents.

When I hugged him goodbye at SeaTac Airport, just 2 ½ months ago, his back was firm and strong again, and we talked about the next steps on our journey. San Juan Islands? Oregon Coast? Taiwan maybe? I’d lived there for several years and he’d never been to Asia. I liked the idea of it. If I’m honest, even into his sober stage, there was an element of indulgence in us. Who’s going to pick up Chris, who’s going to drive Chris? Where’s Chris going to spend Christmas Eve? Eventually it was like, “No, I’ll go get him. No, I’ll ride with him.” He’d become one of my favorite people. Every day, he was overcoming something bigger than anything I’d ever overcome in my life, and he was doing it with a joke and a smile. I swelled with pride and this time I wasn’t confused by it.

One more story. My wife says she could always tell when it was Chris I was talking to because of the timbre of my laughter. It was the soggy bread line. It was the trip down to Albert Lea the summer before last. This was for another memorial—Eric’s mom, Reggie—and on the way we saw a billboard for a casino: a pair of dice and in big letters the words: LIVE CRAPS. I nodded toward it and said, “That could really be misinterpretted.” Chris started riffing off that, imagining a guy who’s disappointed when he finds out it’s just gambling. He kept riffing off it, and I kept laughing. I laughed so much my stomach began to hurt and I worried I wouldn’t be right for the memorial. When I tried to relay the story to the rest of the family that night, I couldn’t even get the words out I was laughing so hard.

My shared memories with Chris are singular now, but it was nice sharing them with all of you. If anyone here has memories of Chris they’d like to share, please. Stand, sit, come to the podium, whatever you’re comfortable with. We would love to hear them.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Japan’s “Godzilla Minus One” is a huge step-up from the recent Hollywood Godzilla movies but that’s not hard; those were all pretty awful. Each one was a soap opera interspersed with attacks by a giant prehistoric lizard. Here, we get a character study … interspersed with attacks by a giant prehistoric lizard. Much better.

Shame about the ending, though.

Godzilla as metaphor
It’s the final days of World War II, and kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lands his plane on the crater-filled runway of Odo Island for repairs. Except head mechanic Sosaku Tachibana (Munetake Aoki) finds nothing wrong with it. Shikishima is quiet, burdened; it’s obvious he couldn’t kill himself for the Japanese empire. As he gazes at the horizon, carrying the weight of his guilt, he notices odd, deep-sea fish surfacing en masse. 

That night, when Odo is attacked by a giant prehistoric lizard the islanders call “Godzilla,” Tachibana orders Shikishima to get into his plane and fire his weapons at the monster. (Why is he so sure this will work? Who knows? Just play along.) Shikishima is actually brave enough to run to the plane but can’t bring himself to fire the weapons, and when he wakes the next morning, everyone but he and Tachibana have been killed. Tachibana hands him photos of the men whose lives his cowardice lost and curses him forever.

Twice coward now, Shikishima returns to a fire-bombed Tokyo, where he finds his childhood home razed and his parents dead. A neighbor lady, Sumiko Ota (Sakura Ando), who lost her own children, sees the kamikaze pilot alive, puts two and two together, and blames him for Japan losing the war. Thanks, lady.

I’d assumed that all of this was prologue, and at some point we’d cut to modern-day Japan, but no, the movie stays post-war. It’s both period piece and a kind of meta explanation for the Godzilla phenomenon. Why, within 10 years of World War II, did Japan make a movie about a giant monster that breathes fire and wreaks havoc from above? Why, indeed? Godzilla is us. Japan woke a sleeping giant, the U.S., that did exactly this. Godzilla could also be the A-bomb—both work as metaphors. To be honest, I never thought much about Godzilla metaphors before, but watching Shikishima and the others struggling to survive in the wreckage, and knowing what’s about to come, well, you can’t help but see the parallels. 

In the rubble, Shikishima meets a woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), with a baby—not hers—and the three wind up living together in a shack. Platonically. He’s way too traumatized for anything else. Then he gets a well-paying job. Both Japan and the U.S. mined the waters around their island nation, and the new government hires men to remove the mines and blow them up. It’s dangerous work but Shikishima seems to want the danger. The man who couldn’t kill himself wants to die.

The movie is more Shikishima than Godzilla. Our questions about him as the movie progresses:

• Will he fit in with the minesweeping crew? Yes.
• Will he be able to fire his weapons at the mines? Yes—he’s a good shot.
• Will he be able to fire his weapons at Godzilla, newly irradiated and enlarged (and enraged) by the A bomb tests at the Bikini Atoll? Yes.
• Will Tachibana come back to haunt him? Yes, but not to haunt.
• Will he and Noriko find true love? Why not. 

There’s a nice “What a hunk of junk” bit with the minesweeping boat, which is made of old, creaking wood. Shiki is told by its oft-bemused captain, Yoji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), that the U.S. dropped mines that are attracted to metal. So: wood. The other two crewmembers are the affable former naval engineer with the nice hair, Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka); and Shiro Mizushima (Yuki Yamada), who doesn’t realize his good fortune of being too young for war. (I don’t know if Japan went the route of sending teenage boys to war, as the Germans did at the tail end, but I never bought that Shiro was too young to fight. For one thing, the actor playing him is 33.)

Oh, we also get a “Han Solo returns to take out the X-wings” vibe near the end, when Shiro returns at an opportune point to help with the final Godzilla battle. No surprise that, per Wiki, director Takashi Yamazaki was drawn to filmmaking by “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters.”

