The funeral procession from Nativity to the cemetery was endless, a snaking automotive conga line of grief and respect: friends, relatives, neighbors, bridge clubbers, tennis partners, teachers, school parents, hockey parents, Cincinnatians, Chicagoans, and 3Mers. The motorcade was a mile-long measure of Mom’s influence.
In dying, she allayed my greatest fear—of death. Dying joined shoe tying and coat zipping and bed making on the long list of acts Mom demonstrated for her children, so that we could someday do it for ourselves. Among the so-called personal effects she left behind were the collected works of Erma Bombeck, whose essays on housework, child-rearing, and other domestic mayhem reflected Mom’s own experience. Opening one of those books at random—Aunt Erma’s Cope Book: How to Get from Monday to Friday in 12 Days—I saw the author had dedicated it to her children: “If I blow it raising them, nothing I do will matter very much.”
Mom was buried beneath a plaque engraved with her name and the dates 1934–1991. Dad had his name engraved next to hers, with the right side of the dash left blank. It didn’t escape my attention that he’d chosen a cemetery plot in “prestigious west Bloomington,” so that Dad’s moment of departure will also be a sign of his arrival.
Six weeks after Mom died, I was back in Minnesota, covering the Twins in the 1991 World Series. While there, I declined to stay in a downtown Minneapolis hotel and instead slept in my old bedroom in South Brook, where the mastheads of various newspapers that Dad brought me from the road—the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune—were still Scotch-taped to my old homework desk.
When the Twins won game seven on a Sunday night in Minneapolis, I drove my rental car home from the Metrodome and wrote all night in the basement, in front of the same TV where I watched and wrote about Twins games on Mom’s Royal typewriter.
In the morning, I filed the story to Sports Illustrated, as I’d dreamt of doing as a child.
The next time my siblings and I met in the driveway—November 11, 1995—was the last time. Dad was moving out of our house, out of South Brook, out of Bloomington, and into a condo one suburb (and a whole universe) away. “You can’t defect to Edina,” I told him, but Dad was adamant. In a few months, he’d be retiring from Mickey Mining after thirty-eight years. Audiocassettes had already been replaced by compact discs. Videocassettes would soon get deep-sixed by the DVD. Dad’s career in magnetic tape was winding down like one of the cassettes he long championed, all the tape having transferred to the right-hand spool—what pros like him call the take-up reel.
And so my brothers and I decided that since we’d all be visiting Bloomington on the same weekend in November, we could repay Dad by removing and dispensing with a quarter century of stuff at 2809 West 96th Street. That we chose to denude our childhood home of all its objects and their corresponding memories on November 11, 1995, did not sit well with Amy. It was, after all, her wedding day.
As she has reminded her brothers on a regular basis in the intervening two decades, Amy didn’t require her alarm clock that morning. “All my brothers greeted me with a wake-up call: Get up! It’s moving time!” she wrote to me in an e-mail in 2016. “I watched as my childhood furniture of twenty-six years was moved downstairs and into the garage. The mirror that hung on my wall was carried away. Julie, my maid of honor, gasped. I just shrugged. I kept a sense of humor and was not going to let my brothers taint my special day. So we just watched as the house was slowly emptied. Furniture. Wall hangings. Kitchen items. Holiday décor. Books. My Raggedy Ann doll. My whole doll collection. My favorite stuffed Santa. I complained that there was no place to sit down—the kitchen had been cleaned out—so John brought a lawn chair in from the garage. Jim retrieved the toaster from its box. My wedding-day breakfast was toast on an aluminum-framed lawn chair in an otherwise empty kitchen. I was stuffing away an explosion of emotions as every worldly possession I had ever known and every childhood memory I ever had was swept into the garage.”
In fairness, we’d been instructed by Dad to take whatever objects we wanted and to “pitch” or donate the rest. Dad called dibs on his and Mom’s bedroom set, the donkey painting that he bought in the Philippines, a carved statuette of Christ the Redeemer picked up in Rio. In honor of Mom, I grabbed a Lladró figurine of a schoolteacher pointing at a globe. I did not take, to my everlasting regret, her Royal typewriter. It and nearly everything else was driven to Goodwill.
We cleaned so diligently and for so long that Saturday that Tom and John showed up late to church and missed the wedding pictures. John didn’t notice that he had the rented tuxedo shirt meant for Mike, the groom, who was eight inches shorter. And Mike didn’t notice that he had John’s shirt. So Mike rolled up his sleeves during Mass and never removed his tuxedo jacket. At the reception, several of Mom’s friends said to Amy, “Your mother is turning over in her grave right now, the way your brothers treated you on your wedding day.” But the redhead knows the ways of the shitheads. Amy forgave us.
She was enrolled in medical school at the time, on her way to becoming an emergency-room doctor. None of us was surprised. Growing up with four brothers, Amy was adrenalized by chaos, unfazed by blood, inured to violence. She’s raising four kids in suburban Minneapolis now. Working the night shift at the ER, saving gunshot and car-crash victims, is her way of unwinding. The Boys still take credit for her success. When we decapitated her Baby Tender Love doll for use as a hockey puck, and she saw it miraculously (if somewhat gruesomely) restored to life, a doctor was born.
Dad now has fifteen grandkids. He lives a block from Amy. Jim, Tom, and John are all successful businesspeople with families—Tom in Minneapolis, the other two in Chicago. I have a large and noisy family of my own in Connecticut. But I still feel the gravitational pull of the two cities where the rest of my family has remained. Where life began and gathered its propulsive force. Where life was never more lively.
On my desk I keep a working, banana-yellow, rotary-dial phone with forty feet of coiled cord. Every so often I pick up the receiver just to feel its heft in my hand. Then I press it to my ear and listen for some distant echo of its origin, the way you hear the ocean in a seashell. All I ever hear is the dial tone. But what I’m really hoping for, one of these days, is my sister’s voice, so I can tell her to get off, that it’s my turn to use the phone.
Acknowledgments