Mom: Nancy to her friends. My Mom met my Dad when she was only four years old. They grew up on the same neighborhood and married when she was 19 and Dad had just graduated from the United States Naval Academy. Her parents divorced when she was young and she lived with her mother until marrying Dad. It always pained me how strained their relationship was because Grams was such an influential person in my life. Mom liked to listen to the radio and sing along with the songs, so I did and still do as well. She's a hospice volunteer in Charleston, SC, and was named Volunteer of the Year in 2005. She worked for the Post Office in Vienna, and there were days I would go with her on the route, stuffing mailboxes from the passenger side of her Ford Torino wagon. Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but within the last few years since Dad passed away we have come to respect each other as fellow parents and put a lot of our past behind us.
Dad: Complex cat, my Pops. He came of age through the Depression, with his Dad off to war and his Mom working in a wartime factory. He and his twin brother, Bob, had a "reputation" in the neighborhood, though I never got a straight story from him. Uncle Bob once told us how Dad shot a squirrel on a neighbor's roof from his bedroom window and caught hell for it because the neighbor was the mayor! When he wasn't at sea, he was home fixing up things and meting out discipline. This involved using objects, usually his belt, to "spank" me. I asked him once how he knew when to stop. "When I wasn't angry any more." Ah. Dad drove like a typical New Yorker, that is to say he went from point "A" to ballistic in 60 seconds. He was also named Ed, but with a different middle name I was spared being called "junior". I was "Little Ed" until high school, when I finally got taller than him. Dad had a brief active career after graduating from the Naval Academy, then worked for the Navy Department until retirement. Along the way he did volunteer work for the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, the Sheriff's Department, the USS Yorktown Visitors Bureau and others. He taught me to shoot and got me into Boy Scouts, which was a great way to get outdoors a lot. His drinking is what stood in the way of any normal relationship between us. He could get pretty mean after that second martini. He loved golf, and played up until just four days before he died in 2005. We had a prickly relationship that settled to a respectful truce in the last few years. We said all that needed to be said two days before he passed, and that made a big difference. I scattered his ashes at sea beside his beloved USS Yorktown.
Leslie: Two years younger than me. She was the wild child of the family, and with no malice here I can say she was always Dad's favorite. She was a really good softball player and she had the record player in her room when we were kids. That meant that a lot of the music I listened to was her favorite music as well. She now lives in Maine with her husband, Bill. Her son Hank is going into the Coast Guard this year and the younger son Jon has been in the Coast Guard for the last four years.
Lori: Four years my junior, Lori and I shared the "lifeboat mentality" in our family. I think we both felt that we were working toward surviving our youth. She is the other person responsible for my foray into music. She kept borrowing my guitar and when I complained to Mom about it she said: "Well, you weren't playing it." So I played it even more to deny her the opportunity. She was also my best audience. Everything I ever did was brilliant or funny. She is a very intelligent and gifted person herself, currently teaching at San Diego State. She and her partner, Deena, also instruct Aikido.
Jan: My soul mate, my best friend and a really nice person. We met when she was managing a video store and I made some casual remark on the order of "What ya doin' on Friday night?" I always had a flair for opening lines. We were married in September of 1988 and will be celebrating our 20th anniversary soon. Jan is the mother of Casey and Zack, my youngest two kids. She is an accomplished musician, playing classical piano and singing with a Master's choral group. I can't imagine my life without her. She came along at just the right time after my first marriage fell apart. She's also way smarter than I am. (That's right, the women are smarter!)
Peter: My oldest. He lives in Northern California currently with his long time girlfriend Joy. He works in the framing and art restoration business and he's a hell of a musician. I remember vividly the night I saw him perform at his high school. His guitar wasn't working and he flung it away from him and grabbed the mike to sing into. That moment electrified the crowd - you could feel the energy level rise. In September of 2005 we parted on very bad terms and I haven't heard from him in three years. I love this kid and it's a weight I carry every day to have him away like that.
Jessica: My older daughter. Beautiful, intelligent, talented...the list could go on. She danced hula for many years, winning individual titles and group awards in Hawaii and Nevada. She has a Masters degree in accounting from UNLV and lives in Henderson, NV, with her husband, Keith. After her Mom and I split up she stayed with her. Over the years I let one clue after another go by that she was unhappy and needed me to fill a gap in her life as a kind and loving Dad. I just didn't do it and like with Peter we have a distant relationship now. In my mind it will never be too late to do the right things, say what needs to be said. Aloha Pumehana, Pi'ikea.
