Go Home, Frank. Go Home.

When a friend or family member passes away, you do your best to retrieve and focus on the memories of the good times you shared. For those of us of a certain age, that task still involves pulling out old photo albums, the ones with the Kodak snapshots forever stuck to the coated cardboard backing and covered with a sheet of plastic, no longer as clear as it once was. Then maybe you sift through your trays of slides from various family functions (anniversaries, graduations, birthdays, Christmases) and hold them up to the light one-by-one. And you glance at the shoebox full of home movies that you’ve never gotten around to digitizing although it’s been on your to do list for years.

I have spent a lot of time sifting through those images and memories of my cousin Frank the past two weeks.  

The picture of my old bedroom reminded me of the intense games of 1-on-1 Nerf basketball Frank and I would play, rolling over the bed, using the bureau as leverage for a vicious dunk through the metal rim and net hung over the back of the door – no cheap plastic in those days – waiting for the call to come to quiet down (and be careful). The photo of Frank and my sister singing in my parents’ living room reminding me of the night Frank took a “cream pie in the face” during one of our family editions of The Gong Show. Unfortunately for Frank’s eyes, we had substituted shaving cream for whipped cream because you don’t waste food and every teenage boy had a big can of shaving cream on their bureau just sitting there waiting to be used for something – plus, I think that we were a Cool Whip family at the time.  

I found the picture of Frank playing Pop Warner football, returning a punt for a touchdown; and the set from the baseball game shortly before he headed off to Tampa to try his luck at college baseball. I remembered the beer mug and nice assortment of foreign beers I gave my “little cousin” (now taller than me) when he turned 18 – Heineken, Molson, Fosters, St. Pauli Girl, etc., and a can of Billy Beer from that one six-pack I bought for the fun of it. I still have one can left.

But it’s this photo of seven cousins, the children of my mother and her two sisters, that gave me pause and made me think about home, what “home” meant then and what it means now.  (There is also an eighth cousin who was an infant at the time and is not in the photo.)

 

 

It would an understatement to say that my mother, Peggy, her older sister, Betty, and younger sister, Pat were close. At the time the photo was taken, our family and Aunt Pat’s (accounting for 5 of the 8 cousins) filled out a triple-decker that their older brother Frank (my cousin’s namesake) had purchased when the numbers fell the right way for him one day. He and my grandparents on the second floor, us on the first floor, Aunt Pat and her family on the third. Prior to that all three sisters’ families had lived a couple of blocks away, in a house owned by Aunt Betty – a two-family house with an attic converted into a third apartment.

It wasn’t long after that photo was taken that home began to change.

Aunt Betty and her family moved to a single-family house with lots of land in the suburbs. It was 7.5 miles away, a stone’s throw from the Boston city line, but you had to drive to get there.  

Up until high school, we still got together weekly. Gathering at their house for an afternoon of play in the front yard and back fields; and a Friday night dinner of spaghetti with clams (or just with butter if you didn’t like clams) and fried scallops. Later, the adults would play whist – girls v. guys – with my mother and aunt sipping their glasses of Spañada, and the kids would settle in front of the TV and shows like the Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, Room 222, and the Odd Couple.

Eventually, Aunt Pat and her family followed one of her bothers to Middleboro, a whopping 40 miles south of Boston. It seemed like the other end of the world at the time, but it wasn’t. In fact, it was significantly less (statistically and otherwise) than my daily commute the years I worked at the MA Department of Education.

My mother and her sisters remained close all of their lives, even after Aunt Betty moved to Florida and Aunt Pat to Texas. My parents, uncle, and grandparents eventually moved to a two-family house just outside of Boston, about 4 miles from the house in the photo and no more than 5 miles from where my parents were born and grew up.  

As for our little band of cousins.

Only one of us remained in Massachusetts the entire time.

• I ended up in Maine, as you know, and my sister is somewhere in southern California – a continental divide..
• Frank and his sisters stayed on the east coast but spread out north to south: one sister in Maine (a few hours north of me), Frank in North Carolina, and one sister in south Florida.
• Eventually, two of Aunt Pat’s kids called Texas home, but Texas is a big place.

That’s a lot of America between the seven kids from Dorchester in that photo. Is that good? Is it bad? Or is it just the way that it is and has to be?  Is it the distance that creates distance?

Called Home

When my daughter started considering colleges in North Carolina, it was nice to know that Frank would be nearby. On our first college visit, he met us at the Wendy’s near RDU. And when it looked all but certain that she would be attending a school down that way, we all got together for a nice dinner in Chapel Hill.

Frank and I would meet up when my travels took me to North Carolina for the ACC Women’s Basketball Tournament or a Taylor Swift concert. Sadly, outside of one project, I was never able to arrange more visits through work with the fine folks at the NC department of education.

I’ll wrap this up with one of my fondest and most enduring memories of Frank. It was from not long after the photo was taken. We were across the street from my house playing punch ball, wiffle ball, or some variation of baseball in my best friend’s yard – a small patch of dirt that looks even smaller today on Google Maps. I was the youngest of that friend group and Frank was a couple of years younger than me.

Frank was on second base, as the ball was hit toward the fence he ran and stopped at third. With the fielder trying to pull the ball from under the hedges, we all began screaming,

 Go Home Frank!  Go Home!

Misinterpreting our cries, he thought that we were kicking him out of the game. Flustered and dejected, head down, the poor little guy started walking back toward my house. Of course, we chased him down, reassured him, and  took him safely to home plate. All was right in our little world.

Now Frank has been called home. I know in my heart and mind that he is safe. And I know that things will never be quite the same in our little world.

Good-bye, Frank.

 

Header image by Gigxels .com from Pixabay