This post is going to be, admittedly, a little disjointed. When I try to reminisce about Alan, things kind of run together all stream-of-conscious-y. I've thought a lot about these various musical memories, and have come upon them from multiple different directions. So, I guess I'll start with Christmas.
We've had many Christmas traditions over the years. We had Christmas bears and Christmas stockings, and of course all the things I covered in the blog entry about Great-grandma. One short-lived but dear one was Uncle Steve getting Alan the DVD sets for each of the Lord of the Rings movies, and then taking us to the theater to see them with him.
It had a bit of everything -- adventure, nerdiness, music in cool meters for me. It provided a framework for movies that came after it. When we watched Thor, his friends -- technically called the Warriors Three, were "Gimli, Asian Legolas of the Woodland Japanese, and the guy from Robin Hood: Men in Tights."
So, now I ask you to follow my tangent here. The Lord of the Rings movies were made in New Zealand, which is kind of like Australia, but they talk even funnier there. "seven eight nine" -->"seevin, ite, noin" It's like Down Under's Canada.
This is how my brain connects this memory to Kimbra and Lorde -- two New Zealand singers that had huge hits recently, and are famous for weird songs, great voices, and making absolutely ridiculous faces when they sing.
Kimbra made it big when she was featured in Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know.
She has a solo career over in Australia and New Zealand.
I warned you about the faces.
Lorde, of course, I already covered in this entry.
I guess this post goes to show how hard it is to capture even one group of thoughts about Alan and my relationship with him as a cohesive whole. This blog is but a dull reflection of its subject. I hope you are able to follow me.
One of the many songs Alan liked to play over and over again was Time of the Season by the Zombies. This would have been when he was living in DeForest with Mom and Dad.
It's got a funky groove, but after a while, you wonder why they keep making that sound, like someone just had their first gulp of CocaCola or something, and then let out a crisp exhalation through their throat to demonstrate how refreshing it was. Eventually, you want to find this person with their Coke, and knock it out of their hands to get them to stop.
Since Alan has been gone, the stress of losing him has made our lives a lot more complicated. Relationships that were already difficult before have become even harder. Figuring out how to navigate a life after loss is not easy. And everyone's pain, so similar, is also so different, so individual.
Looking back at Alan's life, I know that's not what he would have wanted. He would have hoped that people could come together to support each other. He wouldn't have wanted people blaming each other, relationships falling apart in the aftermath of grief, or people isolating themselves.
He would want us to all come together -- to love one another -- even when it's hard, when it doesn't mean exactly what it did before. He would want us to forgive each other our shortcomings. He would want us to see the good in each other. He would want us to find ways to be there for each other.
Alan loved Korean cinema. Uncle Steve had given me and Mom books on Korean films years earlier, but for Alan, the interest grew in the last few years. He took a course on violence in Korean film, and was excited to be in this class because the professor had an interest in phenomenology. There was a focus on the movies of Park Chan-wook.
I had wanted to see Snowpiercer with him, but he backed out and said he would watch it with a friend instead. I don't know if he ever made it to the movie while it was playing here. I still haven't seen it, but I think it's on Netflix now.
His movies spanned genres, and while always somewhat dark, were not all ultra-violent. His biggest success was with his Vengeance trilogy, of which Oldboy was the middle. This trilogy would stretch almost anyone's tolerance for violence, both physical and emotional. I wonder if this was the scale of emotion that ran behind Alan's quiet exterior. He was so hard to read.
College afforded Alan the possibility of being the one who knew more about a topic when he talked with me. That didn't happen very often, given my breadth of trivial knowledge and our nearly 10 year age gap. When he talked about the use of color desaturation in these films, or the phenomenological themes, he was able to teach instead of be taught. This knowledge added a new and stimulating dimension to our relationship.
Hidden in all the tough conversations about his troubles, in all the silly conversations, the mundane comments made as we passed each other in the house, was this new, more adult character to our brotherhood. I mourn the loss of his future, and selfishly what I lost in our future together.
Have you heard the one about the guy who wanted to name his dog America? Then if it ran away, he could say he's gone to look for America...
Alan didn't just listen to music in the car with me. Most of the time, he forced all of us to listen to his music. Among other things, this did allow him to bond with Dad about a lot of the old music he used to listen to. Old albums, famous live performances, trivia about groups from back then, this was one thing that he truly loved to talk about with Dad.
Sometimes, people would ask me how Alan and I were brothers, perhaps not noticing the Asian in him. Or they would ask if Dad was my real dad. And I would explain that Dad raised both of us, and that even though they were technically my stepfather and half-brother, they were as real a family as any.
Our relationships underwent many permutations over the years. Before Alan was in the picture, Dad was working out of the home, and Mom was at work in the office. He and I spent the summers together, and he was the one I wanted to tuck me in at night. He was my Suzuki "mom" and my companion, and he was so patient with me and my endless inquisitiveness.
When Alan came along, Dad was still the parent at home more, but they seemed to have more traditional parental roles with him. Dad would sometimes take Alan on his team when we played games, and we would compete "brown hairs versus black hairs." Other times, it was parents versus kids.
