SEPTEMBER NIGHT
I started by Googling September songs.
No surprise that search returned hundreds — maybe thousands of results. The most prominent was, of course, September by Earth, Wind and Fire. The other results ranged from Green Day to Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Fiona Apple and the Happenings among others.
I did that search because this September, 2025 has an abundance of connections that tug me in various directions. And the main reason for doing that search, and writing this piece, was to honor my two brothers, Terry and Tim, who left this mortal coil one year ago. And, as I often do, I wanted some music to pair my emotional state with the tenor of the text. A September soundtrack.
While the EWF song seemed obvious, it was too joyful. So very weirdly, I landed on this song, for the anniversary of their passing, 52 days apart, one year ago.
I’ve been thinking about this the whole past year. I knew I would write about it but it was just too distressing. I still don’t think I’ve come to terms with it.
Last July, Tim and I were contemplating what to do as Terry, who had suffered another fall was experiencing life threatening low blood pressure while on a ventilator. Terry had told me before that he did not want to be intubated. His caregiver gave us zero hope about any kind of recovery. Terry’s wife Kay knew better than any of us where the end was.
Terry crossed over later that day.
Fifty two days later, virtually the same thing happened to Tim. And when he left this world, one year ago today, he left me, finally, alone.
It’s impossible to describe what that means, but it’s kinda like when the Titanic sinks and you’re clinging to a chunk of a shattered grand piano with one or two others and then they succumb to the icy water and slip beneath the surface, and the sun rises and there’s nothing left around you.
Just white caps and churning sea.
That’s ridiculously hyperbolic. Our nuclear family, the five of us, were never really that close. Not like some people I know whose brothers are like — brothers to them. I didn’t really have that. Before last year, the last time we were all three together was for a half day in 2010. Before that it was probably the summer of 2000. And before that, 1980. So we were not close but we knew that unmistakable blood bond. We knew how we were supposed to act but because in our advanced years, we all turned into cranky, ill-tempered curmudgeons, that just annoyed us.
But when they both finally left me alone, in that frigid turbulence, I felt the loss, the mortality, the ephemeral impermanence and the inevitability of all things.
HELLBOUND TRAIN
Last spring I was acutely aware that the days were numbered for those two men. Both had been diagnosed with some form of lung cancer, among other afflictions that were never identified. Tim underwent torturous chemotherapy that basically hospitalized him. Terry was in and out of conciousness and the hospital. Both were having problems staying upright. Both were predicting the worst. Both continued to smoke 2 packs a day, and several joints.
At that point neither one had spoken to the other for something like 15 years and neither one could remember why. Terry had to ask me for Tim’s phone number which he finally did use and they managed to reconnect, over the phone, daily, sadly for a few last weeks.
The clock was ticking.
On the phone Tim said to me, “I just wish you would come back here.” So on June 11, I jumped on Delta, flew to Detroit and rented a comfortable SUV. I picked Terry up at his house at Algonac in southeastern Michigan and we drove 8 hours to Tim’s home in Brampton, in Michigan’s upper peninsula where the three of us spent the next few solemn and splendid days together.
On a couple of those days Tim drove us around the UP in his somewhat ragged Mercury Mariner with me in the back seat, Terry riding shotgun unable to stay awake, both of them chain smoking in the car, me petrified we would all die in a firey crash on US Highway 2 or M59 because of Tim’s casual driving style, where looking at the road wasn’t necessarily required.
We went to the picturesque town of Marquette on Lake Superior, drove around Presque Isle Park, we bought a half pound of high-quality, home-grown weed from a guy who lived deep in the woods (everybody in the UP lives deep in the woods.) That dude was not home but Tim knew to retrieve that package from the cab of his rusty pickup leaving $125 cash in a zip lock bag on the seat, while his two young daughters sat on their bicycles and watched uncomfortably, quizically. We had chilidogs at a car-hop style A&W in Iron Mountain. We visited the Superior Carpet, Tile and Hobby store where the MAGA proprietor had everything imaginable in the way of hobbies but not many brain cells. And we tried to find the place, miles down a two-track, into the Hiawatha National Forest, near the Jack Pine Lodge in Manistique where Tim had spread the ashes of our father Glenn Gapen back in 1995. Glenn wanted his remains to be near the spot where he slaughtered the last deer of his life and we, his three sons, wanted to commune with that deer and that forest and Glenn E. Gapen’s lost spirit, one final time.
