Thursday, June 19, 2008

A Tribute to My Brother George

This is my eulogy for my brother George, July 24, 1944 - May 26, 2008, delivered at a celebration of his life at his daughter Stacey's house on June 14, 2008.


An old cowboy sat down at the bar and ordered a drink. As he sat sipping his drink, a young woman sat down next to him. She turned to him and asked, “Are you a real cowboy?”

He replied, “Well, I've spent my whole life breaking colts, working cows, going to rodeos, fixing fences, pulling calves, bailing hay, doctoring calves, cleaning my barn, fixing flats, working on tractors, and feeding my dogs, so I guess I am a cowboy.”

She said, “I'm a lesbian. I spend my whole day thinking about women. As soon as I get up in the morning, I think about women. When I shower, I think about women. When I watch TV, I think about women. I even think about women when I eat. It seems that everything makes me think of women.”

The two sat sipping in silence.

A little while later, a man sat down on the other side of the old cowboy and asked, “Are you a real cowboy?”

He replied, “I always thought I was, but I just found out I'm a lesbian.”


That’s the kind of joke George would tell me nearly every time we spoke on the phone. One of his talents was his ability to remember jokes and tell them with the timing of a skilled comedian.


You know, I can’t really get my head around the idea that George is no longer with us. I mean, he’s been part of my life for all my living memory. Every picture you see of him in my slide show, there I am right next to him. So I’m still trying to accept that I can’t call him up for his latest joke. In fact, about a month ago when he was very sick, I talked to him on the phone and said tell me a joke, which he proceeded to do. During his sojourn in Hawaii, he often called me and as soon as I answered, without saying hello, how are you, or what are you up to, he’d just start telling me a joke. Usually it was a bit off-color, and it always made me laugh.


George spent his first six years and I my first seven years at the Adriatic Avenue house in Long Beach. We shared a small bedroom with bunk beds, and we figured out how to take one of the poles out of the bed, put it between the upper bunk and the wardrobe, creating our own jungle gym right there in the bedroom. We were very fortunate not to break that pole. And I’ll never forget the day we were outside this restaurant/bar behind the house that had a faucet on the side of the building. We turned on the water and after it filled the gutter, we proceeded to march back and forth in this water getting our shoes and clothes soaking wet. I don’t know if this was my idea or George’s (most likely George’s), but man we were having fun. That was the one time our mother made us go to bed in the afternoon. She was not amused


One of our rituals during that time was walking to the Santa Fe Theater every Saturday for cartoons, serials, and cowboy movies. I think it cost about 10 cents to get in. As we walked to the show, we always went through a lot with a tree that we loved to climb. Then we waited in line and, once inside, found our way to our favorite seats in the front row. Our dad’s upholstery shop was just down the street, Santa Fe Upholstery, and it was always fun to visit the shop and mess around with the tools.


In the summer when George and I were about 10 and 11 and then living on Easy Avenue in Long Beach, everyday, we’d pay 10 cents and ride the bus down to the beach at Linden Avenue and sit next to the lifeguards who we got to know quite well. That was a wonderful summer. Our mom didn’t know it, but we would often find our way over to The Pike, the amusement park that existed in those days. We’d end up in the penny arcades (when everything actually cost a penny), play pinball machines and the penny pitch. We never had enough money to go on the rides.


In those days, we lived near the LA River, which everyone called the flood control or just the “flood.” It was reputed to have quicksand and bad people hanging out there. We were not to go there. Of course, for us it was like a magnet, and we couldn’t stay away and after several warnings, were told that if we did it again, we would get it with the belt. Yeah, we did it again, getting our shoes wet walking around trying to find the quicksand I guess. I remember riding home talking to George about how we would explain our wet shoes. We had a friend with a fishpond in the backyard and that was going to be our story. Of course, it didn’t work and we did get our spankings. I don’t know if we learned our lesson, but it certainly was a memorable experience.


Another memorable experience was the first time our dad was going to take us deepsea fishing. We were both so excited that we hardly slept and suddenly it was 5 am and dad was getting us up. We were ready in about 5 minutes and off to Pierpoint Landing in Long Beach (that’s gone now) and the boat. Me, I got seasick. I can’t remember if George did, most likely he didn’t. We didn’t catch any fish, but it’s still memorable. Later on when we were in junior high, nearly every day in the summer we went down to Belmont Pier in Long Beach to fish for whatever we could catch. There’s a picture of George and I in the slideshow taken after one of those days.


When George was 11 and I was 12, we moved to east Long Beach on Studebaker Road. I managed to get a paper route delivering the Press Telegram. After a while, there was an opening, and I made an impassioned case for George to get the job (after all, he had substituted for me a few times on an earlier route I had). It worked, and for quite a while George and I spent our afternoons pedaling our Schwinns from street to street, paper bags on the handlebars and rear rack, delivering the Press Telegram. Later on, when George was 13 and I was 14, we both had LA Times routes. I remember well that we were paid $11.50 every two weeks for routes that required each of us to ride about 7 miles to deliver about 50 papers each every morning before school.