When Alan started pulling away hard, Mom was working in New York. In many ways, it was Dad who was most immediately affected by it. He was the one back in Appleton with Alan, trying so hard to connect with him, try so hard to keep him out of trouble. The stress of this clearly took a toll on Dad. I remember Dad counting down the days until Alan turned 18 so that he wouldn't be legally responsible for him and his escapades any more.
So, when Alan lived with them in the Madison area after they all regrouped down there, it was touching to see them connect over music again. It gave them something to talk about other than Alan's struggles.
I know it's not yet Thanksgiving, but this is about Christmas. If the retail stores and TV shows can do it, so can I.
Christmas was always a special time for our family. We always spent it together, almost always in Sioux City. We had a tradition of opening one present on Christmas Eve, and saving the rest for Christmas morning. The year Alan's Christmas Eve present was a sweater did NOT go well.
Alan and I ended up together on a hide-a-bed in the den or the basement. When he was little, he used to ask me questions about Santa. One year, he started to question whether Santa was real, and I convinced him to let it go. By the next year, he had it figured out.
This was the most consistent time we got to spend with Great-Grandma Bailey, and it was a big day for her because it was her birthday. When I was little, she was a stern and silent woman who seemed to spend more time harumphing than talking with us. But by the time Alan came along, she had mellowed. She started to joke around with us, and she and Alan definitely had a special relationship. Grandma used to have to separate them because they were poking each other under the dinner table too much.
Grandma had an organ, and would often start it up and play some hymns. As he got older, Alan would try to sight-read some of them, but then eventually ended up playing All Along the Watchtower instead. Alan was never really as into Christmas music as I was when I was little, but there was a special bond over Silent Night. This was Great-Grandma's favorite.
Still, Christmas makes me think of Great-Grandma, and the things she liked remind me of Christmas. She loved owls and cardinals. She loved ebleskiver. She and Alan were never big eaters, but they could both pack away those little pancake UFOs like nobody's business.
When she was dying at 99 years old, Alan was right there for her. He held her hand, rubbed her back. At the funeral, he fainted. Mary and I took him on a drive to find a bathroom and to have some time to recover.
Theirs was a beautiful relationship. Christmas felt so different after she was gone. And now, with Alan gone, too, it will surely change again. Maybe they're together again, poking each other under some table far away.
Our last big road trip was to New Orleans this May. Alan invited Laura to come along as well. We took two cars, and drove all the way from Iowa City, stopping in Memphis on the way down, and in Little Rock on the way back up.
On the way down, Mom rode with us for much of the way, and I helped her edit some translations she was working on. Having a blog entry about New Orleans and Memphis without any jazz or blues seems like kind of a travesty, but there really wasn't that much on our trip. There was this, which you could argue fills the role, kind of.
We spent quite a bit of time trying to teach Mom the acceptable pronunciations of the name of the city, New Orleans. We discussed that most northerners used the acceptable "new ORlins" pronunciation, but that "NAWlins" was the local pronunciation, especially casually. We discussed the much debated "new orLEENZ" as likely not acceptable. And that "new OH-lee-ins" was definitely wrong.
Other than that, and a few street performers, the closest we got to jazz and blues was when I was whistling this little tune I had stuck in my head. Alan thought it was an old blues classic, and tried really hard to place it, but in truth, it was just from the intro to something very different:
(radio-safe version)
The trip was a blur of activity. We ate Memphis barbecue, boudin, boudin balls, jambalaya, fried chicken, po'boys, and drank hurricanes, even Grandma (especially Grandma?). I bought pralines for Isabelle. We saw alligators on the bayou, visited the pharmacy museum, went on a cemetery tour, and went to a crawfish boil. For Grandpa's birthday, we got chocolate cake.
One day, I ventured off on my own and went to not one, but two different hot sauce bars. These places had counters full of hot sauces to sample, including ones that required signing waivers. I made a horrible mistake at these hot sauce bars: I tried the waiver-signing hot sauces on an empty stomach. I left to join the rest of the family, and suddenly, a couple minutes after walking out of the store, the mix of habanero, red savina, Carolina Reaper, scorpion pepper, capsaicin aquaresin, capsaicin oleoresin, and ghost pepper made its way from my well-lined stomach to my not-so-well-lined duodenum. I decided to sit town on the curb outside Jackson Square to let it pass, and it did. So, I got back up and joined Mom and the grandparents at a bar. As they finished and we went to leave, the next batch of hellfire hit my small intestine, and I felt myself being turned inside out from within again. This time, I was afraid I was actually going to pass out from the pain, so I sat down again, and then had to lie down on the sidewalk. Now, the police are pretty used to seeing people lying on the sidewalk in the French Quarter, so they were immediately at my side asking my family if I had been drinking. Mom had to explain that I was a doctor, that I was fine, and that it was hot sauce-related. I got up, and met the rest of the family at the restaurant where I slammed a glass of milk and ate some food. The family asked if I had learned my lesson, and I said I had. I would make sure there was food in my stomach before trying the hot sauces again. I'm not sure if that's the lesson they were talking about.