The film is oddly anti-government. It’s almost libertarian. Governments create problems (see: Bikini Atoll, WWII) but are nowhere on the solutions. This giant irradiated monster is heading toward Japan, and the U.S. is like, “Yeah, we’re busy with Russia now, how about we give you a couple of battleships and you take care of it, thanks.” And it’s not just the U.S. The Japanese government doesn’t want to tell the populace about Godzilla because they don’t want to cause a panic. The fuck? Plus they have no plan. No nothing. They’re not involved. When it’s time to tackle the big guy, it’s a consortium of private citizens.

The big brain of this group is the affable engineer with the nice hair, Kenji, who, because this Godzilla has the power to heal itself like Wolverine, suggests a rapid dunk with freon, then a rapid rise with inflatables, to kill it with decompression. Meanwhile, Shikishima’s got his own plans. During Godzilla’s attack on Ginza, he killed Noriko, so Shikishima plans to do what he couldn’t do during the war: ram a plane loaded with explosives down the throat of the bad guy. Banzai.

Along with “Star Wars” elements, there's a distinct “Jaws” vibe midway through.

33rd and counting
All of that goes down. The decompression weakens Godzilla, then Shikishima does the kamikaze thing and saves the day. Shikishima’s sacrifice is complete; he’s finally at peace.

Wait, what’s this? He ejected at the last minute? With an ejector shown to him by Tachibana? Who wants him to live? And Noriko is alive too? I think even Hollywood execs would blanch at so much happy ending out of nowhere.

Then we’re shown Godzilla regenerating. Because money.

Apparently this is the 33rd (!!!) Godzilla movie from the Toho Co.—i.e., not the Hollywood stuff—and I’ve seen, what, three or four of them? They seem to go in phases—one a year for five years, then nothing for six or nine years. The biggest fall-off in Godzilla production correlated with the Japanese economic miracle: Between 1975 and 1991 there were only two. Was life too good then? Does Godzilla only imperil Japan during moment of crises? 

I did like the quiet of this movie. I liked most of what it was trying to do.

Don't worry: Like James Bond, Godzilla will return in an exciting new adventure!

“'The New Hampshire gubernatorial race is taking all our time,' Roberta Muldoon wrote. ...

”There was, apparently, some feminist issue at stake, and some generally illiberal nonsense and crimes the incumbent governor was actually proud of. The administration boasted that a raped fourteen-year-old had been denied an abortion, thus stemming the tide of nationwide degeneracy.“

-- The World According to Garp by John Irving, p. 477 in my edition. I read that today and, well, you can imagine. The novel was satire (and not) when it came out in the late 1970s, and now it's not. I used to re-read it every few years but this is the first time in about 20. It's still great. It still reads like a breeze. The most dated thing is the black woman in John Wolf's office—the one who keeps saying ”Lawd." Otherwise, it's as up-to-date as today's tawdry news. It's as if the world has caught up to John Irving's imagination and become the X-rated soap opera he (and Garp) imagined it to be. I'm re-reading it now because it was the book on my brother's nightstand when he was murdered the night before Thanksgiving while waiting with a bag of groceries at an Edina, Minn. busstop.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Throughout Stephen Kijak’s doc, we get scenes from Rock Hudson’s movies that inform viewers of the real story behind the heterosexual facade. Basically they “Celluloid Closet” his oeuvre. 

• In “Bengal Brigade” (1954), Rock’s character informs Arlene Dahl that he can’t marry her. “For a moment,” he says sadly, “I forgot who I am.”
• In the 1957 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” an older woman tells him, cheerily, “You’re going to town tomorrow and find yourself some gay young playmate!”
• In 1965’s “A Very Special Favor” he’s told: “Hiding in closets isn’t going to cure you.”

Even the 1950s tabloid press gets into the act:

TWICE BURNED, ROCK KEEPS HIS DATING GAY

One assumes these quotes are taken out of context, but there are a lot of them. Did the screenwriters know what they were doing? Did Rock? When did gay mean gay? When did in the closet mean in the closet? If all of this was done with a wink, they were certainly dancing on the parapet 

Maybe everyone just had the urge to say some small truth. Or a large one.

The personification of Americana
Rock Hudson was the biggest male movie star in the final years of the studio system. According to Quigley, he was among the top three box office performers from 1959 to 1964, and No. 1 in ’57 and ’59. Then everything changed. JFK was assassinated, the Beatles landed, and Hollywood, struggling to survive in the TV era, began to cut loose the decrepit Production Code in order to show what couldn’t be shown on television (sex and violence, mostly); to get people out of their homes again.

To be honest, Rock’s movie persona, or the movies he made in his heyday, never interested me in the way that, say, early 1960s Paul Newman movies did. I have no interest in the pillow talk movies, or in Douglas Sirk’s weepies, which cinephiles have elevated over the years. (Martin Scorsese has even given them his imprimatur.) Straight, Rock Hudson doesn’t do it for me. Gay, he’s fascinating.

“Rock Hudson is playing a man called Rock Hudson, who is the personification of Americana,” actress and film historian Illeana Douglas says here. “The identity was given to him. And he slipped into it and played it for the rest of his life.”

I’d go further: He was a gay man playing a macho straight man for a homophobic culture. A tall Midwestern kid named Roy Harold Scherer Jr. went to war, came to Hollywood, and was molded by gay talent agent Henry Willson, who, per the doc, taught his clients how to be heterosexual. Willson fixed teeth and effeminacy, and he gave his boys brawny names: Tab Hunter, Guy Madison, and, yes, Rock Hudson—a name so unyielding “The Flintstones” didn’t know what to do with it. In that cartoon world, Cary Grant became Cary Granite, Tony Curtis became Stoney Curtis, and Rock Hudson became … Rock Quarry? It was a name beyond parody.