We never found it.
This area was one of Glenn’s favorite places to hunt deer. I’m sure he and my mom Ester, along with my uncle Bob and aunt Jean, warmed their bones and threw back some Blatz lagers, dressed in all red, woolen deer hunting attire in the rustic, log cabin Jack Pine Lodge in the 1950s and 60s.
So for those few and last days I kinda took care of them. I picked them up off the floor when they fell, made them coffee and cooked for them. Even though they ate almost nothing I made them omelettes and turkey sandwiches and bbq’d New York steaks and baked potato and ice cream. I washed dishes and cleaned the kitchen. We explored the three-bay garage/shop, which Tim told me he built by himself, where he kept his toys and enough tools to erect a modern skyscraper. A nice Chevy Impala, a convertible 2000 Corvette, a classic two-tone, 1969 VW Beetle, a Harley softtail. With the exception of the Beetle, which was a work in progress, all were nearly imaculate.
On those few nights we talked about the neighbors on Fairground St. where we grew up, how amazing the cherries were on the tree in the Fulton’s yard next door, we railed about Trump and I listened a lot while they talked about the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. And welding. And how cold it gets spending a 10-hour shift on top of a powerhouse in the middle of the Michigan winter. And what an asshole Post Malone is.
My brothers were lifelong Democrats and saw themselves as progressives but failed to recognize the hypocracy in their verbal expression when they spoke about the plague of crime and squalor in the inner-city while puffing a blunt watching YouTube on a giant flat-screen in the comfort of a Lazy Boy recliner. I didn’t judge them or protest when the N word was spoken, by these two dying men. Not this time. There was no point now.
When I could get their attention I convinced them to play a drinking game that Linda and I often play when we’re just killing time at home, although I was the only one swilling the bourbon that I brought along. The game is where one person chooses any song they want to play on YouTube and we all listen and then they pass the phone and the choice on to the next person.
Terry’s first choice, Hellbound Train by Savoy Brown from 1972.
Hellbound Train driving slow Move on down to the Hell below Conductor please won’t you lend a hand? Got to get on board take me to your land
The irony.
Tim’s first pick in the drinking game was Pride and Joy by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
For the record, when it was my turn, I predictably got the groaning, “Oh, now we get to listen to your music.” I expected that. I think they presumed I was going to force them to listen to some obscure Japanese prog outfit or maybe speed metal from Mexico or Lady Gaga or, heaven forbid, Post Malone. Afterall, I was the slick brother who lived in California for the past 45 years, doing blow backstage in Mettalica’s dressing room. Tim would sometimes mockingly call me “flash.”
I played Zeppelin, Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.
Terry Lynn Gapen — 1952-2024
I think most of us are still just kids in our own heads, but Terry was like a ten-year-old inside.
He loved cartoons. He loved Rocky and Bullwinkle and Boris Badanov. He loved magic tricks, and knot tying and tomato soup with a sleeve of saltines. He was also an artist and he liked working with industrial materials particularly stainless steel. He loved the purity and power and beauty of stainless.
I said above that I wasn’t very close to my brothers which was true once we all became crotchety, disagreeable adults, but for a while, Terry and I were literally super close. We shared a small bedroom with two single beds for about 7 years in our teens. We sat facing each other, taking pulls off the water pipe that he built into the small cabinet that was between our two beds. We listened to A Saucerful of Secrets, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Led Zeppelin, The Stooges, Hendrix on repeat on our little, Panasonic, mini-stereo record player and FM receiver with two speakers that took up the entire top of the lone dresser in the tiny room. While mom worked the night shift at Detroit House of Correction (DeHoCo,) we had most of our friends over almost every night where we would fill the house with weed smoke and play records on her GE console stereo. Grand Funk, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter.
When we were little kids we would park ourselves in front of the black and white TV after school and while away the afternoons watching reruns of The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals and the animated series Supercar on UHF channel 50 out of Windsor, Ontario. When a commercial came on we would immediately ‘rass, our word for wrestling, rolling around on the carpet, gripping each other in ‘head locks’ until the commercial was over when we’d simultaneously exclaim, “Movies on!” and resume our positions on the couch.
