Family

Dad

28 March, 2019

I find myself writing snarky comments about my father from time to time. Dad probably would have understood, and he’s no longer around to object anyway. Even so, I feel some obligation to paint a more complete picture of the man who was for me a model both of what to do and what not to.

Facts about Dad:

He was a type 1 diabetic from age 9
He was a good pianist and could sightread anything, but his great love was choral music.
Looking back on it, he was almost certainly “on the spectrum” in some way. My brother and sister can vouch for this from their own experience, but I have frequent memories of him completely misreading what was being asked of him or what the right action was in a particular social situation.
He was an absolutely spectacularly brilliant writer
I miss him desperately

There’s a ton of things I could say about why Dad was the way he was or how he was brought up, but they would probably be mostly bullshit. I’m going to stick to my own recollections, which although they may also be bullshit are at least things I own.

One of my earliest — probably in fact the earliest — memory I have of Dad is of watching him walk down the street away from the house we lived in in Mount Vernon, New York (outside New Rochelle) to get his train to work. It must have been winter, because he was wearing a big black seal-skin hat he had that made him look like Lenin or an Orthodox rabbi. (He would have been quite pleased with either comparison.) I remember seeing the hat bob up and down as he walked away, and I think I have the same walk today. Mom must have been holding me up to look out the window. I guess I would have had to have been a bit over two years old, assuming it was winter of 1970. I remember his arrival home always being a joyful thing for me — we had a kind of connection that way that seems very special to me when I look back on it.

Dad was lucky (we thought years later) that whatever variety of diabetes he had somehow did not completely incapacitate him. Although he was insulin-dependent from age 9, he was able to get through the day with regular injections and didn’t usually have too much trouble managing it. Occasionally though he would screw up and take too much insulin or not eat enough, and that (if it went too far) could result in something my brother and sister and I learned to spot well before he saw it coming: an insulin reaction. Imagine the worst case of low-blood-sugar shakes you have ever had and multiply it by a hundred — that’s what this is like. It would make him irrational, sometimes manic, sometimes just weird, and then end in a blinding horrible headache or a diabetic coma. Mom would shout at us to bring sugar or honey or chocolate from the kitchen and we would run like our lives depended on it to do that… which in a way they did.

I realized much later that other boys didn’t learn their fathers were fragile and vulnerable until well into adulthood, if even then. I learned it almost as soon as I could talk, as did my brother and sister. I think it tainted all of us in different ways, but I know I grew up feeling the weight of that vulnerability on my skinny shoulders. Miraculously, Dad never wrecked a car or passed out in a public place or did any of the other things that could so easily have happened had he had one of these fits at exactly the wrong time, but the thought that he might just lose it at any point never really left me.

Dad grew up amid great expectations. His mother was certain, I am sure, that he would be a brilliant and successful man at whatever he chose to do. He was just astonishingly articulate, in a way that made people think he was capable of anything and understood everything. (He wasn’t, and he didn’t, and that initial misunderstanding on the part of his audience was always a big problem.) Naturally he found his way into the law, which he both loved and hated, because despite his brilliance he was destined never to succeed at it. I think we would recognize now that he suffered badly from ADHD and being “on the spectrum,” and in later life from depression. In any case, he seemed incapable of organizing himself to finish anything, including important things like getting briefs filed on time. You know, stuff you expect your lawyer to do for you.

I’m going to write more about Dad later, but to close this introduction I will replay one scene that I think he might regard as his finest moment. Dad’s two great loves were choral music and his children, and he was a gifted conductor if an imperfect father. At any rate, near the end of his life — he was 63 — my sister Susie got engaged. Dad already had cancer and he must have known he was on borrowed time. Nonetheless he got himself out to California from Atlanta for the wedding, and rehearsed and conducted my brother Jeff and me and two of my sister’s bridesmaids singing the Durufle “Ubi Caritas” on the beach in Monterey. We did a fair job of it, except for the bit when I almost cried. Nine months later he was gone.