Alan started his search for tarot cards, but couldn't find what he wanted. He ended up ordering some online, and did many a reading this summer for himself and his friends.
One night, we went swimming. Alan had been a competitive swimmer as a kid, but Laura didn't know how to swim, so she waded with us. On the way back up to the hotel rooms, I saw myself in the mirror, and was kind of horrified. My hair had become a stringy wavy mess, my eyes were bloodshot from the chlorine, and I reminded myself of something I had seen before, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Then I remembered.
At 2:09. Yeah, not good.
I had to leave early, so Mom stayed in New Orleans with Grandma and Grandpa, and I left with Alan and Laura. On the drive back, we read stories, entries on this weird website about strange monsters and phenomena, and talked. In Little Rock, we went to the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum.
This trip was an island of getting along in a time of a lot of tension. Alan and Laura, my parents and me, there were lots of things going on. That's not to say that we got along perfectly all the time, but it was nice. We truly got to connect and mend. But, again, it was an island. Afterwards, real life returned, and things fell apart.
I'm slowly learning to be thankful for the good times we had instead of focusing on the fact that they will never happen again. In dreams where I catch glimpses of Alan, he's always having fun, and we're never serious. It's never about him being dead. As much as I long to have another serious conversation with him, maybe these dreams are the universe's way of showing me that he's okay. Or his way of giving me another little good time, even now that he is gone.
Alan and I loved watching the anime work of Shinichiro Watanabe. He usually stumbled across them on adult swim on Cartoon Network, and I on the internet or through my nerdy med school friends (shout out to Linda!). The two we bonded over were Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. Both were just as much about the soundtrack as they were about the story and visuals, Bebop with its jazz and Champloo with its hip hop.
Memories include:
-- watching part of an episode in Steve and Twyla's basement on one of our solo trips to Minneapolis without Mom and Dad
-- watching Bebop sitting on the couch in the living room in Appleton, trying to explain the concept to Dad, with limited success
-- watching Champloo in Galena with the cousin when we had a mini family reunion there. That was same trip where Anna said her head looked too big in a photo because she was "more fronter," and where I won Hide and Seek by hiding in the cabinet under the counter in the kitchen.
-- Debating with Alan that Bebop was one of the few anime where the English dub was better than the original Japanese voices (which I still believe)
-- Debating which series was better. Alan originally thought Champloo, but I think he came around to my view on that one eventually.
-- Listening to the opening theme to Bebop in Alan's room in my house, reminiscing about the old times.
-- Discovering the music on his favorites playlist in preparing this blog.
Looking back at the themes of the series, Cowboy Bebop is about loneliness, betrayal and loyalty, and love gone wrong. Samurai Champloo is about quests for the unattainable, persecution, and the meaning of dignity. We watched them before these concepts would have much real-life meaning to Alan. It's almost as if they presaged the struggles in his life. Or maybe the seeds were already there, the roots starting to make their way into his heart.
Comfort has been something hard to come by since Alan died. I have found myself talking to him, begging him for some sign that I can understand, to know that he is at peace, to know how to move forward. But the few islands of comfort I have found have been in unlikely places, and not where or how I asked for them.
The first was at his funeral. It was the first time I had seen his body since the night of his death. The funeral home did a decent job of presenting the body, but it was so obvious that he was gone -- that the body was not him. It was like looking at an oyster shell, the oyster gone, and the luminous pearl that was once within shining on our souls from some unseen place. It was so strangely comforting to see this empty vessel, free from a life of pain and anxiety, free from a mind that just couldn't hold onto happiness. Somehow, I knew for that one precious day that he wasn't suffering. I was filled with a peace that I hadn't known in a long time.
I wish that feeling could have lasted forever, but of course, it did not. I sought it out again, and asked Alan just to give me, or Mom, or someone, a sign that I could understand that he was okay. I looked forward at every little thing -- was that a sign? But what gave me that sense of peace again wasn't forward; it was from the past.
After an especially hard evening, I went to bed, practically having given up. Upon awaking in the morning, I had the strangest memory pop up, of a cat Dad owned when I was little. This cat, Dakota, was in many ways a typical cat. It hid a lot. It would show up when it wanted something. And if you were doing something it didn't like, it wasn't afraid to draw blood.
But also, Dakota was strangely patient with me, a four year old kid, letting me pet a bit too hard, even pulling its tail. If the cat fell off a table, it would land any which way, even on its back. It didn't use a litter box -- it went outside like a dog.
Dakota disappeared one day. I was too young, and not really attached enough to the cat to really have any sort of meaningful emotional reaction, but I still remember riding in the car, and Dad telling me that Dakota had gotten run over and was dead. This funny little cat was gone too soon.
I had this realization that morning. Yes, Alan was gone. And there is nobody in the world that is exactly like Alan was, especially not some silly cat from before he was even born. But somehow there were enough parallels to get me to see that some part of that pattern, some part of the quirkiness that was Alan in this life, was eternal, part of the fabric of being, and we would certainly see those funny little threads again.