Terry always had trouble staying awake. He managed to crash more than a few cars as a result of drifting off while behind the wheel. On a nighmarish night around 1972 or 1973 Terry was headed north on I-75 enroute to anywhere “up north,” probably to his brother Tim’s place in Midland. He had Debbie Reed, a great-looking southern gal from the old neighborhood with him in his ’67 Mercury Cougar. I think he hoped to impress Debbie with his slick ride and the good dope he had but somewhere jut north of Flint he just fell asleep at the wheel. The Cougar drifted off the road and onto the shoulder where a man had stopped his car to check on his purebred Dobermann Pinscher dogs that were in a special trailer he was towing. In a horrifying and catastrophic instant that plagued him for the rest of his life, he plowed into that rig. The man and his dogs died at the scene.
Horror.
Terry never got over that. He even said something about it last June when we were all together. More than 55 years later.
He was an ornery, cantakerous geezer, set in his ways with little tolerance for anything or anyone. He loved all animals and his pets and his wife. And I loved him more than I even knew. And I miss him immensely.
Terry was a lifelong Democrat and proud member of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers union. He is survived by his wife Kay and me.
Timothy Glenn Gapen — 1948-2024
Tim Gapen loved cars. He also loved racing. He loved anything that raced. Cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats. I think if you could coax kangaroos to race each other, he would love that. He loved all things cars. Race cars, muscle cars, funny cars, dragsters, rails. In the 1960s the popular race lore in Detroit was built around magazines that featured The Little Red Wagon and Color Me Gone. But I think his favorite thing that had to do with racing would be top fuel. I’m not really sure what that is but I think they put alien blood into ethanol and light a match to it.
Also Rat Fink was cool.
When we were kids assembling model cars was a huge thing. We all got our model cars and accessories at Jerry’s Hobby Shop and Shoe Repair on Main st. at the corner of Wing st. I remember Tim meticulously built several model cars and swapping them out on his dresser as if they were in a race. I always thought his models were the best I’d ever seen, with perfect spray paint jobs and the decals placed perfectly.
Tim got his girlfriend Kathy Lewis pregnant with their first child Nick in 1967, when they were just kids themselves and he left home, got married and became a boilermaker. I rarely saw him for the next, forever.
I remember one day when he came back with his ’68 Road Runner, 426 Hemi, 450HP. Probably his dream car. He loved the Mopar. He took Terry and I to Detroit dragway.
I definitely did not give a fuck about “the drags.”
One night the parents went out of town and left us three to fend for ourselves with Tim in charge. He was probably 15. He threw a party with about 10 of his buddies and they all brought cases of 16 oz. cans of Colt45. The way I remember it, Tim drank 14 of those in pretty quick succession. That story sounds legendary and in my 7-year-old mind it may have some embroidery on it, but whatever the actual number was, he was lucky he didn’t expire from alcohol poisoning.
I don’t remember when he had some kind of accident and had to wear a Frakenstein device that kept his head still with braces under his chin and the back of his head and down to his waist, for several months. I don’t remember because I was being born when that happened. The story was that after the accidnt he was in the hospital and made a friend there named Tom. At the same time my mom was having me in a different hospital and Tim got word to her that she should name me after the nice boy he made friends with there. That would have made him eight years old then.
Tim was the only one of the three of us who was ever a cub scout. He loved chocolate milk, fishing, the outdoors and Michigan’s upper peninsula.
He never really seemed to have time for me. Growing up Terry and I both looked up to him and admired him, glorified him and craved his attention and his praise and his love. But Tim never learned how to express love. Terry got to experience it some off and on over the years. I never did. He just ridiculed me. But he finally admitted to me at his son Jason’s wedding in Phoenix in 2019 that he was always intensely jealous of me. He said that because he thought I got everything handed to me and because I escaped and moved to California and and I was a professional photographer and I played piano and guitar. I think that’s how he dealt with his envy, was to treat me with indifference and even mockery. But to this day, even though he’s gone now, whenever I do something I think, “I wonder would Tim approve?” Or, “What would Tim think of this, would he be impressed?”
I’m still seeking his approval.
Tim also loved his dogs. He always had at least a few, mostly Yorkies. Sadly in the last few years of his life, he lost his beloved Yorkies one at a time. I think one to a coyote. And every one of them devastated him.
A couple of years ago, Tim lost Rita, his lifelong friend and his partner for his last years. He spoke of how he came home from the hospital the night Rita passed and found his last little Yorkie had died on the same day.