Rock was toiling amid early 1950s B westerns and “easterns” when gay producer Ross Hunter hooked him up with Sirk for a remake of the 1935 film “Magnificent Obsession,” which became one of the highest-grossing movies of 1954. It made him a star. Several years later, the Doris Day comedies put him in another realm.

The doc spends a lot of time on his late-career attempt to upgrade to more serious fare, with John Frankenheimer’s “Seconds” (19660, an art film that bombed. What it doesn’t talk about? The roles he took immediately after:

• Maj. Donald Craig in “Tobruk” (1967)
• Capt. Mie Harmon in “A Fine Pair” (1968)
• Cdr. James Ferraday in “Ice Station Zebra” (1968)
• Col. James Langdon in “The Undefeated” (1969)
• Maj. William Larrabee in “Darling Lili” (1970) 

In every movie, he’s a military officer in some dull action-adventure. It’s almost a return to his pre-“Magnificent Obsession” career. It was like he went, “Well, that didn’t work.” The Civil Rights Movement and Stonewall were all happening, and Rock was retreating back into the 1950s personsification of Americana.

Was he ever close to coming out? The doc interviews Armistead Maupin, of “Tales of the City” fame, who met Rock in the early 1970s when Rock came to San Francisco to shoot “McMillan & Wife.” Maupin was of the “out” generation, who felt Rock and his friends were slightly ridiculous—“The pride they took in hiding,” Maupin says. “I had a bee in my bonnet at the time. I said ‘You need to come out of the closet, and I’m the guy who can help you with that.’”

He says Rock listened; it was Rock’s partner Tom Clark who nixed the idea. “Not until my mother dies,” Tom said. To which Maupin adds, “If I was fucking Rock Hudson, I would want my mother to know immediately.”

(Maupin gets off some of the doc’s best lines. He met Rock at a party where Rock read aloud from Maupin’s work: “I think he expected it to charm the pants off me … and it more or less did.”)

For all of the closeting and hiding from the tabloid press (some of whom probably knew), and the FBI (which definitely knew), and the general public (including Rock’s wife Phyllis Gates, 1955-58, who claimed not to know), it’s surprising to me how open the gay community was even in the homophobic 1950s. There were pool parties and beach parties, out in the open, and Rock fucked everybody, and was known for fucking everybody. In the doc, there’s an audio clip of a 1974 phone conversation with a friend telling Rock about a new boy in town. “How is he equipped?” Rock asks.

That whole “Rock Hudson is marrying Jim Nabors” rumor from 1970 began as a gay joke, then spread to the straight press, where proper people were properly offended on his behalf. “How awful that someone would suggest such a thing!” was the right-minded implication back then, rather than “How awful that this is considered awful.” But that was me, too, into my 20s. Whenever a rumor arose that Such-and-Such was gay, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Just look at that phrase. It’s its own kind of homophobia.

Day, Taylor
In 1985 I was in college, reading Newsweek, when I was shocked by a photo of Rock Hudson with Doris Day. I remember scanning the text to see if they said anything on the why of it, but it was all about some Doris Day event, which Rock was supporting, and nothing on how hollowed-out and haggard he looked. The real news broke later that week. Maybe even later that day.

Then the media crapfest: Rock unable to return home from the Paris hospital; the outrage over his “Dynasty” appearances. He knew he had AIDS when he kissed Linda Evans! In voiceover, Evans talks about having to do that scene over and over because his kiss was so unromantic and dry; because, she says, he was protecting her. Yes. Every way except by telling the world who he was and what he had. And yes, that’s asking a lot. The world was a powerful mass and much of it wanted you different—or dead. I doubt I could’ve done it.

Elizabeth Taylor comes off well here. She was already advocating for AIDS awareness—chairing an LA “Commitment to Life” fundraiser—when Rock’s news broke. Who doesn’t come off well? The press. This was Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News in the early days of the AIDS crisis:

Scientists for the National Center for Disease Control in Atlanta today released the results of a study which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer. 

I’m hoping someday for a great Rock Hudson biopic. It’s all there: the irony and hypocrisy of mid-century America. And its tragedy.

A humblebrag is when you seem to be going “Aw, shucks” and you're not. You're stroking your ego. You're beating your chest.

Do we have a 21st century term for what the following does? It was part of a message I received the other day from LinkedIn:

While they're pushing or promoting their product (the app), they're also dissing their product (the website). Is there a term for that yet? And if not, what would you call it? Promodiss? And is there a pre-Internet precedent? It would have to be a product that has multiple ways of consuming or experiencing it, and that's not most products. Hostess couldn't say TWINKIES ARE BETTER IN THE MOUTH! 

I'm also getting a slight scolding vibe here. LinkedIn is basically telling me “You're doing it wrong. Do it this way. The way we want you to.” Creepy.

WARNING: SPOILERS

At Barton Academy, a prestigious prep school in Massachusetts, several students are unable to return home during Christmas break 1970. It’s an annual occurrence, for which a teacher is always left in charge, and this year Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) gets the assignment. It’s not his year but he recently flunked the son of a U.S. senator, who was a big donor, incurring the wrath of the headmaster, Dr. Hardy Woodrup (Andrew Garman). So when the assigned teacher came up with a lame excuse (“My mother has lupus”), Hunham got tapped.

