"Too Much for the Table."
November 27, 2025
There was a lot I had to do before the day got started. Before Jillian and Lindsay and Lindsay’s husband Cody and their four-year-old son Vincent pulled up to the house, before rubbing the turkey down with butter and throwing it in the oven, before assembling the charcuterie board on the kitchen island after my mother said, in a beleaguered huff, “Okay, I need to get in the shower,” there was writing for me to do and a walk for me to go on. Never one to take a day off, not from my unpaid obligations at least, this day’s 6:15 alarm was just a matter of course. But evidently I wasn’t quiet enough when I crept outside to take some shitty pictures of the sunrise. Before my first sip of coffee, let alone my first written word, my mother and father were both awake. And as my mom grabbed the remote and my dad swung open the dishwasher, the house came alive with the sounds of Good Morning America and clean knives and forks getting lobbed at warp speed into the cutlery tray. Brian Eno’s droning ambience blasting in my headphones wouldn’t be enough to counter the distraction. I used to be a person who could write at cafes or the library, memorably unbothered by the goings on around me, but I’m not that person anymore. Instead, I’ve become someone who writes from the militantly controlled silence of my bedroom desk. If there’s a dog barking in a backyard three houses down the block, not only do I hear it, I’m sticking my head out of the window to deliver a shaming “Shh!” Seated at the kitchen table, smack dab in the proverbial heart of the home, I couldn’t fault my parents for starting their days too. It’s just that there really isn’t anywhere else in the house where I can write. Despite my mother’s ongoing obsession with furniture flipping, traveling far and wide in pursuit of gorgeous, authentically midcentury pieces that bozos on Facebook Marketplace give her for free, I guess there’s never been much thought to this house needing even one single desk. So with necessity proving, indeed, the mother of invention, I hauled a chair from the kitchen table into my mom’s bedroom. And after moving aside some perfume samples and rolled-up ankle socks, and reading a post-it or two written in her signature plain print, I set myself up at her dresser. Spreading my legs as far as they’d go to scoot in as close as I could, I wrote for maybe 45 total minutes as the entire town of Gilford, New Hampshire passed by the house. Old ladies with coffees in hand and parents pushing strollers and college homecomers in their dad’s jackets, participants, all of them, in the annual Turkey Trot 5k. Joining my mom in the living room, the picture of creature comforts in her slippers and terrycloth robe, she flung the readers off her face the second I said a word about the neighbors. Narrowing her eyes at the family just across the street, cheering on all the racers as they passed by, I asked if the one standing next to Lisa was James’s girlfriend. “It’s one of his sisters,” said my mom, case closed. “No way,” I said. “It can’t be. This girl, look—she’s blond!” I don’t think I’ve said a word to James since approximately 2009 and we can barely remember the names of those sisters much less identify them from a hazy morning distance. And yet, we were riveted.
Like a vaudeville act sticking his neck out of the velvet curtain, Vincent slid open the back door and poked his head inside, looking all the way up at his applauding, adoring masses. In a chambray button-up with a cardigan over the top, and these little blue jeans, Lindsay herself would later say that his entire outfit was a size too small. Which, of course, just made it all the cuter. Up until dinner, when I changed into a more presentable sweater, I was wearing a t-shirt that had the city’s circa 1976 skyline gleaming dewy on the fruit of knowledge. I’m Crazy About The Big Apple, it reads. “That’s not the real thing? If I know anything about you, it’s that you only wear the real thing,” said Cody, shocked to hear I didn’t have actual vintage on but a bootleg. First seeing it years ago in an old picture of the actress Sylvia Miles, I could never find the shirt anywhere. All my usual vintage channels turned up dry, as hard as I tried. But then, meeting up with Austin for a movie just a couple weeks ago now, on a specific day that’s always meant a lot to us, he surprised me with something. Untying ribbon and ripping open paper to see that Big Apple I know and love, in all its craziness, printed on a shiny and new cotton tee. Just for me, he had it made. And already it had so much more story than the original, wherever it might be, could ever have. “But I don’t have anything for you,” I said that night to Austin who replied, without a care in the world, “I know.” And to Jillian, Cody said how nervous he was that he’d swoop in from behind at some point today and give her a kiss. “You’re wearing your jeans just like my wife,” he explained. That’s just like Cody. In both of his comments, to me and Jillian alike, he’s showing his attention. Something he does so well. Cody and I have known each other for almost twenty years. Much too soon, it will be twenty years since he started dating our middle sister. Here was Cody, a born and raised New Hampshire boy, welcoming himself to a New Jersey family just as they started realizing how very different this new home would be. An outsider among outsiders. And at such a fraught time in my life. Fourteen years old, I had all this rage inside me, all this sadness, and I was a total prisoner to it. Lashing out at almost everybody while saving the very worst of my hostility for anyone who dared be kind. For far too long, I could only be mean to Cody. I still remember how it felt, the sweet shock of it all, every time Cody laughed at something I said, at things I myself didn’t even recognize as funny yet. But to accept him would mean accepting New Hampshire and that was something I just couldn’t do. Thank God, I can love him now. All the moments when I catch him shaking his head, his asides I’ve come to cherish, and the way he sees our family, as maybe only an in-law can. He’s our witness. And Cody doesn’t miss a thing.
