On Being 27 Years Old
"It’s moments like this when my youngest child/only boy/gay wunderkind card has to count for something."
November 25, 2020
Gilford, New Hampshire
I was (almost) 27 years old
November 25th. Twenty-seven years old. Crazy. Though it’s been my go-to line all day that there were still however-many hours left until I was, in fact, 27. Not that I was feeling one way or the other about it. The year-old milestone of getting published in the Times still offering me some cache after all this time, ensuring I don’t need to feel too in-crisis about what it’s in store for me, not to mention what I have—or haven’t—been doing. Woke up and posted a bunch of photos to my Story of “people I love at 27 years old.” Madonna, Gwyneth, Jane Fonda, Carrie Fisher, SJP, Sofia Coppola. The only person I “cheated” with was David Sedaris. I couldn’t find a picture of him at that age and had to settle for a couple-years-younger one. Mom called me that morning, saying she was able to identify every person except for Jane and David. She said, “David Sedaris?! Oh my God—I thought that was Natalie Wood?!”
Austin was thrilled to turn over in bed and find me awake. He’d been saying for days, and really meaning it, just how excited he was for me to open up my gifts. That it felt like Christmas morning—for him. Much to his chagrin, I took my time making my coffee and breakfast before coming back in to open them up. A brief tangent: still adoring my percolator but my breakfast, as of late, has changed a little. Half an apple, chopped, paired with a half-cup of cottage cheese, mixed together with a lot of cinnamon and a spoonful of peanut butter. Percolator coffee and cottage cheese for breakfast—like a Pasadena housewife of the 1970s.
I come back into our bedroom to find all my gifts splayed on the bed, tastefully wrapped in brown paper, of course. They were perfect. Of course. A framed photo of Jane Fonda, stretching her legs out straight and holding them tight against her chest, looking just unbelievably beautiful and athletic. Two first edition copies of Nora Ephron books. A printed shirt perfectly replicating the t-shirt dad is wearing in my favorite picture of him: “No Condo. No MBA. No BMW.” I squealed. It was a shirt I’ve wanted forever and I hadn’t even mentioned it recently. And then, finally, a royal blue pullover printed with two abstract figures in the midst of calisthenics encircled by “JANE FONDA WORKOUT.” It’s the logo for her workout tapes. I screamed. He had every right and reason to be so giddy about these gifts.
Jillian and Scott got to Brooklyn right around 12:30 or so, picking me and Austin up before heading up to New Hampshire for Thanksgiving. I spent, truly, the first hour and a half of the ride just responding to all the deeply sweet things friends were sending me. Michael Benjamin sent a picture of us on the beach, saying how much he’ll always cherish our summer in Chicago. Gina DeRosa called me her favorite son. Cam reminded me he got married at 27. Something Jillian would also write in my birthday card. Nick Courtois celebrated me as the only Sag he can tolerate. Hailey Butman, forever the subject of so many laughs and warm recollections for me and Shannon, wished “a happy fucking birthday to the man, the myth, the legend BRAIN BURNS.”
I was sick to my stomach by the time we got to Connecticut, nauseous from looking at my phone so much. Jillian accepted a route change to save time which ultimately managed to tack on more time. I had us wait til the Charlton rest stop to use the bathroom, at which point I had to pee so bad I could barely stand up straight. Scott slept for most of the ride and when he stirred, Jillian cast some witchy fingers in his direction and hexed, “Sleep! Sleeeeeep!” Wasn’t too concerned about Austin being privy to any inevitable bickering, though I was worried about him seeing me in their argumentativeness.
We stopped at Lindsay’s first, before making our way up to Gilford for the night. She was in great spirits, as she always is. Amazingly, unbelievably, unnecessarily. We were in the kitchen, chatting and hugging and laughing. Cody loves my mullet. His hair is so long right now too. Such a beautiful head of hair. And at some point, Lindsay tells us to come see Mia’s corner. The nook in their living room that they’ve devoted to her. Some poems and flowers, the photo of her feet, her ashes. I’d seen it before but Jillian hadn’t. So we round that corner and immediately I notice, hanging from one of the shelves, a little t-shirt that reads, “Big Sister.” And I interpreted its intended meaning pretty quickly but I didn’t want to say anything, not immediately, at least. Thinking it could just as easily be something hopeful and promising for Lindsay and Cody, that Mia will be a big sister one day. And so Jill points to something else, something different on the wall and Lindsay asks, pointedly, really leading the witness here, “What are you noticing?” There’s a giggle in her voice so we all turned to her at that moment and our thoughts were confirmed: Lindsay is pregnant.
Jillian’s in tears, Cody and Austin are cracking up, all of us so immensely happy to see Lindsay happy, for her to have this good news. She’s eight weeks along and they’re going to tell mom and dad tomorrow before Thanksgiving dinner. Just amazing. Such an unexpected kind of good news. So truly heaven sent after so much sadness for this family. She’s already a mom but we are all so excited to see her mothering.
We didn’t stay too much longer. We stopped for beer and popcorn at the State Liquor Store on our way up to Gilford. Mom met us out in the driveway. Still in her outfit from work that day, looking really pretty in a black dress and tights. Always nice to see her hug Austin and greet him so warmly. It feels right to see her on my birthday. Schlepped our stuff inside, having claimed the downstairs bedroom, with the biggest bed, for ourselves. Despite the fact that Scott clearly thought they’d be sleeping down there. It’s moments like this when my youngest child/only boy/gay wunderkind card has to count for something. Besides, it makes no sense for two men to share a smaller bed.