He never really recovered from that trauma and was inconsolable for the rest of his days.
Tim was, by his own account, a highly respected welder and could lay perfect beads on aluminum in overhead positions with a heliarc torch.
To me he was always pedantic, sardonic and jaundiced but I also thought of him as a craftsman, a perfectionist and a purist.
I now know what I didn’t before, that I loved him beyond words.
Tim is survived by his four kids, Nick, Tomi, Jason and Sunshine. And me.
TWENTY TWENTY FIVE
This month, of this year, is haunting and resonant to me for a few reasons.
My father Glenn was born September 2, and my mother Ester was born on September 25, both in 1925. They’d have celebrated their 100th birthday this month had they not died more than 35 years ago.
Today, September 17, 2025 is exactly one year since the passing over of my oldest brother Tim.
Also, 25 years ago on September 7, 2000, Labor Day, Linda and I went on our first date to a bbq and picnic at a park in Simi Valley. We didn’t get married until October 8, 2006 but we never remember that date. We consider Labor Day to be our anniversary. So having stayed together for 25 years this month marks the longest thing that either one of us has ever done.
When we “retired” nearly four years ago and moved to Oregon we thought we were going to spend our days hiking and kayaking and snowshoeing and exploring the Oregon coast and the forests and lakes of the Cascade Range. We did for a while until it became clear to us both that we could no longer recreate while the world was on fire.
Now we give most, but not all, of our free time to political activism.
THE WATER HAS NO MEMORY
Every year when summer breaks and gives way to September, I’m invariably spellbound by the magic of autumn. The equinox is so distinct as the sun passes directly over the equator resulting in nearly equal hours of day and night. The environment explodes with color for a fleeting moment before the flora succombs and lays down, the fauna goes underground, the air vibrates as the rhythm of the crikets chirping slows and dies away. There is something beautiful in things passing. Sometimes shocking and frightening but beguiling and exquisite. The river flows by with no regard for the observer.
The water molecules have somewhere else to be and nothing to say.
SEPTEMBER NIGHT
I started by Googling September songs.
No surprise that search returned hundreds — maybe thousands of results. The most prominent was, of course, September by Earth, Wind and Fire. The other results ranged from Green Day to Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Fiona Apple and the Happenings among others.
I did that search because this September, 2025 has an abundance of connections that tug me in various directions. And the main reason for doing that search, and writing this piece, was to honor my two brothers, Terry and Tim, who left this mortal coil one year ago. And, as I often do, I wanted some music to pair my emotional state with the tenor of the text. A September soundtrack.
While the EWF song seemed obvious, it was too joyful. So very weirdly, I landed on this song, for the anniversary of their passing, 52 days apart, one year ago.
I’ve been thinking about this the whole past year. I knew I would write about it but it was just too distressing. I still don’t think I’ve come to terms with it.
Last July, Tim and I were contemplating what to do as Terry, who had suffered another fall was experiencing life threatening low blood pressure while on a ventilator. Terry had told me before that he did not want to be intubated. His caregiver gave us zero hope about any kind of recovery. Terry’s wife Kay knew better than any of us where the end was.
Terry crossed over later that day.
Fifty two days later, virtually the same thing happened to Tim. And when he left this world, one year ago today, he left me, finally, alone.
It’s impossible to describe what that means, but it’s kinda like when the Titanic sinks and you’re clinging to a chunk of a shattered grand piano with one or two others and then they succumb to the icy water and slip beneath the surface, and the sun rises and there’s nothing left around you.
Just white caps and churning sea.
That’s ridiculously hyperbolic. Our nuclear family, the five of us, were never really that close. Not like some people I know whose brothers are like — brothers to them. I didn’t really have that. Before last year, the last time we were all three together was for a half day in 2010. Before that it was probably the summer of 2000. And before that, 1980. So we were not close but we knew that unmistakable blood bond. We knew how we were supposed to act but because in our advanced years, we all turned into cranky, ill-tempered curmudgeons, that just annoyed us.
But when they both finally left me alone, in that frigid turbulence, I felt the loss, the mortality, the ephemeral impermanence and the inevitability of all things.
