BROTHER RAY

My kid brother, Raymond, will be 80 years old next month. A little old to be called a ‘kid’ to be sure, but the habit of a lifetime is hard to shake.

More than forty years ago, I persuaded Ray to abandon his career at the Detroit Edison Company and come to Lansing to help me establish the Thomas M. Cooley Law School.

I needed someone who knew what to do with tools. Ray undertook the job of managing our physical plant. Every nook and cranny.

Few people realize the contribution Ray Brennan has made to the revitalization of downtown Lansing. Under his careful guidance and minute attention to detail the mostly abandoned Masonic Temple was reinvented as a classroom building; the old J. C. Penny department store was converted into a magnificent law library; and a commonplace fourteen story downtown office building was re-invented as the spectacular ten story Cooley Center.

Ray retired from Cooley more than a dozen years ago, but true to the teaching of his father, he has kept himself busy. One avocation is to serve as Chairman and Secretary of a distinguished group of over fifty retired gentlemen who play golf together and call themselves the FOF. For popular consumption they translate that acronym as “Friendly Old Fellows” but Ray tells me there is a more colloquial, flatulent rendering.

Still, golf being a seasonal sport, brother Ray managed to discover and become enmeshed in an activity that knows no season: the science of genealogy, which has led him to compiling a massive database of information about people to whom he (and I) are related.

Hardly a day passes that I, and indeed all of our family, do not receive a copy of an email from Ray to a near or distant relative who is celebrating a birthday or wedding anniversary.

Ray has a million stories. Yesterday, as we watched the one hundred forty-third running of the Kentucky Derby on TV, he regaled us with the tale of a distant relative named Noah Armstrong. Born in Kingston Ontario, Armstrong migrated to Minnesota and from there to Montana in search of his fortune.

He found it in silver mining, discovering what came to be known as the Hecla mine and ultimately becoming a founder of the Hecla Consolidated Mining Company.          He did well enough to establish a large ranch he dubbed Doncaster, and to take up the avocation of horse breeding. Not one to be satisfied with half measures, Armstrong constructed a massive, round, three story horse barn. It has been described as resembling a wedding cake. Boasting an indoor race track, the building is now listed on the national registry of historic places.

More recently, you can find Armstrong’s barn on the Internet, where it is advertised as the Round Barn at Twin Bridges, a popular site for wedding receptions. 

But back in the day of its use as an equestrian residence Armstrong had a mare named Interpose who was pregnant by a Hider Ali, a thoroughbred stud.

Armstrong was traveling in Spokane, Washington in 1886, when he received the news that Interpose was foaling. He promptly and whimsically dubbed his new stallion “Spokane.”

Three years later, in 1889, the year in which Montana was admitted to the Union, Montana foaled and bred Spokane won the Kentucky Derby. His time was 2:23.50, a record for the mile and a half distance, which still stands today. It will never be eclipsed because the Kentucky Derby was changed to a mile and a quarter in 1896. Spokane remains the only Montana horse to win the “most exciting two minutes in sports.”

Spokane went off at 16.4 to one and paid $34 on a two dollar bet. One bettor did particularly well, as he wagered $5,000 on the race. He collected $170,000. His name was Frank James. And, yes, he was the brother of Jesse James, the infamous nineteenth century American bandit.

Fascinating how the tentacles of genealogy can connect us with people, places and events. Brother Ray has learned much and made many friends through his exploration, and he has enriched all of us with his discoveries. In many ways, the pay off has been as bountiful for Ray Brennan as it was for Frank James.

NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR

In 1965, about a week after our youngest daughter was born, Polly and I moved our burgeoning clan to a beautiful six bedroom home in the Sherwood Forest section of Detroit.

I was a Circuit Court Judge at the time, and by no stretch of financial legerdemain was I qualified to make such a purchase, but with the aid of cousin Leo at the Savings and Loan and Gertrude Harwin, who desperately wanted to sell the property, we swung the deal.

