Brotherly Love

My house is torn apart. I haven't had hot water for a week, and it'll be another week, so I am told, before I get hot water. Every day there are people in my house pounding, sanding, plumbing, tiling. I have been hot mopped, electrified, roofed, and floored.

I have been working, or, rather, trying to work, on my kitchen counter on a tiny tablet. I am failing at it. My editor wanted some work from me weeks ago, work that could help pay for the aforementioned mopping, roofing, plumbing, etc., but I have not finished said work. (Since she reads this newsletter, let me interject an aside: I know! I know!)

I have, however, as depicted in a gif a friend sent to me of a scene from one of the old Our Gang films, been throwing fistfuls of money out a window. I am envious of my plumber's income. I do not have hot water. He has a boat.

About a year ago I decided that 2026 was going to be The Year of the House. My friends were greatly relieved when I announced this plan. My house was becoming notorious. I live alone in it, and because I spent parts of my life in tents, in rainforest hammocks, in cabins equipped with long drop privies out the back door, and because I hadn't ever been rich, I always thought it was kind of a miracle I owned a house – or most of one, along with my minority partner, the mortgage company – and so the 40-year-old faded brown carpeting, and the broken sinks, and the bathtub that I halfway demolished didn't bother me much, until they did.

This is my midlife crisis, I guess. Instead of buying a ridiculous car, or taking up with a far-too-young cocktail waitress at the Las Vegas Sands, I'm renovating my house.

I'm pretty sure this all started about eighteen months ago when my friend Mike died. (I've mentioned him, and the third member of our buddy trio, Patrick, here before. I hope you'll read that post. It's about manhood, and in light of this week's Pete Hegseth command that military members get tested for testosterone – beyond parody – the post is relevant again.) The three of us met in kindgergarten, and have been friends since, especially during our high school years when kids start to differentiate themselves and develop different kinds of interests.

Mike and Patrick and I were into music most of the other kids in small town Ohio weren't into. They were the ones with whom I tried to tune into Cleveland's WMMS. We read stuff most of the other kids weren't reading. Patrick loved history. Mike loved math and physics. I loved writing and literature.

We loved each other like brothers, though, of course, we would never have said such a thing. We were just buddies.

Off we went, into the world. Mike became a renowned physicist. When he died, of a glioblastoma, he was working on fusion at Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory. Patrick lived in Europe for a long time doing things for the government and speaking multiple languages. When we all met up at Mike's place we sat around his kitchen table drinking beer and eating pizza knowing Mike did not have long to live, but talking about all sorts of things, like the bands we saw. Mike got up and retrieved a milk crate full of old vinyl albums.

"You guys want any of these?" he said. "I'm not going to be needing them." We laughed.

We did not stay in close touch through the years, but somehow that didn't matter. Lines etched themselves on our faces, my beard grew thick and then grayer, Patrick lost hair, and Mike got brain cancer, but none of that mattered in one important way: We were brothers. We'd always been, through all the years and all the distances. Anytime we did get together, or just shared an emailed joke, we were right back in Lancaster, 17-year-olds, cruising around town in my hand-me-down, rattle-trap Chevy Nova with the ripped upholstery, looking for...something.

We were antsy. It was a big world. We knew that whatever it was, for us, it wasn't in Lancaster, and so we busied ourselves chasing it all over the world.

Did we ever find it? I know I'm still searching. Mike told me a few weeks before he died that he was most annoyed that fusion was close, now, but that he wouldn't live to see it. He wanted to keep going. Patrick served his country, as all three of us, in our different ways, served it, but I'm not sure he would say he found "it," either. I don't think any of us do. There's always another adventure, something new to be learned or experienced, some new mystery to be solved about the world, and ourselves.

A philosophy professor, a Catholic theologian, once told me that the search for knowledge is the search for God. I don't believe in God, but I believe in the search, and I know Mike, also a doubter, did and that Patrick does.

A few years after my father, a man who loved golf and played it well, retired, we stood on a tee in silence as we looked down a fairway. Then he turned to me and said "You know, you can only play so much golf."

He and my mother had moved to one of those pleasant-looking, gated, golf course developments in Florida. My dad called it, somewhat derisively, "The Reservation." He'd rather have been out there, still, in the world, striding through a Maytag plant.

The tile guys are working above me right now. They have a radio on, and the Allman Brothers are playing "I Musta Did Somebody Wrong," an old Elmore James song, and it has put me right there in that Nova drinking beer (don't do that, kids). It makes me a little melancholy, yes, but more energized than melancholy. Like Mike, I wanna keep going. But that's also why I plunged into The Year of the House.

I don't ever want to stop, but I am no longer going to neglect my friends in favor of the pursuit. I want both. So I hope they'll come to this renewed house, and make themselves at home, ideally when I'm here, too, but even when I'm not. Mi casa es su casa. I'm taking cold showers for them as much as for me.

Here's a fun, sweet song written and performed by my friend Jim Coulon, a man who knows a little something about the search. He's not stopping either. Enjoy it. And your weekend.

Dave1

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