HELLBOUND TRAIN
Last spring I was acutely aware that the days were numbered for those two men. Both had been diagnosed with some form of lung cancer, among other afflictions that were never identified. Tim underwent torturous chemotherapy that basically hospitalized him. Terry was in and out of conciousness and the hospital. Both were having problems staying upright. Both were predicting the worst. Both continued to smoke 2 packs a day, and several joints.
At that point neither one had spoken to the other for something like 15 years and neither one could remember why. Terry had to ask me for Tim’s phone number which he finally did use and they managed to reconnect, over the phone, daily, sadly for a few last weeks.
The clock was ticking.
On the phone Tim said to me, “I just wish you would come back here.” So on June 11, I jumped on Delta, flew to Detroit and rented a comfortable SUV. I picked Terry up at his house at Algonac in southeastern Michigan and we drove 8 hours to Tim’s home in Brampton, in Michigan’s upper peninsula where the three of us spent the next few solemn and splendid days together.
On a couple of those days Tim drove us around the UP in his somewhat ragged Mercury Mariner with me in the back seat, Terry riding shotgun unable to stay awake, both of them chain smoking in the car, me petrified we would all die in a firey crash on US Highway 2 or M59 because of Tim’s casual driving style, where looking at the road wasn’t necessarily required.
We went to the picturesque town of Marquette on Lake Superior, drove around Presque Isle Park, we bought a half pound of high-quality, home-grown weed from a guy who lived deep in the woods (everybody in the UP lives deep in the woods.) That dude was not home but Tim knew to retrieve that package from the cab of his rusty pickup leaving $125 cash in a zip lock bag on the seat, while his two young daughters sat on their bicycles and watched uncomfortably, quizically. We had chilidogs at a car-hop style A&W in Iron Mountain. We visited the Superior Carpet, Tile and Hobby store where the MAGA proprietor had everything imaginable in the way of hobbies but not many brain cells. And we tried to find the place, miles down a two-track, into the Hiawatha National Forest, near the Jack Pine Lodge in Manistique where Tim had spread the ashes of our father Glenn Gapen back in 1995. Glenn wanted his remains to be near the spot where he slaughtered the last deer of his life and we, his three sons, wanted to commune with that deer and that forest and Glenn E. Gapen’s lost spirit, one final time.
We never found it.
This area was one of Glenn’s favorite places to hunt deer. I’m sure he and my mom Ester, along with my uncle Bob and aunt Jean, warmed their bones and threw back some Blatz lagers, dressed in all red, woolen deer hunting attire in the rustic, log cabin Jack Pine Lodge in the 1950s and 60s.
So for those few and last days I kinda took care of them. I picked them up off the floor when they fell, made them coffee and cooked for them. Even though they ate almost nothing I made them omelettes and turkey sandwiches and bbq’d New York steaks and baked potato and ice cream. I washed dishes and cleaned the kitchen. We explored the three-bay garage/shop, which Tim told me he built by himself, where he kept his toys and enough tools to erect a modern skyscraper. A nice Chevy Impala, a convertible 2000 Corvette, a classic two-tone, 1969 VW Beetle, a Harley softtail. With the exception of the Beetle, which was a work in progress, all were nearly imaculate.
On those few nights we talked about the neighbors on Fairground St. where we grew up, how amazing the cherries were on the tree in the Fulton’s yard next door, we railed about Trump and I listened a lot while they talked about the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. And welding. And how cold it gets spending a 10-hour shift on top of a powerhouse in the middle of the Michigan winter. And what an asshole Post Malone is.
My brothers were lifelong Democrats and saw themselves as progressives but failed to recognize the hypocracy in their verbal expression when they spoke about the plague of crime and squalor in the inner-city while puffing a blunt watching YouTube on a giant flat-screen in the comfort of a Lazy Boy recliner. I didn’t judge them or protest when the N word was spoken, by these two dying men. Not this time. There was no point now.
When I could get their attention I convinced them to play a drinking game that Linda and I often play when we’re just killing time at home, although I was the only one swilling the bourbon that I brought along. The game is where one person chooses any song they want to play on YouTube and we all listen and then they pass the phone and the choice on to the next person.
Terry’s first choice, Hellbound Train by Savoy Brown from 1972.
Hellbound Train driving slow Move on down to the Hell below Conductor please won’t you lend a hand? Got to get on board take me to your land
The irony.