“And then Nana told me, ‘A good man is hard to find,’” said Jillian, telling our mother about a recent phone call with her mother. Nana had already met him but, this past weekend, Jillian introduced her new boyfriend Tyler to our Aunt Patti who promptly reported back, with flying colors, about our family’s newest cast member. And Nana made sure her granddaughter understood just how lucky she is. I don’t know the half of it, and I’m not sure I want to either, but for far too long, I know that Nana was married to an awful man. And while she planned to divorce my grandfather just as soon as her youngest child was out of the house, that empty nest coincided almost exactly with his debilitating stroke and for the next twenty years, Nana didn’t just remain his wife, she became his caretaker. A twist of fate so cruel it makes me want to weep. Something that would be too sad for words if it weren’t for a man named Stan. Not long after my grandfather died, my Nana started seeing this old Jewish guy who drove a convertible and collected coins. He had a tattoo of a sexy lady on his arm and a constant toothpick in the crease of his mouth. For almost a decade, an active and able-bodied decade just as those things were becoming less of a guarantee for both of them, they had each other. It’s secondhand news, never hearing this directly from her, but I believe what I’ve been told—that Nana considers Stan the love of her life. He’s been gone for sixteen years now. In the kitchen, after pouring champagne into enough flutes for everyone but Vincent the four-year-old and Cody the non-drinker, my mom raised her glass and told a story from work. “So, I was telling the pharmacist about the plan for the weekend, how you’d all be here, sharing a little this and that about all of you, blah blah blah. And she said, ‘Everyone’s happy! Right? Everyone’s got something good going on!’” A devout believer that a mother is only as happy as her unhappiest child, our mother has known unhappiness. She’s carried our sadness. Knowing our heartbreak, suffering our grief. I’ve called her crying many times this year only to hear, in a second’s time, the catch in her throat of my same teardrops. The way she understands life, and the pain of it, that’s something I wouldn’t trade for the finest counsel. Raising our glasses, I heard that familiar catch in her throat as she tried to share in something good here, the happiness of knowing her children are happy. But for me, it was almost too much to bear. Suddenly compelled to change the subject and look away, to cast my gaze at something else, anything else, that was any less enormous than the thundering love in our mother’s heart.