What Makes Us

9 March, 2019

I’m with my brother and sister this this morning outside Philadelphia, waiting to go to my uncle Benson Brock’s funeral this afternoon. I have written elsewhere in this blog about his passing, but I want to go into more detail about who and what he was to all of us.

Benson was born eleven years after my father, so my image of him as a boy was of a much more glamorous and interesting person than my parents were. Benson dropped into our lives from time to time with tales of learning to fly an airplane, tuning pianos for a living (this seemed impossible to me), playing jazz in nightclubs. Living in Philadelphia, he represented the Northeast of my early childhood, left behind when we moved south to Atlanta. If I was lucky, he and Dad would sit down together at the piano and read through duets together — a four-hands arrangement of the William Tell Overture was a favorite. Sometimes he would play Scott Joplin rags for us or tell ridiculous jokes. I knew he was not married, had no children, drove a 280Z, and lived on a house on an airport where he kept his airplane. I think I thought it was impossible anyone could do all these things — whatever they wanted, apparently — without any obvious negative repercussions.

As I grew older and started thinking about my path through life, Benson continued to loom large in my imagination of what I could be and what I wanted to do. When I felt lost in my first year of engineering school at Rice, Benson’s example — switch to music school — was an option in front of me, and in fact what I ended up choosing. When I decided I wanted to learn to fly, it was because Benson had done it so I knew it was possible. As my brother Jeff reminded me last night, Benson’s example was always there as we became men, showing that there was a path for us outside of conventional wisdom, outside of what was expected, and that we should believe that path was something we could achieve even if we didn’t have the skills or the background that other people on that path did.

Somewhere along the way Benson found his way into commercial flying, and over the years he followed that career to a number of different places. He particularly loved flying for Air Wisconsin in Colorado — the routes were short and the pay wasn’t very good, but he loved the mountains and the airplane he got to fly in them. Later, Air Wisconsin moved to Philadelphia and Kim and I found ourselves seeing a lot more of Benson. The highlight of this time was that we finally got to play some jazz together — more than once Jeff brought his bass down from Rhode Island and all three of us played on piano, bass, and vibe. Jeff’s son Sam even joined us on sax once.

Benson retired a couple of years ago, maybe a year after we moved to Brno in the Czech Republic. I was distracted with work and living abroad and I didn’t make as much effort as I should have to stay in touch, but we did still connect every so often. I thought of Benson as young, compared to Dad, so it never occurred to me that he was already older than Dad was when he died — Dad only made it to 64. I was confident we would have time to catch up again, play some more music, talk about flying, tell some more lousy jokes.

Fate proved me wrong on that point last week and closed the last chapter of Benson and Dad’s generation of Brocks. I’m bitter with it, and with myself for not treasuring and caring for that connection a little deeper. But in truth I already learned, long ago, the most important thing I could learn from Benson. It’s quite simple: Remember that there is always another path to the one you are taking, and if you want that other path, a little hard work is all that’s required. Also, don’t be afraid to tell absolutely lousy jokes.

Last Of The Brox

3 March, 2019

Benson and Donna Brock, newly married in Rome, 2009

My uncle Benson died last week aged 67. Too young, like his brother — my dad — who went aged 64 back in 2006.

I’m not going to write a ton here about our family, and my relationship with Benson. That is a later post that needs more thinking and work. I will say that Benson, a jazz pianist and airline pilot, was a huge inspiration to me when I was younger, and that I was always very happy to see him and visit him and, later, to play music with him. We were both lousy at keeping in touch, so I didn’t see much of him after Kim and I moved to Europe in 2015. I have lots of time to regret that now.

In my life, I’ve lost a number of people — my best friend Tom Nilon, Benson, Dad himself — well before their time. The advance knowledge that there are no rules to this does not make it any easier to deal with. Wiser people than I make a priority of maintaining a robust connection with the people they care about, because they understand that every contact could be the last. I am slowly getting better at this, but… well, there just isn’t much time. Use it wisely.

UPDATE: For those who have asked, there will be a service on Saturday at the James J. Terry Funeral Home, 1060 West Lincoln Hwy, in Coatesville Pa.