It reminds me of a piece of music I introduced to Alan this spring. After I showed it to him, he put it on his Youtube favorites playlist -- a record of his listening, a ghost of his life that remains.
I had been listening to it for a lecture I was writing, where I had discussed the cases of Ann Adams and Maurice Ravel. There is a good Radiolab podcast on it. Ravel, some postulate, may have written Boléro under the influence of the early stages of a degenerative brain disease, primary progressive aphasia.
In the piece, the same snippet of melody is played again and again, but each time different, changing timbre, adding or losing overtones, all the while escalating. Alan was like one of these variations, so unique, and yet linked by a strange melody to the whole.
This thought did not take away the pain of losing him, the longing to be with him, to share with him, to help him. But somehow, it put a smile on my face, and a bit of hope in my heart.
It's about choices we made, and things we didn't get to decide.
1991
When Alan was born, I was anxiously awaiting his arrival. I remember getting woken up early to go to the hospital. Mom and Dad hadn't yet picked a name for the baby. All morning, we waited for things to kick in and get going. It was as if this baby wasn't sure if it wanted to come. In fact, when he did, it was a struggle, having to be induced at nearly 10 pounds, a difficult delivery.
As a 9 year old kid, I was not allowed in the delivery room. I was initially sat down in a seating area down the hall, but I couldn't wait. I went up to the door, and listened to everything until they let me in.
Alan's life didn't start with a soundtrack, at least not music. Like the majority of people who enter the world in a labor and delivery unit, there was the sound of beeping machines, printing rolls of paper, the hustle and bustle of nursing staff, and the OB pronouncing orders -- to my parents to push or pull or hold or breathe, to the nurses to get this or that.
I waited outside that door, and as soon as they let me in, I saw his face, not yet cute like a baby, but the wrinkly red little monkey face cute of a newborn. I knew my life had changed forever.
2000
In the spring, I tried contact lenses. I started to notice increasing problems with the vision in my left eye, which I thought was related to the contacts, but it wouldn't go away. In the summer, I finally saw my ophthalmologist, Dr Vogel. She immediately knew something was wrong, and ordered visual fields and an MRI. At 17, sitting alone at the front desk of Sage Hall working as a desk clerk, I got a call from Dad that I should call Dr Vogel on her home phone and talk to her about the scan.
I had a tumor pushing on my optic chiasm. This was the cause of the visual loss. And I would probably need surgery.
My eighteenth birthday -- it fell right in the middle of the workup leading to surgery. I invited my friends from college who were in town over the summer. Lynne stopped by with a cookie cake pointing out that I still didn't have a driver's license.
For Alan and me, there was music. It seems goofy now, not what I would pick if given another chance. Alan and I would both talk for Kirby, the stuffed doll Mom made for him (twice). I decided he should be able to sing a song, and for whatever reason, chose Absolutely by Nine Days.
(In a high pitched Kirby voice) "This is the story of a girl..."
Preparing for surgery, I remember being afraid -- not for me -- I figured if I died I just wouldn't wake up from surgery and wouldn't know any different. I was afraid for Alan. What if I did die? What would Alan's life be like, losing a brother at the age of 8? I didn't want him to suffer like that.
2013
I had moved back to Iowa City from Chicago to work at the University the year before. Isabelle and I had been dating since September, and we were talking about next steps. The condo I was renting downtown was too expensive for the space you got, and I was considering buying a house. Isabelle had shown me houses she thought I would like all winter when I reluctantly went to an open house for a place close to work. Despite the Scandinavian elderly "charm" imparted by the owners at the time, there was a breathtaking mid-century modern mystique to the place. Immediately, I knew at some level this was the house.
Alan was deciding on where to go back to school. Comparing film programs in Minneapolis, Madison and Iowa City, he chose Iowa City. I guess you could say he chose me.
I bought the house, knowing that if I stayed in my condo there would be no room for him. I did this, and agreed to let Alan live with me indefinitely despite my plans with Isabelle to move forward in our relationship. Alan was wary of this, and even promised to find a place of his own eventually, but I told him he could stay as long as he needed. And so, I chose Alan.
The soundtrack -- this was the summer of Lorde.
I thought this was too pop for Alan when I showed it to him, but then I heard him listening to it. A lot.
2014 (part one)
House renovations were nothing short of catastrophic -- hidden expenses, an incompetent contractor, frozen pipes, a leaking roof, tensions all around, a mountain of debt, lawsuits, and Alan living on friends' couches between nights in his squalid dust pit of a basement room in my house.
Alan's legal problems started in early June. We had been trying to make sure he would see a mental health professional, and were busy setting things up, when suddenly the OWI happened, changing everything.
As Alan needed more support, Mom moved into my house, and I moved out to make room.
In Mom, Alan had the most intense support that anyone could ever have. She was there for him in ways nobody else could be. She would cook for him, keep track of appointments for him, and see him through any trouble. She hunkered down for the long haul, but it was tough losing so much control in the house. Tensions ran high.
Alan must have known what Mom could do for him that I couldn't, but in the end, he still begged Mom to go back to Wisconsin. I guess you could say he chose me again.
