Polaroid

Let go of the little distractions
Hold close to the ones that you love
’Cause we won’t all be here this time next year
So while you can, take a picture of us
— Frank Turner, “Polaroid Picture”

My friend, Karen, just passed away. Cancer. I had not managed to see her in her last months. I said to myself what you say to yourself: I’ll get to it. But I didn’t. It’s not a lesson I needed to be taught — I truly thought I’d learned this one — but there it is: a lesson after dying, to mangle Ernest Gaines.

Another friend said she hadn’t realized Karen and I were close. Were we? No, not in some senses. I would see her — lunch, usually — perhaps every 2–3 years. That’s not “close,” is it? But Karen was like my Mom in that she was intensely intimate when you were with her. And we packed an awful lot of connection into our 2-hour lunches. I felt she really knew me. I felt I really knew her. And I loved her. Yes, we were close.

A couple of weeks ago, my son, Oscar, asked if I could skip out on a couple of hours of work to go fly kites. My first thought was, “No, gotta work, can’t afford to do that.” But I decided to be The Dad Who Says Yes — he doesn’t ask me to do a lot with him these days — so I did.

It was a stormy day, gusts up to 40 mph, wind shifting directions. Not really ideal for kites. But we tried, he with a standard kite, I with a Wright Brothers replica thing my Dad gave us. It was nearly impossible in those conditions. For 10 minutes, we couldn’t get anything going at all. We’d stand becalmed in our soggy field, waiting for a gust, and when it would come, we couldn’t figure out which way to run to launch. I began to fear that my Very Cool Looking Kite was basically just a Crappy Kite. Oscar kept moving farther away to find better conditions. I fell in a hole while running backwards: feet soggy, pants seat soaked.

But we were laughing the whole time, and Oscar started having a little success, so I moved toward him. Next thing we knew, he’d gotten past the critical point and his kite was soaring in the crazy winds up high. I finally got the Wright Brothers into a couple of one-to-two-minute flights (which would end when a wind shift would pummel the Brothers straight into the ground). There’s nothing quite like high wind to make you feel truly alive, and now we were having Genuine Fun.

And then, with an, “Oh, NOOO,” Oscar lost his handle. He chased the escapee up the next rise, over it, and then way out of view. I kept trying to fly the Wright Brothers until he came back 10 minutes later, laughing but empty handed. The kite, he reported, was lodged high in a tree, the handle in another. He tried his hand at my admittedly Impossible Kite for another 15 minutes before we headed home, breathless and happy.

I almost lost another friend this year, Mike, to a condition called hemochromatosis. It’s genetic, and had just about wiped out a few of his organs over a long period of silent assault. We all believed he might be dying — indeed, his docs were talking that way — and while it had been slow, it seemed so sudden. During dinner one night while he was in the hospital in NYC, my phone lit up with his mother’s name, and my heart sank. I answered, and Mike’s voice came over, telling me that another high school friend named Mike (“The Quin”), had just died. I was briefly relieved and then devastated. Man, is life ever f’d up.

While Mike convalesced, I turned him on to Frank Turner’s tune, “Get Better,” and he became an obsessive FT fan (you should, too). He kept “Get Better” close as his rallying song, and, almost miraculously (the docs don’t understand it), is doing quite well, with a partly sunny prognosis. You… never… freaking… know.

So when Mike told me he’d bought me a ticket to see Frank Turner with him in NYC on a Wednesday night, I decided, “Screw it,” and agreed to go. You gotta listen when the universe speaks, right? And it was sublime to stand next to him screaming FT lyrics all night:

Well I haven’t always been a perfect person And I haven’t done what mom and dad had dreamed
But on the day I die I’ll say at least I fucking tried!
That’s the only eulogy I need.
That’s the only eulogy I need.

On Thanksgiving this year, I thought back to Oscar and the kites. That might have been the last time I’ll do something like that with one of my children. He’s my youngest, 13 now. It might not be the last time, but it’s possible. And I was unspeakably grateful for having had that day, that Frank Turner show with Mike, and every other minute that’s become memory now.

Because it all passes. When my Mom died in 2002, this was all fairly new to me. Over the next decade, I started losing more loved ones, and of course, my children grew and each phase of their childhoods passed on. Jobs came and went, bands, friends. It all passes. I’ve looked for Oscar’s lost kite in the trees of Highland Park since then, but it’s gone with that windy day and with his being precisely the boy he was then. On that particular afternoon, feeling overwhelmed with work, I made the right decision.

But I screwed up with Karen. And I could have done so much better with The Quin. A year ago, he was in my house, jamming Who songs. It felt kind of quaint, but it was momentous without my realizing it. I’m not looking for pity (really). I just want to remember that nothing is assured in this life and that the kite-eating trees are everywhere. That, like Frank sings, “we won’t all be here this time next year.” So fucking pay attention and try. Pay attention. And try.

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