Tim’s first pick in the drinking game was Pride and Joy by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
For the record, when it was my turn, I predictably got the groaning, “Oh, now we get to listen to your music.” I expected that. I think they presumed I was going to force them to listen to some obscure Japanese prog outfit or maybe speed metal from Mexico or Lady Gaga or, heaven forbid, Post Malone. Afterall, I was the slick brother who lived in California for the past 45 years, doing blow backstage in Mettalica’s dressing room. Tim would sometimes mockingly call me “flash.”
I played Zeppelin, Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.
Terry Lynn Gapen — 1952-2024
I think most of us are still just kids in our own heads, but Terry was like a ten-year-old inside.
He loved cartoons. He loved Rocky and Bullwinkle and Boris Badanov. He loved magic tricks, and knot tying and tomato soup with a sleeve of saltines. He was also an artist and he liked working with industrial materials particularly stainless steel. He loved the purity and power and beauty of stainless.
I said above that I wasn’t very close to my brothers which was true once we all became crotchety, disagreeable adults, but for a while, Terry and I were literally super close. We shared a small bedroom with two single beds for about 7 years in our teens. We sat facing each other, taking pulls off the water pipe that he built into the small cabinet that was between our two beds. We listened to A Saucerful of Secrets, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Led Zeppelin, The Stooges, Hendrix on repeat on our little, Panasonic, mini-stereo record player and FM receiver with two speakers that took up the entire top of the lone dresser in the tiny room. While mom worked the night shift at Detroit House of Correction (DeHoCo,) we had most of our friends over almost every night where we would fill the house with weed smoke and play records on her GE console stereo. Grand Funk, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter.
When we were little kids we would park ourselves in front of the black and white TV after school and while away the afternoons watching reruns of The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals and the animated series Supercar on UHF channel 50 out of Windsor, Ontario. When a commercial came on we would immediately ‘rass, our word for wrestling, rolling around on the carpet, gripping each other in ‘head locks’ until the commercial was over when we’d simultaneously exclaim, “Movies on!” and resume our positions on the couch.
Terry always had trouble staying awake. He managed to crash more than a few cars as a result of drifting off while behind the wheel. On a nighmarish night around 1972 or 1973 Terry was headed north on I-75 enroute to anywhere “up north,” probably to his brother Tim’s place in Midland. He had Debbie Reed, a great-looking southern gal from the old neighborhood with him in his ’67 Mercury Cougar. I think he hoped to impress Debbie with his slick ride and the good dope he had but somewhere jut north of Flint he just fell asleep at the wheel. The Cougar drifted off the road and onto the shoulder where a man had stopped his car to check on his purebred Dobermann Pinscher dogs that were in a special trailer he was towing. In a horrifying and catastrophic instant that plagued him for the rest of his life, he plowed into that rig. The man and his dogs died at the scene.
Horror.
Terry never got over that. He even said something about it last June when we were all together. More than 55 years later.
He was an ornery, cantakerous geezer, set in his ways with little tolerance for anything or anyone. He loved all animals and his pets and his wife. And I loved him more than I even knew. And I miss him immensely.
Terry was a lifelong Democrat and proud member of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers union. He is survived by his wife Kay and me.
Timothy Glenn Gapen — 1948-2024
Tim Gapen loved cars. He also loved racing. He loved anything that raced. Cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats. I think if you could coax kangaroos to race each other, he would love that. He loved all things cars. Race cars, muscle cars, funny cars, dragsters, rails. In the 1960s the popular race lore in Detroit was built around magazines that featured The Little Red Wagon and Color Me Gone. But I think his favorite thing that had to do with racing would be top fuel. I’m not really sure what that is but I think they put alien blood into ethanol and light a match to it.
Also Rat Fink was cool.
When we were kids assembling model cars was a huge thing. We all got our model cars and accessories at Jerry’s Hobby Shop and Shoe Repair on Main st. at the corner of Wing st. I remember Tim meticulously built several model cars and swapping them out on his dresser as if they were in a race. I always thought his models were the best I’d ever seen, with perfect spray paint jobs and the decals placed perfectly.
Tim got his girlfriend Kathy Lewis pregnant with their first child Nick in 1967, when they were just kids themselves and he left home, got married and became a boilermaker. I rarely saw him for the next, forever.
I remember one day when he came back with his ’68 Road Runner, 426 Hemi, 450HP. Probably his dream car. He loved the Mopar. He took Terry and I to Detroit dragway.