Our parents left right before my thirty-second birthday. That weekend, Isabelle and I took Alan to Solon Beef Days. The soundtrack to that weekend was provided by that event, definitely not what we would have chosen.
We stood outside an old stone building that had been converted to event space, waiting for Isabelle, listening to the speakers blare this song, and Alan looked at me incredulously. Was this song for real?
Late that night, in the daze of recovering from the fighting, Alan couldn't find a bike rack, and left my bike unlocked outside of a Walgreen's. It was promptly stolen. Against my advice to let it go, find the serial number at the bike store, and report it to the police, Isabelle and Alan spent hours that night driving and walking around the not-so-nice areas of town with flashlights looking to see if they could find it.
Monday was my birthday, and Isabelle and I invited Alan with us for my birthday dinner. He almost bailed at the last minute, but she convinced him it was important to me. The restaurant we were going to go to was closed, so we ended up eating at the buffet in the casino. Afterwards, Isabelle would play the 2 cent slots and Alan electronic blackjack. It was a quiet birthday, and only Isabelle and Alan made it not feel lonely.
2014 (part two)
That last day started like any other. I woke up that Sunday morning, not knowing if Alan had made his way back to the house or if he had stayed downtown. I prepared for the Alzheimer's walk where I was giving a little talk to kick off the event. Alan and I saw each other in passing as he came home to start working on editing footage for class. The shoot was "shitty" according to him. He complained about the finicky internet. I told him it only seemed to be finicky when he was on it.
After the walk, I drove to Isabelle's. We decided to go to Cedar Rapids to look at a chair she wanted to buy for me. As we were shopping, I got a text from Alan about dinner.
Piecing things together, it would have been in a flurry of activity for him that afternoon. He had called and texted friends, asking if they could be with him. He had snapchatted a picture of himself with a tear drawn on his contorted face complaining about the footage he was editing.
I called him, and we talked about Isabelle and me bringing food to the house, if he could wait an hour for us to drive back down.
I guess we'll never know what he was listening to at the time, but in the very end, there was no soundtrack. His computer wasn't on. The radio wasn't playing. The only sounds would have been the hum of cars on the street down the hill, the chirping of birds, and the rustling of leaves. He would leave the world in that near-silence. Unlike his hesitant entrance, he must have been resolute, ready to go. There were no signs otherwise.
When I opened the door, the first thing I saw was his face. It would take me a while to process, step-wise, what I was seeing, what had happened, and that life had changed again, forever.
When I was in college and Alan was in early grade school, I got Mom a cocktail set for her birthday. She had wanted a good cocktail shaker, so I found some stirrers, strainers, and cocktail music CDs to go along with it.
Alan wanted in on the gift, so I put one of the two CDs in my Discman, and put the headphones on his head. As I laid on his bed, he stood next to it and started to dance and spin in circles. Intermittently he would yell, "Chihuahua!" I had no idea what was going on until I put the headphones on my ears.
He could almost always make me smile, even when he was older and darker. Of course as he got older and darker, he could also make me want to pull out all my hair and punch a wall.
The gift was a hit, except the CDs. Mom really didn't care for mambo.
Most serious pianists have had, at least some time in their lives, a huge crush on Rachmaninoff, I think. Alan was trying to figure out what to play for "the big concerto" his senior year of high school, and while he initially settled on the Grieg, he briefly considered a Shostakovich concerto that I suggested, as well as several Rachmaninoffs.
By the accounts we have, Rachmaninoff was a melancholy artist type, which Alan would have gotten. He required significant treatment for depression during his life. Some of that is echoed in his use of the Dies Irae in so many of his works. There must have been some thought of death in his head at all times. Having said that, his works were full of so much life.
I had been listening to a lot of Rachmaninoff this summer. I had stumbled across his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in my iTunes folder after having heard it on the radio, and decided to look into it more. The theme he speaks of is from Paganini's Caprice No. 24, one of the greats of the virtuosic violin repertoire. Listen to how he works the Dies Irae into it. Certainly the piece is not all dark. There is even a sweet romantic theme where he turns the melody upside-down at 15:27.
This late spring, I finally moved into the house I had bought almost a year earlier. Alan had been living there through thick and thin (mostly thin given all the construction). When Alan's legal problems started, he briefly tried living on his own, but ended up back in the house. After Mom and Dad left just before my birthday in late July, I moved back into the house. Oftentimes, in the evenings, I would close the door to my master suite, and do some combination of finishing clinical notes, watching TV shows on Netflix, taking long baths in my swimming pool sized bathtub, reading Zelazny stories, and listening to classical music, in a variety of combinations.
One particularly tough day, I came home to relax. Isabelle was gone to Canada, Alan was downtown, and I was feeling a bit lonely. I laid down and started some Rachmaninoff playing. The second piece -- his second piano concerto. Fate must have been mocking me because I had forgotten what lies in the second movement:
Yeah, that would be the source for the bridge from Eric Carmen's All by Myself(1:40). Not exactly what I wanted to hear at the time. Maybe Rachmaninoff had a sense of humor.