Walking down the street in between me and my father, Vincent held my hand. Down on the corner, my parents have a neighbor with three goats penned off on the side of their old farmhouse. At this point, Vincent spends most every Saturday night at Lovey and Poppop’s and the seeing of the goats is one of their many weekendly traditions. Cripplingly homesick as a kid, I can’t even imagine this but Vincent seems to enjoy these sleepovers just as much as my parents do. Anytime I call my mom only for my dad to answer, it’s all he talks about. Abandoning her phone to the living room while she’s down in the garage, my mom will be sanding her latest piece of furniture and breathing in every last gulp of its noxious antique particles while my dad tells me all about the latest visit with their grandson. At wit’s end, Vincent recently said to them, “I’m not Bub!” Short for Bubby, shorter still for Bubbala, all my life my family has called me Bub. And looking at one little boy while evidently thinking of another, my parents keep calling their grandson by a thirty-year-old term of endearment. They usually catch the error and correct themselves pretty immediately but I love it when they don’t. When I get to listen to a story about Vincent only to hear my father call him “Brian.” They have something special, my dad and my nephew. Vincent who also adores Cody so very much. And given how good both these men are, both these fathers in his life, that’s something to celebrate. But still I’ll hope it’s just a phase, just some passing thing that’s recently prompted Vincent to say he doesn’t like girls. Or as he says, in his shockingly strong New England accent, “guhhhls.” The first time that afternoon that Vincent so much as hinted at this, I said, “Uh uh! No! Girls are amazing! Girls saved my life!” And like a cat to the sound of a command, he merely looked at me. Announcing himself with a sing-song “Look who’s here!” as he ran up to the pen, Vincent carried a plastic bag filled with enough carrots and celery sticks to feed the flock but he was insistent about something—the daddy goat needed to eat first. Boasting some pretty buxom udders, what Vincent thinks is a buck could very well be a nanny—but that’s beside the point. Because as I tried making this into a teaching moment, willing Vincent to understand that lady goats are just as deserving of sad, wilted vegetables, I heard my dad say, “It got out.”
Carabiners that usually lock the gate in place were unlatched and during the general distraction of keeping an eye on Vincent, let alone lecturing him on equal rights between the sexes, one of the goats slipped out of the pen. It wasn’t our fault but it was suddenly our responsibility. And as Vincent kept on shaking his bag of food at the expectant goats, attracting them ever nearer to the open gate, a gate that needed to stay open if we had any hope of herding the escapee back inside, I suddenly imagined having to knock on the neighbor’s door and say, “Hi, hello, I’m Brian and Kris’s son? Brian and Kris? From down the street? Yeah, well, we—oh, happy Thanksgiving to you too, yes. Yes. So um, we were down there with your goats just now and uh, well…it’s gone. The goat. Your goat. Your goat is gone.” Thankfully, it had basically cornered itself outside the gate, quivering in the middle of a triangle formed by the fence, an old trailer, and a snow plow. But goats scale mountains. I knew it wouldn’t be too difficult for the thing to sniff out some means of egress and dash off into the woods never to be seen again. Picking Vincent up and plopping him twenty or so feet away from us, I demanded that he stay perfectly still while we tried to get the goat back inside. But for a gently parented child, an order is really just a suggestion. So I just had to say a prayer that Vincent wouldn’t run into the street while I was busy playing the wolf in sheep’s clothing, so to speak, circling around that old trailer to nix at least one of the potential exit routes for this increasingly skittish animal. Gently, but assertively, like the best of shepherds, I crept closer and closer, urging it towards my dad who was still manning the gate. It bolted forward and after a dicey moment where my dad had to lodge the beast in place with his still-recently replaced hip, the goat returned to its rightful quarters and we snapped the carabiners closed. “We just avoided a disaster,” I said, all nervous laughter, finally feeling the throbbing pulse in my neck. Of course, my father was just as aware of how disastrous this could have been. And while his heart was surely beating right out of his chest, just like mine, he looked as cool as can be. Then, and every moment leading up to this, he just did what needed to be done. The good man in a storm. My father.