I definitely did not give a fuck about “the drags.”
One night the parents went out of town and left us three to fend for ourselves with Tim in charge. He was probably 15. He threw a party with about 10 of his buddies and they all brought cases of 16 oz. cans of Colt45. The way I remember it, Tim drank 14 of those in pretty quick succession. That story sounds legendary and in my 7-year-old mind it may have some embroidery on it, but whatever the actual number was, he was lucky he didn’t expire from alcohol poisoning.
I don’t remember when he had some kind of accident and had to wear a Frakenstein device that kept his head still with braces under his chin and the back of his head and down to his waist, for several months. I don’t remember because I was being born when that happened. The story was that after the accidnt he was in the hospital and made a friend there named Tom. At the same time my mom was having me in a different hospital and Tim got word to her that she should name me after the nice boy he made friends with there. That would have made him eight years old then.
Tim was the only one of the three of us who was ever a cub scout. He loved chocolate milk, fishing, the outdoors and Michigan’s upper peninsula.
He never really seemed to have time for me. Growing up Terry and I both looked up to him and admired him, glorified him and craved his attention and his praise and his love. But Tim never learned how to express love. Terry got to experience it some off and on over the years. I never did. He just ridiculed me. But he finally admitted to me at his son Jason’s wedding in Phoenix in 2019 that he was always intensely jealous of me. He said that because he thought I got everything handed to me and because I escaped and moved to California and and I was a professional photographer and I played piano and guitar. I think that’s how he dealt with his envy, was to treat me with indifference and even mockery. But to this day, even though he’s gone now, whenever I do something I think, “I wonder would Tim approve?” Or, “What would Tim think of this, would he be impressed?”
I’m still seeking his approval.
Tim also loved his dogs. He always had at least a few, mostly Yorkies. Sadly in the last few years of his life, he lost his beloved Yorkies one at a time. I think one to a coyote. And every one of them devastated him.
A couple of years ago, Tim lost Rita, his lifelong friend and his partner for his last years. He spoke of how he came home from the hospital the night Rita passed and found his last little Yorkie had died on the same day.
He never really recovered from that trauma and was inconsolable for the rest of his days.
Tim was, by his own account, a highly respected welder and could lay perfect beads on aluminum in overhead positions with a heliarc torch.
To me he was always pedantic, sardonic and jaundiced but I also thought of him as a craftsman, a perfectionist and a purist.
I now know what I didn’t before, that I loved him beyond words.
Tim is survived by his four kids, Nick, Tomi, Jason and Sunshine. And me.
TWENTY TWENTY FIVE
This month, of this year, is haunting and resonant to me for a few reasons.
My father Glenn was born September 2, and my mother Ester was born on September 25, both in 1925. They’d have celebrated their 100th birthday this month had they not died more than 35 years ago.
Today, September 17, 2025 is exactly one year since the passing over of my oldest brother Tim.
Also, 25 years ago on September 7, 2000, Labor Day, Linda and I went on our first date to a bbq and picnic at a park in Simi Valley. We didn’t get married until October 8, 2006 but we never remember that date. We consider Labor Day to be our anniversary. So having stayed together for 25 years this month marks the longest thing that either one of us has ever done.
When we “retired” nearly four years ago and moved to Oregon we thought we were going to spend our days hiking and kayaking and snowshoeing and exploring the Oregon coast and the forests and lakes of the Cascade Range. We did for a while until it became clear to us both that we could no longer recreate while the world was on fire.
Now we give most, but not all, of our free time to political activism.
THE WATER HAS NO MEMORY
Every year when summer breaks and gives way to September, I’m invariably spellbound by the magic of autumn. The equinox is so distinct as the sun passes directly over the equator resulting in nearly equal hours of day and night. The environment explodes with color for a fleeting moment before the flora succombs and lays down, the fauna goes underground, the air vibrates as the rhythm of the crikets chirping slows and dies away. There is something beautiful in things passing. Sometimes shocking and frightening but beguiling and exquisite. The river flows by with no regard for the observer.
The water molecules have somewhere else to be and nothing to say.
Deer Hunter’s Son: Great telling of family history and of your deep seated and complicated relationship with your brothers. After reading this, I can now picture your family home, with three boys , mom and dad living in MI.
Tim, Terry and Tom during the age of rock & roll. Bitchin’!