As we got older, I remember our dad taking us over to what was then the only parking lot at Long Beach State College where he taught us to drive in a 1956 Ford Mainliner with a 3-speed stick shift. We both had trouble but finally managed the clutch-accelerator motions so the car wouldn’t stall. Before I actually got my driver’s license, our parents went to Las Vegas for the weekend. We had the keys to that Ford and decided to drive it even though that was a major no-no. Nothing bad happened, but our neighbor told my dad we did it. That resulted in me having to wait an extra 3 months to get my driver’s license. George still had a year to go. Later we took that car to Pasadena to the Rose Parade. Dad told us not to drive on the freeway because the engine was not in good shape. Of course, we did take to the freeway to drive home and that resulted in the engine throwing a rod, which basically means the engine was destroyed. With much trepidation, we had to call dad and tell him what we did. He actually didn’t get too mad at us despite having to pay $500 for a new short block.


During high school, we each had our own group of friends. George was the athlete of the family, and I was the spectator. The sport he actually played and for which he won his letter was, believe or not, water polo. Now I’m pretty good swimmer, but not good enough to make the team. George was, and he had the letterman’s jacket that I kind of envied.


In the 1962, my dad’s company sent him to Hawaii to run a job building a power plant. I lived with my Grandma Woods and attended Long Beach City College, and George lived with Uncle Jim finishing his senior year in high school. Then we were both to fly to Hawaii with my dad after George’s graduation. It was during the next nine months that George fell in love with Hawaii and got into pipefitters’ union as an apprentice. I joined as well, but dropped out after that summer. We both worked on my dad’s job. George bought an old surfboard and got into surfing. We lived right next to the beach and could hear the surf from our bedroom at night. Those were good times for us. We used to drive into Honolulu on the weekends in my 1957 MGA that I’d shipped over there from Long Beach and try to find girls, something we were not very successful at. I know that from this time forward, George had it in his head to return to Hawaii, and he finally succeeded some 40 years later.


In the spring of 1963, we returned to Long Beach. I went back to Long Beach City College, and George continued working. My dad’s next job was in Michigan. At that time we both had VW bugs, George a 1958 model and me a 1959. In June of that year after school let out, we followed one another across the U.S. mostly on Route 66. It took us four days, with me leading all the way, except when we finally got to our destination, Holland, Michigan, where he pulled out in front and drove into our new home for the summer ahead of me. I was put out about that for quite a while.


After that summer, our lives took different directions. I went off to Berkeley and George continued working in construction. We saw each other when I came home for the holidays, and we worked on jobs together in the summer, when my dad got us on whatever job he could. Everyone came up to Berkeley in June 1965 for my graduation. It was George, however, who stole the show. He took off with my dad’s camera after the ceremony and went up to the podium and managed to get his picture taken with Clark Kerr, who was then president to the University of California system. My mom has that slide showing George with his arm around Clark. It’s classic.

After that, we went our separate ways, I to the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and he to the world of work. I do remember receiving a letter from him with a picture of his new dark blue Mustang. That was a cool car, and one I had no chance of having then or later. A couple of years after that, we both got married and were members of each other’s wedding parties.


Then I took off for Illinois and later New Jersey and George got drafted into the Army at 25 years 9 months (the cutoff for the draft was 26 years). We saw each other on occasion over the next several years and kept in touch via phone calls and so on, but didn’t see each other often enough—which is, looking back on it, very unfortunate. We each had our kids, but they never had a chance to get to know one another as they were growing up, which is also very unfortunate. I know that George was a great dad. All you have to do is ask Josh and Stacey. He was always involved in their activities and really took fatherhood seriously.


George was a victim of the Southern California curse of having to commute 60 or 70 miles each way to work and home, driving from Temecula to the outskirts of LA. As a reader this gave him a chance to read many books, not by listening to them on tape, but by balancing them on the steering wheel as he waited for traffic to move. I don’t know anyone else who’s ever done that.


As I said, for many years as our kids were growing up, we only saw each other occasionally, but when George and Leslie divorced and George left for Hawaii, we retrieved our brotherhood and talked very regularly about our lives. I would call him or he would call me to check in. He always had his joke to tell me and would describe his work life and what he was doing to upgrade his condo and lots of other stuff that should remain private between brothers. He’d tell me he was sitting on his lanai smoking a cigar and enjoying the view of the ocean across the street. I didn’t really know he had this drinking problem, though my sister told me he did—I just never saw it.


George was always the sentimental one between us. He would sometimes tell me how much he loved me and our family and I would be trying to change the subject, not wanting to get into all that stuff. I never quite succeeded, and that’s probably a good thing. George, as you may know was left-handed, and I think this type of person is just more likely to be emotional and creative than guys like me. He was someone about whom a teacher could say, “he works and plays well with others, and everyone liked him.”


Tomorrow is father’s day. George was a great father as we can tell by his wonderful children Stacey and Josh. I am bothered about the fact that his future grandchildren will never be able to know him or he them. As Josh and I have discussed, he would have been a great and I mean a great grandfather.


It’s very hard for me to say goodbye to my brother. I always teased him that I am 1 year, 3 months, and 16 days older than he is. Somehow I thought that gave me the right to lord it over him. That wasn’t true and as we got older, that stuff disappeared. He lived 63 years, 10 months, and 2 days. A good stretch, but not long enough. I am very sorry he’s gone. I’m his brother, and I can say with no false sentimentality that I loved him, too, and that he will always be alive inside me and a part of who I am, just as I am a part of who he is.


One of my friends sent me a card on the passing of George that included a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery from The Little Prince. The quote goes like this: “In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them, I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night.”


I think when I look at the stars, I will think of my brother George and wish him well and he’ll know I’m thinking about him. Good-bye bro. I love you and all the times we had together.