Loose Leaf Notes

1. Facebook is like a Go-Fund-Me for birthday and condolence wishes.

2. “Feel I’m goin’ back to Massachusetts / Something’s telling me I must go home   / And the lights all went out in Massachusetts / They brought me back to see my way with you / Talk about the life in Massachusetts / Speak about the people I have seen / And the lights all went out in Massachusetts / And Massachusetts is one place I have been…” Bee Gees

3. We spent 2 ½ days driving and 2 days in Massachusetts. I knew we were getting close when I saw the above.

4. This was a view from Mambo’s Deck where we celebrated my brother John’s life after a funeral mass that followed his death on Labor Day.

5. The setting sun and the rising moon were in the sky at the same time on either ends of the 5-mile peninsula we grew up on.

6. My brother John figured in “The Jim and Dan Stories,” the book I wrote about growing up as one of nine children in Hull, Massachusetts, and the deaths’ of two of my brothers in 2001. John was the one who added to our family’s plumbing problems when he was a kid and he tried to flush a potato down the toilet after using part of it for pop-gun ammunition. He didn’t want to get in trouble for wasting food and thought the toilet would be a good place to hide it. Later, he was referred to in the book as the “black sheep fisherman rogue” who always has a good story to tell. HERE is a magazine story written about a Fish Company in Minneapolis and John as a central character, and I mean character.

7. John had a scooter.

8. We used to be nine. Now we are five.

9. I’m the oldest (used to be third in line) and my sister Tricia is 14 years younger than me. I can’t help but think of our brother Johnny as an angel on my shoulder like he is in the picture above. But John was no angel!

10. I had five brothers and now there are only two, Joey and Bobby (not pictured here). This is Jim and Dan and John who have all left this world. John is pictured with a couple of angels on his shoulders, my sister Tricia and her friend Jaye, who helped in his passing. Who knew?

11. From The Jim and Dan Stories: My brother John had a dream shortly after Dan died. He had arrived at Dan’s apartment with the U-haul (which he actually did do weeks later) to close it down, and Dan was there. John was astounded! “Dan, you’re dead! How can this be,” he asked? “I know I’m dead, but I’m all right,” Dan answered, and then he said, “And now it’s like Christmas.” The dream continued with Dan giving away his belongings to John and other family members. We all wanted John, the only sibling besides me now who was not living in Massachusetts, to have Dan’s computer. “We want you online. We want to keep track of you,” I told him. John, the black sheep, hard drinking fisherman rouge, who had also contracted Hepatitis C from drug use in the 70’s and was now determined to stay sober in every way, sometimes needed to be kept track of.

12. More From The Jim and Dan Stories: When Kathy, Jeanne, (who came after my mother left), and I were staying in Dan’s apartment, we got a phone call from John. John had lived with Danny for several years in Quincy, Massachusetts, and then in Texas, and was particularly broken up. He cried when he asked us if he could do Dan’s eulogy. We all knew it was his calling, especially since our youngest sister, Tricia, had a dream that John was singing “Let it be” in the church during Dan’s funeral. He didn’t sing, but we did play “Let it be” the morning of the burial, and John did give a moving eulogy for Dan. We all choked up when he ended it with, “…Today we put my big brother Dano to rest beside his big brother Jim. I guess that makes me the big brother now.”

13. The ride home from Massachusetts: Mark Knopfler, crossword puzzles, podcasts, Starbucks stops and an opium den of clouds floating weightless like white whales.

__________Thirteen Thursday