Speaking of which, probably the fondest Rachmaninoff-related memory I have regarding Alan is the comedy act that we saw with Mom and Dad in Chicago. Alan had watched this musical comedy duo, Igudesman and Joo, on Youtube years earlier (Ed did you show him this?), and I saw that they were coming to do a CSO performance with Emanuel Ax. Um, yes please. I bought four tickets, and we went to the late night show.
In addition to this and other classic bits from their act, they had a great voice-over by Ax himself while he played a piece. In the voice-over, he checks out a woman in the front row, contemplates introducing himself to her ("I'm Manny!"), regrets not having better hemorrhoid treatment, puffs himself up ("I play with Yo-Yo Ma!), and fears screwing up the hard part, which he does.
Now, surrounded by supporting friends and family, I still find myself feeling alone sometimes, longing for another conversation with Alan. I wonder if that is a fraction of how Alan felt, deeply loved, but still somehow all by himself.
In the blog, and through his life, we made a lot of animal analogies about Alan. Alan the cat.Alan the fish. The first of all of these was Alan the sheep. He was born in the year of the ram, just like Dad. Mom and I were born in the year of the dog, so we saw each other as sheepdogs, each with our sheep to keep in line.
Personality-wise, Alan did have a kind of sheepish center, but kept it well-hidden most of the time. When he was in a bad mood, and you tried to force something on him, he would lash out and push back. He didn't bleat -- he snarled and howled.
Maybe that's why he played this track for me one day on the way to IHOP. Or maybe not.
Alan liked The Heavy. He liked a lot of music that brought jazz and soul influences into rock. He seemed a bit disappointed that the band had gotten so much play on commercials and TV shows. I guess that was the hipster in him.
Moving forward without Alan, our whole family is figuring out our new roles. I feel like a sheepdog without a sheep. I know I have other purpose in my life other than him, but it's hard to feel it now. Time, I'm sure, will sort that out, but right now, it's one of the most acute reminders of our loss. It makes me want to howl out.
When Alan switched from music store lessons to full on Suzuki lessons with Mrs. Chang, he really excelled. As many of you know, part of the Suzuki method is active participation of the parent in the lesson and at least early on, in the practicing.
When I started violin lessons, Mom and I would read the introductory material together, learning about chin rests, shoulder rests, f holes, the names of strings, practiced where to put each foot, each elbow, each finger. When I started playing actual music, the responsibility shifted to Dad, who was still Ricky at the time. His long-distant trombone experience in high school was enough to get him through those early days.
For Alan, Mom and Dad covered the majority of those responsibilities again, but as he became more advanced, my visits home from school included helping more and more with the technique of practicing -- when to take things slow, how to feel the music, how to adjust tempo and emphasis musically, not herky-jerky.
As Alan prepared for recitals and competitions, he had to play pieces from different periods, so there were a long string of modern pieces. One of the early ones was Bartók's Evening in the Country. Alan's first take was cutesy and light. I worked with him extensively to get the feeling that the country in question was rural Transylvania, where people were of Hungarian, Romanian and German heritage, not known for their lightness. I remember prancing around the living room like an idiot to get Alan to understand the paradox of spryness with heft.
It was an important moment in his musical development. His rendition of this piece was the first time I could really truly feel something in his music. He got it.
Maybe this was the precursor to the role of music later in his life. Maybe this is why he always had music playing -- the pensive dark music to match his mood, the light happy music to try to lift it, the songs he sang over and over again, the ones he wrote (always with lyrics full of despair). Maybe these moments paved the way for the soundtrack, the music that haunts me now that he is gone.
The first movie with subtitles Alan watched was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I think I asked for the soundtrack for Christmas that year, and so Alan would have heard the CD in the Saturn on one of his trips to and from Milwaukee or Great America when I was in med school.
When the movie came out, Hollywood Cinema's sign had a curious setup. There was a movie title per line, but there were only outlines separating every other title, so it read something like this:
I think Marianna Allen has a photo of this somewhere. Let's not even talk about the "up your butt" game with this group of movies.
Alan would only have been 8 at the time, so the parents and I weren't sure if he was following the plot. He insisted he did, and proved it by describing a scene:
Deep man voice: And you will die!
Evil lady voice: So will you!
Deep man voice: [pulling imaginary dart from neck] Oh, how'd that get there? I guess I will.
Alan was my movie buddy. We saw so many films together. Action film? Call Alan. Weird foreign film? Call Alan. Of course, sometimes I would tell him I wanted to see a movie with him, and at the last minute, he would inform me that he might go see it with a friend instead. Nice.
As time goes by, I realize I lost so many different things when he died, not just a brother, but my Star Trek buddy, my movie buddy, my music buddy, my video game buddy, my internet meme buddy, my keep me up to date on "young people stuff" buddy, my piggyback riding buddy, my complaining about parents buddy, my complaining about society buddy, my best friend, the kid I raised with Mom and Dad. I know I can never replace him as a whole, but I find myself searching for fill-ins for some of the smaller roles. Anyone want to see a movie?