It was a lovely home, and perfect for a family of our size. Among its many benefits was the fact that our next door neighbor was a man named Arthur J. Lacy.

He was known by all as Judge Lacy, despite the fact that his judicial career  as the first and only Judge of the Wayne County Court of Domestic Relations, lasted only eight months until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1913.

The Judge was a kindly, pleasant man, born in 1876. By 1965, when I met him, he was well into a ninety-nine year lifespan. As a young man, he had been elected Mayor of Clare, and subsequently was the Democratic nominee for Governor in 1934.

Despite his loyalty to the Democratic Party, the Judge took great exception to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third and fourth terms. In fact, he purchased radio time to broadcast speeches opposing FDR in 1940 and 1944.

To me, the old Judge was a father figure. As a young Circuit Judge, I had a way of generating controversy which spilled into the newspapers. I found the Judge to be a steady, wise and sympathetic counselor. His comment: “There is nothing older than yesterday’s newspaper.”

In his last years, the Judge donated his personal papers to the Bentley Historical Collection at the University of Michigan. The index reveals his broad circle of friends and acquaintances as well as his life long interest in public affairs.

I am specially in his debt. On the upper shelf of my cozy new East Lansing den there is a set of twelve volumes entitled simply, “America.” Published in 1925, by the Americanization Department of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the books are a compendium of letters, speeches and essays, described as a library of original sources. It was a gift from Judge Lacy shortly before he moved to a retirement home.

A bonanza to a history buff, every page of those books yields insights into the history of our nation that can’t be found elsewhere, even with the help of Google.

For example: this evening, out of curiosity, I pulled down the volume that covers 1783 to 1803 and opened it to a page about the Northwest Ordinance.

Few Americans have ever read the Northwest Ordinance, and fewer still appreciate its importance in the history of our nation. Adopted by the Continental Congress during the fading days of the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance was a blueprint for the expansion of the United States from a timorous thread of thirteen coastal colonies to the bold nation that reaches from sea to shining sea. 

It established our use of the common law, protected the right to own private property, abolished slavery in the Midwest, and provided for the creation of independent states chartered and governed with the consent of the people.

Along with the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance deserves to be enshrined as a founding document of our nation.

But interestingly, it was not the work of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton or James Madison. Or any of the other Founding Fathers who are celebrated throughout the land by the naming of cities, streets, schools and Universities.

No indeed, the Northwest Ordinance was written by a lawyer from Massachusetts named Nathan Dane. Perhaps you never heard of him. I hadn’t until I opened Judge Lacy’s book.

There I discover that Mr. Dane not only wrote the Northwest Ordinance, he also wrote an eight volume treatise called “A General Abridgement of American Law” which became the sine qua non of reference for lawyers throughout the country. It was so successful that Dane donated the profits to establish a law school at Harvard University.

FAMILY

On April 28, 1951, we were two twenty-one year old college kids skipping our classes at the University of Detroit to honeymoon at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago.

She still has the key to that 14^th floor suite.

It was a four day whirlwind. We saw the classic musical “South Pacific,” and “The Moon is Blue” on the stage. One night, we caught the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at a night club.

We went back to Chicago last week, celebrating sixty-six years of marriage.

It’s a different city, of course. The Edgewater Beach is gone, sacrificed to the widening of Lake Shore Drive.

Still, Chicago is the toddlin’ town of story and song. We dined at RL, the campy restaurant under Ralph Loren’s roof. We looked down on the Navy Pier from an 18^th floor suite at the Ritz Carlton.

And we went to the Private Bank Theater to see “Hamilton.” It turned out to be everything we had heard about it; a faithful recounting of the life of the man whose face is on the ten dollar bill, performed with incredible vigor and verve by a talented cast of young Americans.

It’s not a musical comedy; it’s not an opera or an operetta. The story is told in the urgent rhythm of rap music, with its random rhymes and sassy vocabulary. I dubbed it a “Rapera” and I predict there will be more of it on stage in New York and elsewhere in the years ahead.