“How can you sit on the floor like that at 32 years old?” asked Cody, as I colored with his son. I was helping Vincent fill in the flora and fauna of a huge prehistoric scene, less a coloring book than a coloring tapestry, and laying on my side to do it, resting all my weight on one hip. Cody is six years my senior and, by the sound of it, the days of this kind of flexibility are long over. And while I guess I should just be grateful that I can still get up and down with ease, instead I replied, “I’m so out of shape.” The phenotype passed down by my Irish and Polish forebears, by these potato-tilling men of big bones and women of even bigger hands, is decidedly that of a serf. But within my family, as tall and broad as I’ve always been, I’m comparably pretty thin. My mom has spent most of her life on one diet or another and my father was the only one of his brothers who needed his Catholic school uniform in a size “husky.” But with reliably good yearly bloodwork results, they’re both active people who are—thank God and knock on wood—in great health. Living proof that the number on the scale doesn’t mean everything. It’s just that I’ve recently come to know my own number. Never one to own a scale, knowing exactly how damaging that would be for me, I’ve historically relied upon my own yearly physicals to get any idea of how much I weigh. And for many years, give or take a few pounds, I never fluctuated. And beyond my daily walks and nightly Jane Fonda calisthenics, staying trim never required much in the way of over-exertion either. But it seems the time for exerting has come. Because maybe it is my 32 years, or maybe it’s my prescribed SSRI, but after stepping on the scale during a recent weekend on Cape Cod with my friends from college, I could suddenly qualify with a number what I’d otherwise been ignoring in the mirror. “I’m my heaviest,” I said to my family. They didn’t exactly rush all at once to dispute my remark but no offense was taken. Suspecting this had less to do with my actual appearance and more to do with l’esprit du jour of not commenting on bodies. Letting me feel however I wanted to feel right now and, for that, I was thankful. But not for long. Because just as soon as we took our seats at the dining table, my dad took one look at my dinner and said, “Now, that’s a plate.” And finally joining us from kitchen after putzing around just out of earshot, my mom said, “Dang, Brian…” Through gritted teeth, and resisting the temptation to throw my meal promptly into the trash, I told both of them to not tell me that. In their defense, what I was hearing from, I wouldn’t call it judgment. Neither of them ever the type to police what or how much their son was eating. How their daughters feel about this same thing, well, I won’t pretend to know. But what I do know is that at the end of every visit to New Hampshire, I can’t leave that house without my mom sneaking jars of peanut butter and loaves of homemade banana bread into my duffel bag while my dad says, “I love having you around at home and watching you write. And watching you eat!” Though that sentiment from my father usually gets saved for the text message he’ll send me a day or two later, once I’m back in New York and it’s months and months until my next visit home. For that reason alone, I know it’s the truth.
“Who moved the candle?” asked my mom, returning the burning tea light from the center of the table to the empty seat beside me. It was me, I moved it, but I didn’t say a word. I figured it was just a mistake, that my mom set the table intending for this candle on a saucer to be some subtle little centerpiece. So when I first sat down and noticed the flame, barely thinking, that’s where I put it. But now I knew. That seat beside me wasn’t empty, it was Mia’s, and this candle burned for her. This Thanksgiving, Mia would have been five years old. Nothing was ever the same for us, losing her. The grief, this kind of grief, the grief of losing a child, it’s terrifying. That might be the only way I can sufficiently describe it. Terrifying in scope and in impact, in its immense injustice, and in its cruelty. How Lindsay survived this, how she did it, how she continues to do it, how she can make it through even a single day without climbing to the rooftops and screaming her name so loud that every person on earth could hear it—I don’t know. I don’t know. Holidays aren’t easy. But holidays for any parent with a four year old son aren’t easy. Lightly bribing Vincent with a trip to the bookstore if he took ten bites of food, the ploy went to pot just as soon as he said, “I don’t want to go to Barnes and Nobles.” Just wanting to be helpful, my father couldn’t resist concocting forkfuls for his grandson. And as more and more tension gripped my voice, telling my dad to just leave Vincent alone, I suppose I just wanted to be helpful too. But after Vincent reached for his water cup only to knock it over for the third time in a row, all the while refusing even a single bite, Lindsay grabbed him by the wrist and took him to the back of the house to have a talk. It’s a fierce love that Lindsay has for every person in her life, and for her son most of all. But in moments like this on days like today, when the demands on a mother’s patience has to supplant the pain in a mother’s heart, I wondered how it must feel for Lindsay to mourn a daughter while caring for a boy who keeps saying he doesn’t like girls.