Mom put together an impressive spread of dips and apps. We were all hungry. Dad made margaritas and Austin had one and got immediately sick to his stomach. Dad subtly asked me if he was okay in such a way that made me wonder how often Austin’s family members asked him that the very same thing about me this summer. Mom made me her devil dog cake, per tradition, and we Facetimed Lindsay in time to sing “Happy Birthday.” That miraculous stretch of time, getting sung to once per year as you’re lit oh so generously from below. A moment to cherish. Took some time to think of a wish, holding on to it tightly, then and now, and blew out my candles.
Was sad that I forgot to bring our white noise machine with us while feeling very happy that I remembered to bring our beloved sleep aid of choice: NyQuil. You’d think that king-sized bed would guarantee a heavenly slumber but those polyester sheets made for an unbelievably hot night’s sleep. It was hell. I’ve been fully spoiled by the $120 Boll & Branch sheets we sleep on. Makes you realize how easily people become fiscally conservative.
November 24, 2021
Gilford, New Hampshire
I am (almost) 28 years old
There are these educator meetings at the museum. Once a month or so, some scholar is brought in, their area of research usually perfectly supplementary to the tours we’re already giving. They present a lecture, take our questions, sharing with us more information than we’ll ever need to know about the Johnson-Reed Act or anti-Semitism in Kleindeutschland or the flooding of woodframe tenements built atop the old Collect Pond. Getting paid to learn is one thing but getting paid to learn things that are decidedly secondary to our more necessary content? It’s pretty dreamy. So often, these meetings make me feel so very lucky to be telling these stories of ordinary lives lived by ordinary people who never, ever, not even once could have dreamed that—a hundred and something years later—strangers would pay $30 a ticket to spend an hour learning their personal history from a wildly expressive homosexual. Imaginably, I could go on and on here. But I only bring this up to share a parting sentiment from the museum’s president at the very end of our most recent meeting. She was citing some study that I can’t remember, my attention already spanned to its capacity, chicken-scratching every word, lest I forget, of a statement she’s supposedly returned to over and over: “The resilient child is one who knows his family’s history.”
It’s a very tenement-y notion, of course. And while I heard her saying this for what it was, a mission statement of sorts for all the work we do, I felt it as something else. Tomorrow, I turn 28 years old. But, even at the time of this meeting, I was near enough to my birthday to feel that melancholic weight of a year in review. As if I’m not constantly indulging in the melancholic weight of years in review. Nevertheless. “The resilient child is one who knows his family’s history.” She said that and I made the signature “mmm...” sound of a heart-aching empath, that hum of deeply-felt recognition I make whenever I watch early-season episodes of Roseanne. Really understanding something about this idea that the child who can move forward is one who’s reckoned with the people and places who made him, who recognizes that generations of hurt can’t be avoided but, maybe, could stop here. At 27 years old, and more than ever before, I felt like I knew my family.
Though maybe that’s a very “27 years old” thing to say. I suppose it was more of a tipping point, really, an entry into some new stage of grown-upness. My Puberty 2. My Saturn return, premature. Because I’ve had a hard time knowing my family this year. It’s not like I haven’t gotten along with my mom and my dad and my sisters, that’s not it. I guess I just thought that, while my own personal future would surely prove rocky and uncertain, my history would ease into its place. That the figures and fixtures of my past would prove static, like words on the pages of chapters I’d already read, informing the story to come, yes, but finished and settled and resolved. I didn’t anticipate my parents getting more concerned about money as they got older, that—in planning for his imminent retirement—my dad would cancel their cable TV subscription and town garbage collection out of necessity, not choice. I figured losing a job was out of the question for them. I didn’t think we’d ever know a grief as bottomless and confusing as when Mia died, fumbling through those months that followed when nothing seemed like the right thing to say and saying nothing was the worst thing to do. And I didn’t anticipate a recent day at the museum, when a demanding visitor made me so furious that—later on that evening, once I was home—I’d be brought to tears, and not because of the way he treated me. I cried because of how much I recognized this fury, how I knew exactly who taught it to me, feeling so sorry for the woman who gave me all this anger, just about 28 years ago now.
I want to know peace in my family, peace for my family. And I’m hopeful about it. Back on July 4th, Vincent was born—Lindsay’s first son, her second child. He was delivered very early that morning and, waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I checked my phone and saw the first picture of him. The smile on my face felt like molasses. It was a kind of joy coming from someplace so deep that it took a long, slow moment to get to my head, to stretch across my cheeks, lit from below by the blue-white of my screen, and by each and every cherished pixel making up the newest member of our family. I’ll be 54 when Vincent is 27. I’ll have lived exactly two times as much life as him. And if he’s interested in knowing my history, in learning about my trials and benefitting from a knowledge of my tribulations, that’s great. I’ll settle for being his critically-adored, cautiously-successful foxy gay uncle. What I really hope for him is the very same hope, the very same prayer I have for our whole family. That, in great health and happiness, we’ll get older and we’ll get gentler, with the means to be generous and the intent to be good. Things will be better, not harder. We’ll love the way we all needed to be loved. And when we’re hurt, when the strife and the sadness of life gets heavy, we’ll know that our pain is already the past.
Oh my. I’m happy I read this after seeing you because I would surely have been a sobbing mess while talking to you about it. A beautiful tribute to Mia and Vincent, a heartfelt wish for the entire family.
So much love in you and for you.