Few are happy about this—certainly not Hunham, and definitely not the kids. He teaches an ancient civilizations course, uses Latin liberally, and grades harshly. He’s walleyed, smells of fish, drinks too much. He’s disliked by students, faculty, staff. 

But over the course of winter break, he and the most obstreperous of the students, Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sess), fight and bond, fight and bond, and bit by bit reveal more of themselves. It’s broken people finding each other, along with more of their own humanity. That’s a movie trope, often called “heartwarming,” but each scene feels genuine. There’s a stiltedness. Nothing quite lands in the way of movies. No scene is wholly satisfying. 

And I kind of liked that, but I still found Alexander Payne’s film, well, unsatisfying. And I don’t know if it’s because, deep down, I want the Hollywood of it all, or for a different, awful reason.

I just didn’t like the kid.

The journey
Angus should be thoroughly sympathetic. He’s shuttled from boarding school to boarding school, and the next stop is military academy and maybe Vietnam. His mother is recently remarried but she and hubby decide to go on a delayed honeymoon rather than host a family gathering. That’s why Angus is a holdover. And where’s his father? An early reveal comes in an argument with Paul:

Paul: You think I want to babysit you? I was praying your mother would pick up the phone, or your father would arrive in a helicopter or a flying saucer—
Angus: My father’s dead!

Except he's not. After Angus finagles a chaperoned trip to Boston, he abandons Paul in a movie theater where they’re watching Dustin Hoffman in “Little Big Man,” and when Paul catches up to him the truth is revealed: His dad is in a mental institution. He himself is taking anti-depressants. He’s sad about dad but worried that what happened to the old man will happen to him. He has no friends. One of the upper classmen is vaguely racist (Teddy Kountze, played by Brady Hepner), one is the supermellow star quarterback (Jason Smith, played by Michael Provost), while Angus is, you know, Angus. He stands up to Kountze’s backward racist barbs, sort of, and he’s empathetic when a smaller kid, a Korean kid, cries about missing his family. We should like him. So why don’t we? Or why don’t I?

Is it that he doesn’t let us in? He feels like elbows. He feels like thrashing.

How do you make an unlikeable character likeable? How does Paul Giamatti do it? Or do I just like his character because I’m closer to him? Both of us are on the wrong side of middle age, and wondering why what we know is considered useless while what we consider useless is everywhere in the culture. Mr. Hunham actually has a greater sense of humor about it than I do.

I like him because he has enthusiasms. He loves what he teaches, thinks it’s important, has standards and ethics he doesn’t compromise. He has wit, particularly in interactions with his students:

Kountze: Sir, I don’t understand.
Hunham: That is glaringly apparent.
Kountze: I can’t fail this class.
Hunham: Oh, don’t sell yourself short, Mr. Kountze, I truly believe that you can.

And even as he tries to inculcate these kids with what he considers ancient, important wisdom, he has a shrugging acceptance of the way things are. “I find the world a bitter and complicated place,” he says, “and it seems to feel the same way about me.” At another point, as a lesson to the kids: “Life is a henhouse ladder: shitty and short.” He can’t help the walleye, he can’t help the fish smell, but he muddles through. I would rewatch the movie for him. 

The period details are amazing. Hanging in the dorm is that W.C. Fields black-and-white poster where he’s holding cards close to the chest and looking suspiciously around. (Mouse over the poster for a glance.) “One of my brothers had that poster,” my wife whispered to me. “We had it in the family rec room,” I whispered back. It was a thing seen everywhere back then and now nowhere. Who even knows W.C. Fields anymore? But there he was. Perfect.

At one point in Boston, they’re coming up out of a subway tunnel, and a woman is exiting in front of them, Jewish maybe, with a kind of black dress and a long dangling necklace of … a peace sign? I forget what it was. It just felt exact. So was all this the work of production designer Ryan Warren Smith? He was born in 1977 so wouldn’t know this stuff first-hand. Was it Smith working with Payne? A team effort?

It’s not just the details in the movie but the details surrounding it. You see it in the trailer: its stentorian voiceover; that final awkward hold on Giamatti’s shocked face. So perfectly ’70s. They have fun with it. The R rating in the beginning of the movie is that ultra-blue R rating screen from the ’70s. The Focus Features logo is full of the fat bends of the early 1970s.

Initially there are five holdovers, watched over by Mr. Hunham and the Black head of the kitchen, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who’s there because she lives there. She took the job way back when so her son could attend Barton. It’s a bit like Jenny Fields in “Garp.” Except when her son graduated, he couldn’t afford college like his rich white peers so he was drafted into the Vietnam War. He died in combat. She’s broken, too, but puts on a tired, brave face. Until she doesn’t. 

Four of the five kids wind up being helicoptered away—literally. Smith, the QB, is only there because his dad (who owns a helicopter plant or something) won’t let the kid come on the holiday ski trip unless he cuts his damn hair, and, though it’s never stated, it seems like the kid brokers a deal: take all of us holdovers and you get your wish. Near the end of the movie, we see him in the shower with short hair. I assume it’s him anyway. It’s the only time we see anyone with short hair.

Angus is the holdover who doesn’t go because his mom doesn’t pick up the phone. So he doesn’t even have peers anymore. And his thrashing and self-pity get worse.

What do we learn about Mr. Hunham in the process? That he was engaged once. That he suffers from a disease that causes the fish smell. That he got kicked out of Harvard for plagiarizing his roommate’s work, even though it was the opposite, and the roommate, the cheating rich kid, went on to success. Hunham was given a chance at Barton and clung to it. We learn that his enthusiasm for history and ancient Greece is genuine. 