For the moment or two that it took me to turn on the lights, stepping into the guest bedroom to take his Facetime, Austin could hear me but he couldn’t see me. “Of course it’s pitch black in that house,” he said. There’s a streetlight right in front of the house but that can only do so much with nighttime in New Hampshire. It’s something else. The night sky so black, so black that it stops being black and becomes more like blue, or green, like a roll of Kodak 400. And in my mom’s defense, guests or not, she does always leave a light on. A lamp in the living room that, guests or not, I always turn off. Visiting a couple years ago now, Jillian woke up the whole house with the sound of broken glass. “I was just trying to find the bathroom!” Jillian told us, adjusting the band-aids on her feet that next morning. “Literally had my arms stretched out in front of me, slapping my hands against the walls. You can’t see shit up here! And then suddenly I ram my foot against something heavy on the ground and the whole thing shatters all over the place. And I still can’t see! Who the hell keeps a vase on the floor?!” It takes getting used to, I guess. Anytime Austin joined me up here, he was just as disoriented by the dark. I told him about my day and he told me about his. That he just got off the phone with his mom and his youngest sister and that I was mentioned at some point, that I was asked for. Moving on to what he’s been watching, half-joking in online speak, Austin said Stranger Things is good as hell “when u don’t got a bitch in ur ear saying it’s not.” Like an incantation, Jillian suddenly appeared. If TV raised us, and it did, it was Jillian who turned the channels. It isn’t the parents who create the culture of a household, it’s the oldest child. That’s my belief. The movies and shows that Lindsay and I watched, the music we wanted to hear, the sitcom sarcasm we each perfected by age five, it was all Jillian. She does it first and then we follow suit. It’s only natural that Jillian was the first to speak to Austin. Seven years ago when we got together at a dive bar in Brooklyn so she could meet my new boyfriend. And once more, here and now, just as soon as I turned my phone around so they could see each other. Excited enough just to talk about Stranger Things, rounding the corner into the bedroom just as he said the show’s title, one happy expression became another as Jillian realized who I was talking to. With such pleasant surprise, her voice like a happy hiccup, Jillian said, “Hi, Austin.” She wasn’t interrupting anything and there wasn’t too much more we had to say either. I saw him three nights in a row to start off this week. At a bar in Ridgewood for my Saturday night birthday party, and again on Sunday to give me my gifts, and finally during some of my last couple hours as a 31-year-old when we met up at the movies on Monday. Gay guys seeing Wicked 2, we were in a predictably fragile state afterwards. But before we went our own ways, before I woke up that next morning to my birthday and its many hours of traveling, I had to let him know something. “For Good” was long over but with just as many tears still in my eyes, I tried to acknowledge the moment. Austin told me not to be upset and I told him I wasn’t. “It’s just,” I said, “Very emotional.” This was a trying year. I almost died, I think. So to have this night at the movies with Austin, to be brought here after everything that’s happened and discover that this is where it was always going to end, it’s almost surreal. Sometimes, I actually can’t believe it. But it must have rang true, so true I can still hear it. Loud and clear, in that voice of his that rings like a bell, Austin looked at me and said, “I’m happy.”
Lindsay said “How about you give Uncle Bub his birthday present?” and her son listened. Lugging something so heavy he was teetering from left to right, like a man on a wire, like a wino, the gift was still wrapped when Vincent said, “Here’s your suitcase!” Lindsay and Cody saw it in a thrift store in a town called Derry and thought immediately of me. Circa the 1950s, per the tag on its handle, it’s a sturdy and handsome weekender that made me think of Julie Andrews leaving the convent. “When the Lord closes a door,” says Julie-as-Maria, at His feet but in the dark, “Somewhere he opens a window.” And stepping then into the sun with her luggage in one hand and guitar case in the other, she begins to sing. Me and Sophie saw The Sound of Music in theaters back in the spring. It was a sing-along screening at an Upper West Side theatre which proved, at times, just as torturous as it sounds. Redeemed at first by an old woman next to us who said The Sound of Music was the very first movie she ever saw in theaters. And then promptly almost ruined by the guy one row behind us who scoffed, “Real cool, ELON!” at the first sight of Nazi-aspirant Rolf. When our audience gave him the satisfaction of their laughter, I almost stood up from my seat to hiss. But when this same guy came in a moment too early on “Do-Re-Mi” just to bark those doh-doh-dohs from the beginning of “Uptown Funk,” thankfully he wasn’t as warmly received. Moving as far away from him as we could during intermission, we were able to enjoy the rest of the film mostly in peace. It’s so special, The Sound of Music. Like a story out of the Bible. A gentle testament to the kind of virtues mighty enough to break ground and move mountains, and all of it housed so neatly within Julie Andrews. When she first gets to the Von Trapp house and runs up that lane, darting at a sprinter’s pace, with a suitcase just like mine spinning all about—it’s wondrous. “I have confidence in sunshine,” sings Maria. “I have confidence in rain. I have confidence that spring will come again.” It was March 22nd, this night at the movies with Sophie. And March 22nd was our anniversary. That day would have been six years together for me and Austin. But we weren’t talking at all at that point. Months had passed and months were still left to come with barely a word between us. Not that that kept me from holding my breath as I checked my phone after the movie. I was barreling downtown from 96th Street with all the same forward motion and all the same uncertainty as Maria’s exit from the abbey—but there was nothing to see. It’s all right that I didn’t hear from him that day. Perhaps that’s exactly what needed to happen. But I did have somebody who reached out to acknowledge it. Sending me a screenshot of Austin’s Instagram Story from that evening, a picture of Barbra Streisand projected on the wall of a living room I knew so well, my mom asked, “Is she singing ‘The Way We Were’ here?” Babs isn’t exactly Kristine’s cup of tea. She wasn’t making an educated guess, asking this, she was saying a prayer. Somewhere inside of her, and somewhere inside of me, just alike, we hoped.