I confess that I gave in to the wonder of celebrating a marriage that has lasted for two thirds of a century. Waiters and clerks, cab drivers and doormen; they all respond with good cheer and friendly smiles when you tell them that you are celebrating sixty six years of marriage.

And, of course, being a classically presumptive pedant, I can’t resist posing a quiz to one and all. “Do you know who was President in 1951?”

I chuckle in my eighty-seven year old superiority as I tell them it was Harry Truman. I chuckle, that is, until I realize that if someone had asked me when I was thirty years old, “Who was president 66 years ago?” I would not have known it was Grover Cleveland.

There are, indeed times when I feel like a visitor from another planet. Coming back to Lansing after a number of years, I marvel at new buildings, new land marks, old roads going new places.

This morning I will meet a new primary care physician, and later this week there will be a CT scan and more meetings with the oncologist and the urologist.

Polly was an orphan when I married her in 1951. I promised her that she would never be alone again. She isn’t. We aren’t. We are surrounded by loving family.

Neither of us ever wanted or expected to be a burden to our children. On the other hand, we didn’t expect them to eagerly anticipate our every need, as seems to be the case.

The fact is that the family is the basic unit of society; the existential structure than combines individual human beings like atoms in a molecule to create an identifiable substance. And children are essential.

The family is the first unit of human governance. The first church. The first school. The first hospital. The first court and the first jail. It is also the first choir, the first theater, the first team.

We knew those things instinctively sixty six years ago.

Now we are learning the rest of the story. Be good to your kids because they will decide what to do with you when you get old. Our family decided that we should move back to Lansing, and through a massive cooperative effort, they have ensconced us in a charming condominium at the Burcham Hills Retirement Center.

Not that either of us intend to retire. If our first days at the condo are any measure, the future will be busy, interesting and memorable. 

And Chicago is only an hour away by airplane.

THE F WORD

The word does not appear in my 1963 copy of Webster’s International Dictionary of the English language. Nor does it appear in the 1977 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus or in Black’s Law Dictionary.

It does, however, appear in more recently published resources. The Urban Dictionary, for example, contains a complete discussion of the word, its etymology, and the various ways in which the word is used as a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb.

It is, I suppose, a commentary on the changing American culture that the dictionary now contains a definition that mirrors the comedy routine made famous by George Carlin more than a generation ago.

Half a century ago, our oldest son, returning from a public swimming pool, asked his mother what the word meant. Fortunately, I had already explained sexual intercourse to him in an age-appropriate manner. She simply told him it was a crude and vulgar reference to the basic human reproductive function.

She suggested that when he heard people use that word, he should say a prayer for them.

I shutter to think of the amount of praying we would have to be doing these days to keep up with that admonition. Some enterprising soul has created a web site called “F Bomb” on which are traced Tweets world wide in search of various expressions of the word.

A map of the world displays another pin whenever new F Bomb is tweeted. There are pins from South Africa to the United Kingdom, but the busiest part of the world is the eastern section of the United States. And, of course, California.

Of particular note to Web Watchers, like myself, is the frequency of F—ing and F---ers that appear in blog commentary. It seems that every time a writer publishes an opinion on any subject from politics to football, someone will take exception and enhance their comment with an F bomb or two.

It is the surest way to terminate any attempt to maintain a rational discussion or debate.

The Urban dictionary tells us that a principal use of the word is to express emotion; to emphasize; to reinforce the impact of a word or a sentence.

The pity, of course, is that the word replaces all of the expressive and powerful English words and phrases that once made our native tongue the envy of writers and composers. The unhappy result is that this single multipurpose word is dumbing down our nation.

There was a day when one might have excoriated a neighbor as annoying, aggravating, exasperating, vexatious, bothersome, a pest, an annoyance, even a pain in the neck. Today’s one-size-fits-all colloquial assessment, would probably be something like: “He’s a dumb fuck.”

For the post-millennial generation the ubiquitous F bomb says it all, whether ‘it’ is good, bad or indifferent. Along with the mindless repetition of the word “like” it has become a hallmark for the numbing of the American brain.