What do we learn about the kid? The dad and the depression.

And Mary? We learn that “The Newlywed Game” and her drinking cover up a bottomless sorrow about her son that bursts forth at the Christmas party. We also learn she has a sister with a baby. We see her bring the sister her son’s old baby clothes. We learn she’s saving money so that some day that baby can go to college—so what happened to her son won’t happen to him. She’s given herself a reason to live.

Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson even give her the Jack Nicholson diner scene from “Five Easy Pieces.” You’ve got bread? And a toaster of some kind? For her, it’s cherries jubilees, which the restaurant won’t serve to the kid because of the brandy. So she orders the cherries and the ice cream to go. And in the parking lot, they douse it with their whisky and light it on fire and laugh. It’s their fuck you to the system, but this, too, doesn’t quite land. The fire gets out of control. They stomp on it with their feet. Life is not a Hollywood movie.

The sacrifice
I wondered how they would end it. School would start, and something would happen in ancient civ, and Hunham and Angus would share fond, knowing glances? There’s a bit of that, but short-lived. 

Because Angus’ awful mom and step-dad arrive, furious at the school and Mr. Hunham for allowing Angus to visit his father at a sanatorium. Now Dad thinks he’s returning home, and he tried to brain an orderly with the snow globe Angus gave him. The visit was the result of Angus’ machinations, but Hunham knows the next step for the kid is military school, then maybe Vietnam, and maybe an early grave. So he takes the bullet. He says it was all his idea. 

For that, he’s fired, but the kids hail him as a hero. Kidding. It’s the opposite. Rumors float about something untoward he did in the boys’ locker room—not that, just something stupid, like literally eating shit—and as he’s packing up his little car, which requires him to get in via the passenger seat (another great period detail), Angus comes over to talk, to thank him. They tell each other to stay strong. Again, the scene doesn’t land in a Hollywood way. You never really get the sense that Angus gets it—the sacrifice that was made on his behalf. 

I’m curious if Payne and Hemingson made the kid all elbows in order to make Hunham’s sacrifice more profound? Or is it more profound? It’s just messy. Hunham even seems to wonder over it.

At least now I know why the movie’s reception has been muted. But I don’t know. The more I write about it, the more I like it.

Lear in The Chair.

A few years back I read Norman Lear's autobiography, “Even This I Get to Experience” and could've sworn I included excerpts on this blog. But that was just another thing I thought about doing and didn't. So here you go, all at once:

ON FATHER COUGHLIN
He despised Franklin Roosevelt, fulminated endlessly about the New Deal as a betrayal of American values, and attached prominent Jews to everything he was railing against. Coughlin repulsed me thoroughly, but I listened to him enough and was so chilled by his polarizing and divisive rhetoric as to be reminded of him throughout my life whenever I’ve run into an irrational, self-serving mix of politics and religion.

WORKING WITH SINATRA ON “COME BLOW YOUR HORN”
Frank was notorious for not doing retakes ... I looked at the scene in question and was even more certain that it needed to be reshot. I picked up the phone. Frank, whose day didn't start until eleven A.M., was in a makeup chair. “Frank, I just looked at that scene and we really have to do it again.” He asked why, and I told him. “My mother in New Jersey ain't going to notice that,” he said. “But, Frank—” “Did you hear me, pally, there is no fucking way I'm doing that again.” “But we have to, Frank,” I said earnestly. “You give me one reason why,” he fumed. “Because I fucking said so!” I exploded. “Okay,” he said.

ON FOCUS GROUPS 
Some 30 people, likely recruited at a mall, were brought to a screening room and seated before a large TV screen. They were a bused-in midlife group, carrying shopping bags, dressed on a warm day in shorts, sandals, and blowsy short-sleeved shirts, all wearing the “What the hell am I doing here?” expression. The host explained that they were going to be shown a 30-minute situation comedy [“All in the Family”] and the network was interested in their reaction to it. At each chair there was a large dial at the end of a cable. They were to hold that dial while watching the show and twist it to the right when they thought something funny or were otherwise enjoying a moment. If they didn’t think something was funny, if it offended them or simply bored them, they were to twist their dial to the left. ... The group howled with laughter, rising up in their chairs and falling forward with each belly laugh. But wait! Despite the sound and the body language, they were dialing left, claiming to dislike much of what they were seeing, and they were really unhappy with it. But really! While I can’t say I could have predicted this behavior, unlike my friends at CBS I understood and was elated by the audience’s reaction. Who, sitting among a group of strangers, with that dial in his or her lap, is going to tell the world that they approve of Archie’s hostility and rudeness? And who wants to be seen as having no problem with words such as spic, kike, spade, and the like spewing from a bigot’s mouth? So our focus group might even have winced as they laughed, but laugh they did, and dialed left. 

ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF ARCHIE BUNKER
The most telling letter we received was from a woman who had been divorced many years before, when her son was four years old. The boy had never seen his father after that. On the night All in the Family debuted, her son was now 32 years old and living 1200 miles away. The show was on for about 10 minutes when the lady ran to the telephone and almost broke her dialing finger phoning her son. When she reached him she screamed across the miles: “You always wanted to know what your father was like—well, hurry up and turn on channel two!” 