Okay, this post is a bit different. There's no music. This post is about the other thing we listened to on long road trips: Alan himself. He really liked science fiction, as do I. He would find full text stories and read them to us. Each title below is a link to the text online. I don't know if anyone will actually do this except for me, but try reading these stories out loud and imagine his voice.
In this short story, people ask a computer of their making a question that cannot be answered, or can it? The answer is not 42. Alan read this to me and Isabelle on one of our trips to Wisconsin to see Mom and Dad. This was one of the first.
This story, published 24 years after the previous story, is about an entirely different question, almost the opposite in fact. Alan read these to us back to back. Despite my extensive Asimov collection, somehow I had missed these gems of his work. Knowing now the questions that were going through Alan's head, I wonder how this darkly humorous take on existence resonated with him.
Read to me and his friend Laura on our way back from New Orleans on our last family road trip. In it, he ponders a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!
Let's just say that's not how things unfold. This was the last story he read out loud to me.The last line haunts me as I hear it in his voice: "The long night had come again."
Roger Zelazny is my favorite sci-fi author. This is not his best story. For that, you might want to check out A Rose for Ecclesiastes. These two stories were the pre-Space Age sci-fi era's last hurrah, writings about Venus and Mars at the moment just before we knew what was on them (or what wasn't). This particular short story, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, stretches the definition of short a bit, but bear with it. To get the full experience, try reading it in a variety of mediocre southern accents, with one of the characters sounding remarkably like Cleveland from Family Guy.
For Isabelle and me, this story, in those voices, is a strong memory of who Alan was -- realizing that the character with the thickest southern accent was from the Midwest halfway through the reading, complaining about the spotty 3G/4G internet access on the road, lines alternating between masterfully delivered and awkward due to trouble reading on a phone screen in a moving car.
Beyond?
Frankly, I don't know what comes next. Reading stories has been hard for me since he left us -- too hard to concentrate. I do see irony in Alan's reading speculative fiction about the distant (on not-so-distant) future when he couldn't even picture his own tomorrow. I think Alan would want us all to look forward, though, in that way that he couldn't.
The first show he watched regularly was Blue's Clues. Nick Jr. had recently started to replay the same episode over again for kids, à la Teletubbies.
Alan never seemed to want to pretend to participate in the mysteries. He just liked watching the show.
As he got a bit older, there were other Nickelodeon shows, like all the classic NickToons. These, I could legitimately sit down with him and watch for my own enjoyment, too.
Mom mentioned Starship Troopers. This straightforward alien invasion Heinlein sci-fi book turned sappy anti-war movie was made into a computer animated cartoon, Roughnecks. It was on in the morning before school, and Alan tried not to miss it. This was one of the few television shows that Mom and Alan watched together regularly.
For me, the show that Alan and I shared most was Pokémon. In watching these shows with him, it let me have a second childhood. My actual childhood was a bit rushed. I had skipped two grades, and being a chubby nerdy Korean kid in Appleton already, I stood out. I had to learn to deal with situations at school where I was picked on relentlessly for being different. Even the well-meaning kids trying to be nice could be forceful and intrusive at times. It took a long time, but I grew a tough skin and learned, after years of not being so good at it, to defend myself. By college, it was clear there were two mes, the mature serious rigid adult, and the kid who still wanted to play. Pokémon was the perfect bridge for a 16 year old college student and his 7 year old brother.
At the end of each episode in the early seasons, they played the Pokérap. I can still sing that damned song to this day.
When a Pokémon movie came out, I immediately bought advance tickets for us. John Fahrenbach was going to go with us, but bailed. I guess I wasn't the only college student watching Pokémon.
Alan gave me an excuse to act young, whether that meant 22 or 5. The kid in me still wants to play with him and wants him back. The adult in me is heartbroken by the pain he must have been in, and wants to still take care of him. Both miss him.
I've already talked about Alan's love for The Lion King. In addition to The Circle of Life, there is one other song that stands out -- The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
Timon and Pumbaa's version notwithstanding, it is actually the Tokens' version that we listened to the most. One day when Mom and Dad lived in DeForest, we were driving somewhere, and Alan played this song over the car stereo on his phone.
We started to sing along, and this became a little tradition of ours. On several road trips afterward, we would come back to this song. It's not the easiest song to sing -- remember Alan's lack of a good falsetto. However, I can sing that high, and even got to the point where I could sing the soprano licks -- mind you, not well, but I can sing them.
When our cousin Edward visited us in the house this summer, he brought his own versions of the song. He apparently listened to them in the lab. On the way to the state fair in Des Moines, he played the Tokens version, the French language version, and even a version of Mbube, the song that it was based on. This sing-along was followed by a day of eating food on a stick (butter on a stick and bacon-wrapped pork ribs on a stick being highlights) and going on carnival rides. I had no idea it would be the last one.
What do you do with "our things" when there is no "us" any more? Alan and I had so many little traditions, inside jokes, topics of interest that the two of us would talk to only each other about. Isabelle told me that when her father died, she felt like there was a part of her that disappeared, the part that only existed with him. It took her a long time to realize that part of her was still there. I hope I find that part of me some day.
