On Brian Burns the First
"My father is a serious man, but not at all stern. He’s a mush. He's a mensch."
October 28, 2018
Brooklyn, New York
I was 24 years old
Got home last night and finished My Dinner with Andre, which positively bored me to tears for the first like 7/8ths of it and then absolutely floored me for the last five or so minutes. Truly moved. Most of all by the following line, from Andre: “What does that mean? A wife, a husband, a son. A baby holds your hands and then, suddenly, there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground—and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?”
Cue the tablecloths being stripped from the restaurant’s tables as a truly exquisite piece of music plays. And then, mere minutes later, at the stroke of midnight, the 27th of October becoming the 28th, it was my dad’s birthday. Not to frame that as some sort of dun-dun-DUN moment, not at all. If anything, I only felt more moved by the end of that movie. By that abstract image of a father and son aging out and away from each other. Wasn’t lost on me.
I called him this morning. The plan was to meet up with Lindsay and Cody tonight for dinner. We talked for 15 minutes or so. It was nice. He was in a bright mood. Fluffy. Things aren’t complicated with him. Things are never particularly complicated with him. And maybe that’s what can make things harder. “Where’s that son,” I ask myself.
October 27, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I am 29 years old
I was going to be named Dane. That was the plan. My mother’s first boy and my father’s first child, my parents found out they were expecting a son and decided they’d call him Dane. I told this to a friend recently and got the exact kind of naughty laugh I wanted when I said, “Dane. I would’ve been straight. And a rapist!” In my parents’ defense, it’s a family name. My mom’s mom, Nana, it’s her maiden name. And the Danes were classy, from what I’ve been told. Living in a lovely home with a sensible two children, her dad was a school teacher and her mom never wore slacks and they were both appropriately appalled when Nana got hitched at 15 to a greaser from some trashy Pennsylvania family with a patriarch who ran out for the likely literal carton of cigarettes only to never come back. But that’s Conway stock. I would be Dane. That is until Grandma Burns, my dad’s mom, proved the toughest nut to crack. Let’s put it this way—the first time I watched Meryl Streep in Doubt, I felt like I was watching a home movie. That said, growing up, she was always warm with me. Prickly on the upper lip perhaps, but never in spirit. My mother, meanwhile, remembers that when she met her for the first time, Grandma looked her up and down, truly from head to toe, only to say, “Kristine.” Divorced and eight years my dad’s junior, with two kids from her first marriage and another on the way, my mother knew how she was being perceived—a trollop. But Kristine also knew who had the winning hand here, just as soon as she gave birth on Thanksgiving night to a baby boy and chose to name him after his father. A son, a brother, a grandchild, an olive branch: Brian Thomas Burns II.
While it would still be another couple years before Grandma finally took her framed wedding portrait of my father’s first marriage down off the wall, it appeared that by the time I came along, they’d mostly reached detente. My mother’s mission in homeland security: accomplished. It also didn’t hurt that I was the spitting image of my father. We were clones, that’s what everyone said. And I see it. Same nose, same huge head, same sad blue eyes. Now, as an adult, I’m a pretty perfect fifty-fifty mix of Kris and Brian. I believe that’s called “genetics.” But occasionally, in reference to some of the things she first noticed about him, back when she was falling in love with Brian Burns the First, my mom will comment on the air of my walk or the soft look of my hands and say it’s “just like your dad’s.” I see it. Though usually she punctuates these memories with something along the lines of, “Well, not his walk anymore! Not with his messed-up hip!” Cackling away at her joke, at his expense. Where to begin. My dad marrying a woman who’s just as much of a brass tack as his mother? Or my mom pointing out the physical attributes I share in common with my father that, once upon a time, she found hot?
I spent a lot of time with him when I was little. Both my parents worked, both of them putting in 40 hours a week at Pathmark Supermarkets but, for whatever reason, so many of my memories are just of me and my dad. In part, I guess, because my mom was at work by six in the morning. Seafood department manager, she’d already shoveled all the ice and killed her first lobsters by the time her husband was getting their youngest child dressed for school. But it was more than just a matter of work schedules. For years and years, each and every night, I’d tiptoe down the hall and into their bedroom to ask, “Can you lay down with me until I fall asleep?” And while it took me until, I don’t know, the fourth grade to break this habit, never once did I dare disturb my mother. Knowing her answer without ever asking. (“No.”) But before I could so much as finish my question, my dad would already be up out of bed, following me down the hall to lay with me until I fell asleep. And usually without ever even saying a word.
We had our routines. Driving around Freehold, he’d play “At Last” by Etta James or “One More Saturday Night” by The Grateful Dead, soundtracking the day’s errands. I don’t ever remember being bored, keeping my dad company as he deposited money at the bank or checked on the store during a day off. By four years old, I’d perfected my impression of the ladies who worked at his dry cleaners, an absolutely offensive caricature that cracked my sisters up and, hopefully, doesn’t exist anywhere but our memories. And surely so much of said patience was chalked up to the occasional bribe. Lunch at McDonald’s or, eventually, a book from Barnes & Noble. That was our thing. Every Friday night, that’s what we’d do, me and my dad. He’d beeline for the music department, listening to thirty-second previews of songs at one of those little booths, leaving me with total freedom to browse any section and pick out any title. It was so generous. Yes, he was buying these books for me, there’s that. But when we’d reconvene and I’d show him what I picked and he saw that his son had chosen The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson or The Devil Wears Prada or Unlocking The Zohar, he never said no. What I wanted was never too mature for me, or too girlish, it was never anything but right. In the car, I always sat right behind him. Had I chosen the backseat on the passenger side, we would’ve been in each other’s eyeline, if only occasionally. But instead I was always looking at the back of my dad’s head, at the back of whichever baseball hat he chose that day. I don’t remember why. But I do remember how often he’d extend his right arm behind him, his palm face up, to hold my hand.