The entertainment industry, the prodigal offspring of a stage once dedicated to uplifting the human experience, has embraced the F bomb culture and given it the secular imprimatur that insinuates it into daily life from the Saint Lawrence to the Santa Margarita.

I first came upon the frequent use of the word when, as a college student, I was working in a stone yard. It was hard, manual labor, and the men in the yard were older than I, and veterans of WWII. Their language reflected the men-only culture of the draft-populated military.

Lots of young men learned to use the word in the service. When my older brother Terry, of sainted memory, came home on leave from the Navy, he

had already – in boot camp – acquired some of the jargon of a sailor.

At one family dinner he casually asked me to pass the f….kin potatoes. 

If anyone else around the table heard it, they didn’t let on. For my part, I was left to wonder whether potatoes simply grew out of the ground, or whether they were the product of some sort of vegetable copulation he had learned about at the Great Lakes Naval Base in Racine, Wisconsin.

THE BIG C

Doctors call it gross hematuria. I call it red pee.

By whatever name, it’s scary stuff. Scary enough to send me to the ER at McLaren Northern Michigan Hospital on Monday.

A few hours in their tender care and a CT scan yielded a diagnosis: transitional cell carcinoma of the left kidney. Doctor Z gave Polly and me a couple of pills, just in case we would have trouble getting to sleep.

When you have six children, all mature and highly educated, and you tell them you have cancer, the immediate mobilization is a marvelous thing to behold.

Get a primary physician in Lansing; get a top urology expert and a first rate oncology doctor. Make appointments ASAP. Have all CT scans and medical records delivered immediately. Step up the remodeling and furnishing of the condo at Burcham Hills in East Lansing. Urgent emails, text messages and phone calls create the kind of teamwork buzz I remember from my days of political campaigning.

Their concern, of course, is heartwarming, but I suspect that my reaction to the news has not been what it would have been thirty years ago. When you are 87 years old, death is like politics; you can talk about it, but you can’t change it.

It is what it is.

Our Christian heritage tells us that we are dust and unto dust we shall return; that we know not the day nor the hour. Good enough. If I were scheduled to face a firing squad tomorrow morning, I probably wouldn’t sleep very well tonight.

But that is not the case. Tomorrow will be like today. Another blessing. Another miracle of sentient existence.

The old body gets a little creakier every day, that’s true. The hugging and kissing, daily habits of a lifetime, get a little more satisfying and appreciated; the smiles and the laughter are a little more precious and necessary.

But life goes on. I will watch the news. I will do Sudoku puzzles. I will write blogs, read books, browse the world wide web, and chew gum.

And I will hug my darling Pauline. Until I can’t any more.

I have spent the last half century trying to make a difference in this old world. It is a preposterously egotistical ambition. Like a grain of Lake Michigan sand trying to create a dune.

Still, I have always believed it is worth the effort. Sharing in the important work of administering justice to my fellow citizens, helping to create access to the legal profession for new generations of Americans and on more than a few occasions, just trying to make things a little better for some folks who needed help; it’s not a mighty sand dune, but it’s not chopped liver.

The popular mantra sweeping our nation these days is “Make America great again.” All well and good, but I hope our people will pay heed to the famous words quoted by Dwight Eisenhower in a 1952 campaign speech:

I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers—and it was not there. . . . in her fertile fields and boundless forests—and it was not there. . . . in her rich mines and her vast world commerce—and it was not there. . . . in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution—and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. 

America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good,she will cease to be great.

In the last analysis, the most patriotic and efficacious thing that most people can do with their lives is to try to behave themselves. Or as my sainted father, Joe Brennan, advised: “You know what’s wrong and you know what’s right. Do what’s right.”

Dr. Z from the Emergency Room called yesterday to say that the CT scan also shows a penny-sized nodule on my left lung.  

The big C is the big C. It is what it is. I’ll try to behave myself a while longer.