When Alan started college at Beloit, he was assigned room 321 B. Some time during the early part of the year, someone added to it, and his room was labeled, "321 Blast off". Rarely did we see his room without other people in there. It was a combination self-serve restaurant, lounge, hotbox. Those kids would eat anything, so when we would stock Alan up on dried cuttlefish and gochujang, Korean instant ramen, or seaweed, it would disappear within days. Our parents and/or I would visit at least a couple weekends a month, usually taking a rag-tag group of friends along for dinner at Applebee's or the Chinese buffet. We got to meet Courtney, Leslie, Jack (Zack? Mom's accent made it hard to tell), Jared, Sam (briefly), Rui (how Mom spelled Louie), Rosie, and the rest of the gang.
Alan was in "piano class," where he would play duets with other students, and taking private lessons, but he never seemed to listen to classical music. He was into offbeat East Coast (or sometimes Midwest) hip-hop, by people like former Wu-Tang Clan members Rza and Gza and Das Racist.
To each his own, I guess.
While at Beloit, he kept up good grades and did well for himself despite all this. When some temporary social falling out led to missed classes, he found he had the rebound capacity of a wad of wet Kleenex (*splat*) and dropped out. But before that, he discovered a love for philosophy. Perhaps the most influential course for him there was on phenomenology, a course he described as "phenomenal." Somehow, when we talked about it, we would always end up singing:
Phenomena, doo doooooo doo doo-doo...
Since he wasn't able to bounce back, he had to rebuild. He moved in with Mom and Dad, started taking courses at MATC, and got himself back on track. Academically, despite the existential struggles that clearly tormented him, he was somehow able to keep on top of things. He had rediscovered his love of film, and decided to go to film school at Iowa. While this complicated my life quite a bit, I was happy for him to move into my house, and this ushered in our closest times since I graduated from high school.
When Alan was an adolescent, he started to struggle to connect with Mom and Dad. Who doesn't? When things got really tense when I was visiting from college or from med school, I would drive him out to Barnes and Noble to let him calm down. I told him that I, too, had struggled at that age with them. It's hard to be mature enough to form all these thoughts, but not be mature enough to know when they don't matter. For me, it was Lynne Slattery Schroeder who first set me straight on that. For Alan, I felt it was my job. I told him that parents were like that -- that you couldn't change them, and that it was easier to change 5 hard things about yourself than one easy thing about someone else.
On the drive, we would listen to my Dave Brubeck CDs, and I started ear training with him. We talked about basic music theory. We used pieces with weird meters to practice hearing the beat.
Blue Rondo a la Turk,9/8 broken up as 2-2-2-3/3-3-3:
Take Five, 5/4:
I think he played a version of this at his senior recital with Ed Hou and Ryley Crowe. I am waiting to get footage of this from our parents. I also played it with our jazz band, Gyrase, in med school. Too bad we never played it together.
Unsquare Dance, 7/8:
Later, Uncle Steve and his friend Jordan would introduce him to more jazz, but this was his start. Our sharing of music went both ways. He was always introducing me to new things, but this was something I introduced to him.
In retrospect, this was the beginning of our tradition of car conversations. It often felt like we were each other's co-pilots, driving through life together. I'm sure now, I'm not the only one feeling a bit lost without Alan in the passenger seat.
There are some things you never finish because you run out of time. There are so many things I wish I could have done with Alan -- trips I wanted to take with him, things I wanted to share with him. But it doesn't always take something as dramatic as death to cut plans short. For both Alan and me, there were pieces of music we started playing in high school, and ran out of time to perform in a big way.
For me, it was Zigeunerweisen by Sarasate. This was Grandpa Lee's favorite violin piece, and I learned it, but never polished it for performance.
For Alan, it was the Grieg piano concerto. By this time, he was spending more time playing the chords to I Shall Be Released or All Along the Watchtower (more on that soon) instead of working on the Grieg. He still practiced, and made a lot of progress with his classical playing, but it was no longer his top priority. Here is Evgeny Kissin's interpretation:
When I moved to Chicago, Evgeny Kissin came to play the Grieg with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the whole family came down to see it. It was a mild March evening, and we walked from my apartment to the Symphony Hall. At some point, he broke a string, and had to take time during a long rest to pull it free from the others. Very rock star. His control over his hands made it seem like he could alter the gravity over the keys. There was a series of encores, and later in the program, the original version of Petrushka. This ballet is proof that there is humor in classical music. The contrabassoon is the most flatulent sounding thing ever, and there were some muffled laughs (see 5:17)
Both of us continued to play in the beginning of college, but then let it go a bit. When Alan moved in with me a year ago, we tried to get him a keyboard, but he never really wanted to go do that. His organ stayed in its case, too. Somehow, he did keep up his skills though. For me, music has been an important outlet, both before Alan's death, and especially in this time after.
The mother of one of Alan's good friends posted on his obit that the music in Heaven just got better. If he's up there jamming in Heaven, I'm sure he's disappointed that he beat Bob Dylan there.