ON THE ESSENCE OF ARCHIE BUNKER
Archie's primary identity as an American bigot was much overemphasized because that quality had never before been given to the lead character in an American TV series. But the show dealt with so many other things. Yes, if he was watching a black athlete on television, he'd make an offhand bigoted remark, and Mike would call him out on it. But the episode in which that exchange occurred might have been about Archie losing his job and worrying about how he was going to support his family. ... He was lamenting the passing of time, because it's always easier to stay with what is familiar and not move forward. This wasn't a terrible human being. This was a fearful human being. He wasn't evil, he wasn't a hater—he was just afraid of change.

ON CARROLL O'CONNOR
The marvel of Carroll's performance as Archie Bunker was that at some point each week, deep into the rehearsal process, he seemed to pass through a membrane, on one side of which was the actor Carroll O'Connor and on the other side the character Archie Bunker. Fully into the role of Archie, he was easily the best writer of dialogue we had for the character. ... If Carroll O'Connor hadn't played Archie Bunker, jails wouldn't be a “detergent” to crime, New York would not be a “smelting pot,” living wouldn't be a question of either “feast or salmon,” and there would not be a medical specialty known as “groinocology.”

ON 'MESSAGE' SHOWS
“If you want to send a message,” I was told, “use Western Union.” In the early years I would face that accusation by denying it. ... Then came a moment when—after expressing this for the umpteenth time—I thought: Wait a second. Who said the comedies that preceded All in the Family had no point of view? The overwhelming majority of them were about families whose biggest problem was “The roast is ruined and the boss is coming to dinner!” Talk about messaging! For 20 years TV comedy was telling us there was no hunger in America, we had no racial discrimination, there was no unemployment or inflation, no war, no drugs, and the citizenry was happy with whomever happened to be in the White House. Tell me that expressed no point of view!

**

All the obits say Lear changed American television, and he did—for about five years. Then it changed back. His shows thrived in the aftermath of the “Rural Purge,” when sitcoms like “Mayberry R.F.D.,” “Petticoat Junction” and “Gomer Pyle” went away or were canceled; and for a time, per Paddy Chayefsky, Lear replaced them with the American people. “He took the audience and he put them on the set,” Chayefsky said. By the 1974-75 season he had five shows in the top 10: “All in the Family” (1), “Sanford and Son” (2), “The Jeffersons” (4), “Good Times” (7), and “Maude” (9). The characters were bold and brash, and the sum total looked more like America, and everyone argued with everyone. And soon audiences tired of it. It was like what happened with the movies. For a time, we wanted reality, or hyped reality, or maybe just violence and sex, but before long the No. 1 movies were not “The Godfather” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” but “Star Wars” and “Superman,” while the No. 1 TV shows were “Happy Days,” “Charlie's Angels” and “Three's Company.” And by 1980-81? It was rural redux. The No. 1 shows were “Dallas” and “The Dukes of Hazzard,” and Lear's real people were replaced by “Real People,” the beginning of reality television, and the beginning of the end. That year, Reagan was elected by a landslide and began to change everything. Archie Bunker won and made things worse for the Archie Bunkers of the world.

I didn't know, watching “All in the Family” in the early 1970s, that I was watching America for the rest of my life. This line above gets at it: “Yes, if [Archie] was watching a black athlete on television, he'd make an offhand bigoted remark, and Mike would call him out on it.” One side was racist, the other side was annoying, and they just swirled together forever. We're still caught in that dynamic. “Didn't need no welfare state/ Everybody pulled his weight” has been, along with a touch of Father Couglin, the GOP platform since forever.

But what a life Lear led. From the above, you get a sense of how he did it. It was not just that he was funny, it's not just that he had original ideas and a good moral compass, it's that he didn't compromise. If he could stand up to Sinatra, what chance did CBS have? None. By forcing the suits to go his way, he made them millions. And yes, he changed television. Until it, and America, changed back.

FURTHER READING:

• “Norman Lear Reshaped How America Saw Black Families,” The New York Times

WARNING: SPOILERS

This was just Burt Lancaster’s fifth film, and Kirk Douglas’ fourth, and their first of seven together, and though it’s from Paramount Pictures and based on a play (“Beggars Are Coming to Town” by Theodore Reeves), it feels very Warners Redux. The plot is basically “Angels with Dirty Faces” without the collar. During Prohibition, a guy takes the fall for his gang; years later, he comes out of prison with something owed to him and gets the runaround. 

Lancaster is in the Cagney role. He plays Frankie Madison, the loyal guy who lost 14 years. From the start he has a massive chip on his shoulder, so when he’s betrayed he has nowhere to go but bigger. He overacts. The character is a drag, to be honest. Lancaster may be in the Cagney role, but he’s not Cagney. We almost always like Cagney. I never much liked Frankie. 

Douglas is essentially a slicker, more corporate Bogart. He plays Noll Turner, the disloyal fink who killed guys trying to hijack their liquor run, for which Frankie takes the fall. During the 14 years, Noll never visits Frankie in prison—not once—but everything he touches turned to gold. His life got bigger, swankier, and more corporate, and he got harder to touch. Douglas is great. He's both greasy and clean, and supremely confident. We kind of like him in his awfulness.

There’s a dame, of course, Kay Lawrence (Lizabeth Scott, sixth film, trying her throaty best to Bacall up the joint). She sings at Noll’s nightclub, has a thing for him, does his bidding, winds up with Frankie. Because movies.

“I Walk Alone” has a bad title, an unsympathetic lead, an uninspiring romance, and too many nightclub songs. Two things recommend it: Douglas’ performance and Regent, Inc. 