My father is a serious man, but not at all stern. He’s a mush. A mensch. The type of person who darts over to an old lady struggling to get up the stairs or cross the street. Holding them up, steadfast at the elbow. I’ve seen him do it. Fifty years spent working in retail, he’s made a life of being at service. At work and at home. My mom always did the cooking but her hausfrau duties ended there. Everything else—the laundry, the dishes, the bills, the cleaning, the yard work, my dad did it all. And he’s cool. Manly but never macho, no bullshit without proving blunt. The Dead, The Stones, Dylan, Prince, BB King and Muddy Waters, Bruce Hornsby and Bruce Springsteen—he’s seen them all. And can tell you where, when, and what they played. My father can also be very, very, very quiet. They were married for a couple years before my mom and dad were able to go on a vacation just the two of them. She remembers being so surprised at how much time would go by without him saying anything. They got back home and my mom mentioned this to Grandma, who said, regarding her son, “Oh yes. That’s Brian! Always thinking.” My mom has struggled with this quiet ever since. I have too. Even if we both know, all the times we’ve come home to an immaculately clean house, exactly what we’re supposed to understand. Some people just don’t have the words. But some people really want to hear them.
And I suppose I got my chance. One afternoon, this past spring, I sat beside my father at the kitchen table and recorded him answering 126 of my questions about his life. Spurred on by the nature of my museum work, and Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, and Molly Shannon telling Terry Gross, “I just thought, I’m going to be brave and ask the million-dollar questions that only a daughter can ask a parent when they’re still alive,” this increasingly felt like something I needed to do. Like something the universe itself needed me to do. Not that it didn’t take courage. Especially once it became clear that my first subject of this family oral history wouldn’t be my mother or my sisters but my father. My quiet, quiet father. Over three hours and twenty seven minutes, thoughtfully and generously, he answered each and every one of my questions. Go figure. He told me about saving up for his first pair of Converse and hearing the Yiddish accents from all the yentas out on their sidewalk folding chairs and saying an Our Father with his grammar school’s hostile nuns the day JFK was assassinated. Recalling his most beloved concerts, triathlons, Bullmastiffs and Welsh Corgis. Telling me stories about the old union reps of Local 1262, in their gold pinky rings and three-piece suits, disciplining associates in ways he never could, and how much he wishes he still worked for a company that has a union. I asked him if he prays and he said, “I worry.”
It was the easiest thing. Asking him these questions and listening to his answers, for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time in my life, I finally felt like I was in conversation with my father. Something we both seemed to be aware of, right near the very end. I asked him if there was anything else he’d like to talk about and, after three hours of perfect eloquence, he stumbled. Dancing around the point he clearly wanted to make. Referencing, vaguely, some conversation we had, or some conversation I wanted to have with him, about our relationship. I realized he was talking about an essay I published last year, on my birthday, in which I mentioned feeling like a stranger to my father. That upset him, of course. But it was, again, my birthday and the last thing I wanted to do was discuss something so serious, and possibly so sad. He hadn’t said a word about it since, not up until the oral history. Clearly, he hadn’t forgotten. And so I asked him if he was satisfied with our relationship and he said, “The distance that’s between us, you know, I don’t reach out to you as often as I should—and your mother chastises me for that. But that’s just who I am. I’m proud of you. And I love you with every ounce of my being. And I’d like to find out what it is, if there’s something I need to change about myself to make you feel a little bit better about me and our relationship but—all I can say is that I love you and you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” I could weep for that. I should weep, for the immense fortune of having a parent—a father, no less—willing and able to be so tender. And I should also weep for putting him in this position at all, of having to explain his feelings that even, yes, a stranger would recognize wholly as love.
We become our names. I say that a lot. I’ve had art teachers named Mrs. Stonebreaker, and Ms. Makepeace, and Miss Weed. A historian came to talk to the educators about food and her name was Professor Diner. And I saw a gastroenterologist once whose name was Dr. Chu. Studies have been done about this, drawing conclusion after conclusion about our personality and identity, our very appearance, being affected by the names we’re given. It’s like my favorite line in Lady Bird, where she says, “People will call each other by names their parents made up for them but they won’t believe in God.” And if I’m to become Brian Burns, lucky me. He’s given me his tenderness, his love of music, his blue eyes, and he’s given me New York City. My father is from here. Born in a Manhattan hospital and raised in a NYCHA building in Queens, he’s a New Yorker. Anytime I’m in the East Village, if I’m with friends and we pass by the corner of 2nd and 2nd, I’ll tell them, “This is where my dad went to school. Right here.” And just about every time I’m at the museum, inevitably a visitor will ask, “So, what’s your background?” For the longest time, I figured they meant that in the C.V. sense, curious about what I studied or where I used to work. I’ve since wised up. I’ve said it a thousand times now, to a thousand faces, but each time I well up with the blessing that is my answer. I say to them, “My dad’s a New Yorker, he grew up here. He shared a bedroom with his four brothers ‘til he was 16. So, in a way, I feel like I have my own connection to these tenement stories.” It’s usually right near the very end of the tour when I’m asked that question, mere moments before I’m positioned at the door, holding it open and saying goodbye to people I’ll likely never see again. And more often than not, some visitor, in the frenzied same breath as their parting compliments, will ask me, one more time, for my name. Smiling, I say, “Thank you. Brian.”
What a wonderful essay! I’m so happy I read it this morning on your Dad’s birthday. You and he are so blessed. Your Dad is a man that loves with his whole heart and that’s another beautiful trait that you two share.
Weeping.