_{After the life-altering departure of 2/3 of the wine team at my job, and shouldering the work load of three since mid-August, I did recently decamp to Boston a few weeks ago for my Father’s 89th on a Sunday, and a memorial service on the following Tuesday for my best friend’s Dad.}

_{It was a four day period of unskeining not “the patriarchy,” as I am wont to do, but rather, my own patriarchy.}

_{When I repacked my small traveling bag when I was leaving my Dad’s place to go stay with another close high school friend, there were three items inadvertently packed in the same quadrant of the suitcase: a vintage tie I bought while my friend’s Dad was still alive from one of his favorite tie makers, Turnbull and Asser, a red and blue patterned tie my Dad used to wear when I was a kid, and a triangle folded American flag (and some adjacent pajama pants).}

_{Given the small amount of sleep I managed to enjoy on this particular trip, this context rich tryptich was completely accidental, and although they are pictured below, I was certainly not raised to offer my pajamas for public visual consumption.}

_{My eighty-nine year old Father and I were in fact recalling the night of his birthday, that when his Mother could still drive her Ford Granada, she would put on makeup, jewelry, a skirt suit and heels to go shopping at Johnny’s Foodmaster and drop off dry cleaning at NuWay Cleaners in West Medford.}

_{But to return to the tryptich, the combination of a tie I remember my Dad wearing when I was a small child, a tie I bought to pay homage to a well-loved friend and mentor since my teens, and then of course an actual real machine sewn American flag held weight, especially at this moment in history. The symbolism isn’t nuanced, but still powerful: this is where you came from.}

_2.

_{The small Sunday birthday party for my Father was a great success, as my former caterer and restaurateur Father planned it himself, and dinner the night before was even more astonishing: my flight had arrived three hours late, but little did I know the two green thermos containers perched on the kitchen table while we enjoyed some cheese and wine were full of still piping hot clam chowder when opened, and a more drum-shaped one to the right under the table held a crisp and cool curried shrimp and rice main course.}

_{This dramatic presentation was certainly a logical continuation of his fascination with big food reveals, which began with a penchant for serving food under silver cloches at his restaurant in the seventies, such service, I was informed, commenced a whole week before the Le Meridien just up the street caught up to him.}

_{“Didn’t Locke-Ober have those silver cloches on pulleys in the bar since they opened in the nineteenth Century?” I asked.}

_{“Those are completely different,” he gently corrected me, “and we also had those, but on the walls instead.”}

_3.

_{When I arrived at my friend’s house where I was staying the night before the memorial, I hung the suit that my friend’s Dad had passed down to me twenty years ago in the closet of the guest room, and despite it having been in a box since we’d mailed it Elizabeth Taylor-style a few weeks previously, along with a few collages for my hosts, it had no wrinkles and immediately took its shape on a hanger. My heretofore pristine white shirt I actually packed had gotten coffee spilled on it in Harvard Square earlier that day, but I just hoped it wouldn’t show. The washing machine in the adjacent room looked complicated and was very much in use.}

_{The suit pants of this particular suit were given to me when I was considerably short of thirty and more wasp-waisted, so I resigned myself to be forced to sit up very straight all through the Memorial.}

_4.

_{Rather predictably, I arrived four hours early for the Memorial under the mistaken impression that the Gardner Museum was open on Tuesdays, but Boston in early Fall is breezy and comfortable in the Fenway, and I found a bench to sit on.}

_{I spent some time listening to The Trout Quintet that morning, a work I heard for the very first time live at The Spoleto Festival being played by my friend’s Dad and other members of the “Concerti di Mezzogiorno” ensemble.}

_{In 2002, I almost returned to Spoleto to spend the Summer working at the Festival, but ended up moving to Chicago instead.}

_{So much of this journey on earth, if you care to make something of it, has a great deal more to do with what you offer it, notice about it and try to fill it with.}

_{No one lies on their death bed thinking they should have given less money to the homeless, spent less time by majestic bodies of water, or spent less time on creative pursuits.}

_{Years ago, in my graduation speech to my High School, I spoke about what I still find a useful distinction: between what you do for a job, and what your work could be in this broken-hinged world.}

_5.

_{As I was waiting for the memorial to begin, a “T” bus drove by with an advertisement for the hospital where I was born. A childhood friend is the Chaplain there now.}

_{I think of Little Edie in Grey Gardens saying: “It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It's awfully difficult.” They are unstoppably always in dialogue.}

_{Serendipitously, another close high school friend I reconnected with online that same weekend used to have an Ani Difranco/Utah Phillips poster in her dorm room in College for their album: “The Past Didn't Go Anywhere.” It doesn’t. It simply keeps coming back unbidden.}

_6.

_{Staying with close friends my age in the middle of this trip, and watching them interact with their own three children, I was reminded that their parents were just about our age when we were all teenagers. Watching them sorting out rides, breakfasts, and adjudicating small conflicts in the lives of their daughters, even more than spending time with my Dad who is forty years older than me, starkly reminded me that I am almost fifty.}

_7.

_{My friend’s Dad, on Christmas about seven or eight years ago, casually observed as we were hugging multiple times while parting that “it was too bad I had never amounted to anything in this world” and I actually took this statement literally for a few years after that, as my career was then in a very frustrating place, and given the caliber of classical musicians he had mentored, I felt I could have fallen short for him, but I realize now that the clear implication behind his teasing was that whatever I had done or not done in my adulthood, my place in his heart was secure regardless, even if he couldn’t say it without also ribbing me in the fashion of his generation.}

_8.

_{When the museum opened the day of the Memorial, I found myself once again backstage, as some of the same musicians who I first met in Spoleto twenty-Nine years ago reconvened to play tribute.}

_{When I first met these folks, I was just a sophomore in College and had grand notions about how my adult life might look, and about the great things I might do, not knowing that I was destined not for greatness writ large, but for greatness written on a more granular level, for greatness at kindness, for greatness at noticing, for greatness at being steadfast.}

_{Perhaps if my portfolio of abilities and lack thereof had been more pointedly obvious, I might have found an obvious calling, but it has been more in line with the trajectory of my adult life to be a renaissance man with few patrons, but many important elders laying clear my path, who have shown me ways to be in this world that might sometimes repair it, that might somehow affirm the dignity of others, ways of being that might be significant in notes played at intervals, rather than all at once to applause.}

_9.

_{Before I went to bed the night before the memorial, I wrote this down in address to the man who we would be be celebrating the next day: “There would be no “my life” as I know it, in any meaningful way, without you.”}

_{The same is true of my now eighty-nine year old Father in regards to everything from my propensity for collecting intriguing trash, as he used to use all sorts of things for percussive affect when he was in a banjo band, to my strong belief in fairness and solidarity, and my love of museums.}

_{We used to go to the Gardner a lot when I was a child, before the big heist, and after, and there was a time just after I graduated from College, that it felt like a home away from home, with my friend’s Dad running the music program and our friend P. from the Summer of 1996 in Spoleto curating the contemporary art.}

_10.

_{When the Memorial Concert ended, I emerged into the original Gardner center courtyard to the sound of bagpipes, and a spate of texts regarding the rat breach of our apartment in Chicago, and about to be late to the airport: the present and the past entwined, inexorably, again.}