In which corporation?
That’s the moment Frankie makes his play but he’s operating from a bygone playbook. He gathers the few men he knows, and some he doesn’t, and takes them to Noll’s nightclub for a showdown to get his promised half. He thinks it’s still 1933.

Noll, whom Frankie calls “Dink,” knows better. He's nonchalant. Half of what? he says.

This isn’t the Four Kings—no hiding out behind a steel door and a peephole. This is big business. We deal with banks, lawyers, and a Dunn & Bradstreet rating. The world’s spun right past you, Frankie. In the ’20s, you were great. In the ’30s, you might have made the switch, but today you’re finished: as dead as the headlines the day you went into prison.

Flummoxed, Frankie keeps making his play, trying to strongarm his way in. So Noll brings in his accountant. Dave (Wendell Corey) is the guy Frankie trusts, the only one who visited him in prison, and he tries to explain the situation.

Dave: The Regent Club, Frankie, is controlled by three corporations: Regent Incorporated, Regent Enterprises, and Regent Associates.
Frankie: I don’t care what kind of Regent you call it. What’s Dink’s in?
Dave: Well, it’s not that easy to explain, Frankie. For instance, the fixtures and furniture, that’s the property of Regent Incorporated. The equipment, on the other hand, belongs to Regent Enterprises. Now, Regent Associates … I’ll diagram it for you.
Frankie [knocks pen away]: Stop trying to dizzy me up. Here! Now, I want simple answers, Dave. No diagrams. Dink’s got the full say around here, right?
Dave: Yes.
Frankie: Okay then!
Dave: Except that it’s revocable by a vote of the board of directors of Regent Associates.
Frankie: Stop the double-talk!
Dave: I’m sorry, Frankie.
Frankie: Just what Does dink own?!
Dave: In which corporation?

And it goes on in this manner. It’s so fucking good. Frankie barrels in there with muscle to take what’s his, and he’s basically told that what’s his doesn’t exist. Nothing is concrete anymore. Muscle—at least that muscle—doesn’t matter. It’s the giant step in the gangster genre between ’30s Warners and ’60s flicks like “Point Blank,” or epic tales like “The Godfather.” Martin Scorsese laid it all out in his great 1995 documentary for the BBC: “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” which, as always, is much, much recommended. It's Film 101 for anyone who gives a shit.

This scene is so brilliant—particularly compared with the tired tropes of the rest of it—that I wondered where it came from. Who it came from. One of the credited screenwriters is John Bright, part of the Chicago team behind “The Public Enemy.” Bright was a Marxist, a cynic, and a drunkard, and the scene feels right up his alley—the true gangsters are the white-collar capitalists—but in his memoir “Worms in the Winecup” (another bad title), he takes no credit. Mostly he complains that his writing partner, Robert Smith, didn’t get tough-guy understatement. He thought everyone should be over-the-top. But Bright makes no mention “Regent, Inc.”

Because it's from the play by Theodore Reeves. In The Boston Globe, Oct. 10, 1945, reviewer Cyrus Durgin says the play is absorbing in part “because of the thesis that Frankie is behind the times since force has been abandoned for the greater strength of business methods.” Not a bad cast, either. Paul Kelly as Frankie, Luther Adler (cf., this) plays Noll, E.G. Marshall is Dave. And look at that pub date. WWII had been over one month. And here was a play saying, “Hey, remember those ’30s gangsters before all this went down? Whatever happened to them?” But I guess not enough people were interested. The play got so-so reviews and didn’t last. 

Sadly, after the “Regent, Inc.” scene, the movie has nowhere to go, either. Or it goes in predictable places. 

Pen pal
As Frankie’s newly formed gang abandons him, Nolls abandons his true strength—the gossamer threads of corporate holdings—for the thing he mocked Frankie for bringing into his office in the first place: muscle. He has his goons beat up Frankie in a back alley. It’s so awful, it turns two of Noll’s minions into enemies: Kay, who takes Frankie home and nurses him back to health; and Dave, who knows Noll has cooked the books, and decides to betray him.

And how does he decide to betray him? By telling Noll he’s going to betray him. Cue face palm.

So of course Dave is killed, and, since Frankie had publicly threatened him, the murder is blamed on Frankie. And fast. From Noll fingering Frankie to the front-page headlines (GANGSTER KILLS PAL) is like, what, a half hour?

The problem with the second half is that everyone acts stupidly: Noll abandons his true strength, Dave tells Noll he’s going to betray him, and when Kay see the screaming headlines, she doesn't go to the cops and say, “Nah, Frankie was with me. People at his hotel can corroborate. Seriously, you might want to question Noll a little harder instead of taking his word on everything.” Instead, in the manner of thrillers, she and Frankie go after Noll themselves.

After a confrontation with Noll at his mansion in Jersey (no penthouse in NYC?), they all return to the nightclub. There, Frankie finally outsmarts Noll but it’s more sleight-of-hand than anything. Noll tells the cops Frankie forced his confession with a gun, but Frankie says “I’ve got no gun.” And he doesn't. The bulge in his pocket that seemed like a gun was just a pen—the pen he was going to give to Dave. And the cops stupidly fixate on this detail, then (way more stupidly) allow Noll to get one final drink from behind the bar before they cart him off to jail. How were they supposed to know he had a gun back there? So yes, he tries to shoot his way out, and yes, he’s killed by the cops. And yes, the end.

But that middle scene is brilliant. It lets me know that the world was lost to me decades before I arrived.