Casey: My younger daughter. How lucky am I to have not one, but two daughters who are lovely, talented, yadda yadda yadda. She got straight A's from kindergarten all the way to high school graduation, so obviously she takes after her Mom! Casey has been singing barbershop style with a select group of girls and they won national honors at several competitions. She's in her freshman year at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. It's been clear to Jan and me from the time she was a little girl that she has an Old Soul. Go ahead, be skeptical. You don't know her like we do.
Zack: The youngest of the bunch, 14 as of this writing. Zack has a really witty sense of humor and a ton of natural musical ability. I bought him a bass guitar less than a year ago and he's just blazin' away on it now. I see the way he dislikes many aspects of school life and I struggle to keep him focused. The hardest part of having kids is remembering that they are their own person, not a little version of me. No matter what Zack does, he'll be successful. And he's so cute, don't you think?
Lani: My ex. Her Mom and I worked together in a photo lab, and I was captivated by the things she told me about her 19 year old daughter. How she collected pictures of sunsets, danced hula and loved to sing. We had a very passionate relationship that led quickly to our being "in the family way". We were married in April of 1980 and our boy Peter was born in October. Jessica came along in 1983. Our marriage ended in 1984 but we had two amazing kids and I think we both learned something about who we were really looking for.
Grams: A typical grandma in so many ways. She always had an encouraging word for me and she fed me like it was my last meal every time I went to her house. When she and my grandfather David divorced, she raised my Mom through adolescence. Not an easy task under the best of circumstances. She graduated from the Julliard School of Music and desperately wanted me to play the piano. "You have piano player's fingers", she always said. Alas, I fell for the guitar, an instrument she equated with low life musicians. She wasn't far wrong, if you knew me and some of my friends.
Grandpa Newbegin: A stern, unforgiving man. He was a Naval officer during WWII, leading a flotilla (14) of destroyers in the Mediterranean and at D-Day. Graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1927. He was very much in favor of my banishment to private school. This man couldn't resist pitting his two sons against each other to curry his favor, and that carried on to my cousin Bob and me. That was exemplified one night as I sat at the kitchen table listening to the three of them singing old seas chanteys while they drank whiskey. I was spinning a small magnet, not paying much attention, when the room became silent. The three men were watching me spin the object and my grandfather was timing me! It became a game, with my Dad, my uncle and me all spinning the thing and Grandpa timing us to determine a winner. Sheesh! Well at least I won, so it was all good. Upon his death we laid him to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.
Grandma Newbegin: She had one of those very cultured New York accents, very much like Katherine Hepburn. She was an English teacher, stopping during the war to work in a bomber factory as a "Rosie the Riveter". She enjoyed a drink or two whenever the spirit moved her. Grandma had two dogs: A beagle named Lucy who survived a bout of distemper and a very fat dachshund named Ducky. That dog was so rotund that she had to be helped up a single step! Lucy developed a twitchy eye due to the distemper, making her look like she was doing a perpetual Groucho Marx imitation. Spooky. She was buried at Arlington with Grandpa.
Uncle Dave: My Mom's older brother. What a cut-up! He knew card tricks, always had a ready smile and gave my sisters and me goofy nicknames. We were Edwin, Lester and Loren to him. He served as assistant secretary of HUD under President Carter and vice president of the American Institute of Architecture. He served in the infantry in WWII and he is also interred at Arlington. I gave his name to Zack for a middle name in honor of my cool uncle.
Uncle Bob: My Dad's twin brother. I always considered him the cool version of my father. His hair was a bit longer, he laughed more readily and he acted as if he liked me. He was a Navy pilot and flew missions in Vietnam. My folks told me that when I was a toddler I used to call him "Dada" when he came to visit while Dad was at sea and cry when I found out it wasn't him. I think I knew all along he wasn't Pop and I cried because they knew it, too. He was born just minutes before my father and died in July of 2006, just 17 months after him. So he won that one for sure. My cousin Joe and I had a cool poem about our Dads. Read on.
Cousin Bob: The black and white photo of the "five cousins" was photographic proof that I was taller than Bob. The competition fostered by Grandpa didn't last too long because we actually became different people, much to our Dads' disappointment. Bob went a little over the edge mentally when his parents split up just after he graduated from high school. He's a very nice person and I wish there was more we could all do for him. His brother Joe is such a stand-up guy in dealing with him. Peace, brother.
Cousin Joe: The brother I never had. When my ex and I first broke up my first thought was to get back to SoCal and find some sanctuary with him. When we were kids I relished the times we spent together. When I lived in Norfolk, Virginia his friends were my friends. We had a special poem about our Dads that never quite had an ending until both had passed. It goes like this:Our Fathers, who art in Heaven
Golf's got to be thy game
Thy days are done
So go, have fun
With mirth, and a Seagram's Seven
Upon our Return: SMA, An Introduction
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