It was time for bed. After giving goodnight hugs to those of us he deigned to hug goodnight, Vincent followed his dad’s lead. Willing to spend the night up here but only if Cody was still the one to tuck him in, the twin slaps of their identical feet got quieter and quieter from the hall before they shut a bedroom door behind them and he’d try to go to sleep. But at the table, we were still together. Usually there’s a child present or significant other, an aunt, a friend of our mom’s from the gym, somebody who gets tacked on to our party of five. Sometimes they’re the buffer and sometimes they’re the foil but, more often than not, I’m just grateful they were there. But here and now, and so unusually, it was just us. Knowing this wouldn’t last forever, I asked them to help me figure out where we used to be. “I was trying to remember,” I said to my family, “Where we sat for dinner. I don’t even know what got me thinking of it, it was a couple weeks ago now. But I started thinking about where we all used to sit at the table.” At first in pieces, and then all at once, we figured it out. “I was to the side of the kitchen,” said Lindsay. “And I was to the side of the TV room,” said Jillian. “Back yard,” nodded my dad, “The sliders behind me, out onto the back deck—that’s where I was.” And our mother, in on her own joke, said, “We always sat in the same places?” This dinner scene wasn’t lost from my memory after all, just lost in the dark, and here was my family to turn on the lights. If anything came as a surprise it was that only half of them remembered where I was sitting. Or, really, how I managed to sit there at all. Built for four, not five, we were too much for the table. So if we wanted to eat as a family, I had to drag my own folding chair into the kitchen. “And that thing was heavy,” said my mom, laughing so hard her eyes were watering. “With the leather upholstery? Right? They were solid wood! Grandma Rita gave ‘em to us, I remember it now. That was good quality shit…” Every night, I parked my seat between Jillian and my father. The corner of the circle with the most to teach me. How to listen, how to take care, how to be the biggest fan. They had so much music for me to hear. But then I got older. Before I knew it, I got older. And while I still have so much left to learn, I think I need to hear it from the mothers now. All the things I didn’t know until they told me, it will fill a book. After dinner, the chair would need to go back where I found it, crammed once more into this narrow, shadowed corner where our colossal television unit almost met the wall. But before the seat went back, I’d go first. If this gap was two feet wide, it was a lot, but there was space enough for me to wedge myself inside, like one of the cows in that Temple Grandin contraption. And once I was in there, I’d stick out my arms to either side and brace them in place with all my might. One arm pushing against the wall and one against the TV unit. I counted to thirty and then, just as my sisters taught me, I stepped forward. And like leaves falling from a tree but in reverse, like getting to rewind the tape and see every flash of gold and red perfectly tuck itself right back into the branches, I took flight. Freed at last from all that old resistance, my arms would soar up in the air. An understanding of whatever isometrics might actually mean could probably make logic out of this. But now and then, I understand it as magic. Like a miracle that was waiting for me every time I stepped away from that humming cabinet of images where I’d been pushing in the dark. From there, all I remember are smiles.