“A shape-shifting, flip-flopping, over-promising, self-serving politician is nothing new. Where Mr. McCarthy truly distinguished himself was in his willingness and ability to debase himself in the service of Donald Trump — even as he occasionally pretended to still have a spine. 'My Kevin,' as Mr. Trump so delighted in calling him, certainly did his part to aid Mr. Trump's political revival after the Jan. 6 sacking of the Capitol. In a turnaround so dramatic it must have given him whiplash, Mr. McCarthy went from saying that Mr. Trump needed to 'accept his share of responsibility' for his role in the attack to, some weeks later, slinking down to Mar-a-Lago for a grotesque photo op with the former president. ...

”By empowering the most extreme elements of the Republican conference, he made an already fractured, fractious chamber even more dysfunctional. Worse, by shoring up Mr. Trump after Jan. 6, he helped put America back on a crash course with a dangerous, antidemocratic demagogue looking for political revenge. ...

“Thanks a lot, Kev. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.”

-- Michelle Cottle, “Was It Worth It, Kevin?” The New York Times Opinion page

My questions about his resignation revolve around whether Mike Johnson is paying attention—how can he not be?—and what lessons he's drawing. I get the feeling he's drawing the wrongs ones. As for Kev: Why now? Why not stick it out for another year? He says he plans to stay in GOP politics, but how? In supporting more centrist candidates or in continuing to be lickspittle and lackey to the crew that undid him?

She came with the name but we came up with the nicknames:

• Jelly Pie
• Pie
• Little One
• Little
• Pretty One
• Pretty
• Funny Face
• Funny
• Sugar Pop

Mostly she was Jelly or Bean. I don’t know if all these names confused her. Probably not. She was smart; she knew tone. She knew when she was being called and mostly didn’t care—unless she was being called for dinner. Or breakfast. Or a snack. Particularly a snack.

She was food-focused but if she’d written a memoir it would’ve been called “Something to Swat At.” That was her forte. She was a rescue cat, and feisty, and most of her swats were with a soft paw, but not always. One afternoon, more than 10 years ago, a dog we were looking after got too close and she gave him a bloody nose. Patricia was embarrassed—what awful neighbors we were!—but I was filled with pride. “That’s my girl,” I told her as Patricia led the wounded dog away. She was superfast. She liked to play with and be chased by Patricia, and she liked to cuddle with me. She had strong back legs and climbed 6-foot armoires and 7-foot bookcases, and leapt between the kitchen stool and the refrigerator like Evel Knievel. She arrived with a square purple patch of cloth, like a potholder, which she carried in her mouth, mowling, when she was feeling vulnerable. When people commented “What a pretty cat,” I corrected them: “The prettiest cat.” Patricia simply called her the best cat ever.

For some reason she liked me. Because I listened to her? Because I was the softer touch? Both? She didn’t like being picked up except by me, and sometimes not by me. I would hold her body with my left arm and create a platform with my right hand that she could rest her front paws on; and in this manner I’d walk around the apartment and show her things. She loved book shelves. She would nose close, purring. I assume she was looking for a spot to slink into, but we’re book people and there wasn’t a lot of extra room on those shelves. She didn’t seem to mind. She liked the journey. She liked looking out the window onto Cherry Avenue. Early on, she was a hunter, and would make eck-eck-eck noises when she spotted a bird or a bug. Early on, she made low growling noises, like a dog, when strangers came to the front door.

Maybe she liked me because I adhered to the lesson I learned from Willie Morris in his book “My Cat Spit McGee.” Morris, the legendary editor of Harper's in the 1960s, and author of the book “My Dog Skip,” was a dog man until late in life when he married a cat woman, and one of her cats because his cat. It was a dog-like cat, and one afternoon, to the hysterics of the neighborhood children, he tried to teach him to fetch. Skip wasn’t having it. Why isn't he doing it? he asked his wife. “Because it isn’t his idea,” she replied. That’s the lesson. I rarely tried to force a program on Jelly. I let it be her idea.

She came to us in Feb. 2008 when our friend Ward spotted her on PetFinder.com, and it was two years ago that the breathing issues began. Antibiotics helped until they didn’t. This September she was diagnosed with cancer, and we opted, at age 16, not to go the chemotherapy route. Since then, she’s been up and down but on a steady downward trajectory: eating less, sleeping more, her breathing increasingly clogged. Our wake-up calls got later and later: from 5:30 to 6 to 7 to not at all. She could still be curious—exploring the hallway—but other times she’d wake from a nap with a start, like she couldn’t catch a breath, and then stare at me for a long time as if to say: “Can’t you do something about this? Can’t you fix it?” Saturday night, for a time, she seemed not able to breathe, and I worried we’d waited too long; I worried she was suffering too much. After it was done, I worried we hadn’t waited long enough. It’s an awful thing to have to decide.

I thought the trauma of losing my brother two weeks ago might lessen the sorrow of losing Jellybean this week. Apparently it doesn’t work that way.

Don't mind me, just let me be
My eyes so far away
I don't need no sympathy
The word gets overplayed

I'm alright, it's just tonight
I can't play the part
I'm alright, it's alright
It's just a broken heart.

-- Eddie Vedder, “Broken Heart,” from Ukulele Songs, 2011

My brother Chris on the Paradise hiking trail at Mount Rainier two months ago. He was murdered at a bus stop in Edina, Minn. the evening before Thanksgiving. 

• Obituary/slideshow
• Donations for a memorial bench
• A memorial service will be held December 27 at Lakewood Cemetery Memorial Chapel in Minneapolis.

More later.