Letter to the Editor

An email from one’s editor can cause an author’s heart to skip a beat.

A weird emptiness forms instantly in your stomach. You don’t know how much they loved and how much they hated, but you know you’re about to find out.

Editors can be thought of as harsh as they tend to dirty our pristine, proudly-crafted pages with their bloody red ink. They take our precious writings and perform surgery far beyond what we thought we had authorized. And yet we need them. The editor's job is to defend our readers and advance our cause as they smooth the flow, carve out grammatical and thematic distractions, and sort wheat from chaff. A good editor brings out the best in one's writing.

As I type this, I am literally wondering if these very keystrokes will one day fall victim to some editor's razor-edged red pen. And yet, that thought quickly wanes and I feel comfortable to type on. Why? Perhaps I write on with such relaxed confidence because my editor is, perhaps more than anyone else in my life, completely for me. He has long been my encourager, my admirer, my defender, my faithful friend. In fact, one might say that he has been constructively and caringly "editing" me for my whole life! You see, my editor is my brother.

Two years apart in age, Mike and I grew up as the two youngest of eight siblings, with a 7-year gap between us and our next older sister. We also grew up in a home where Mom chronically battled serious illness, where Dad worked hard as an electrician, and together they worked sacrificially to love and care for our large family and to maintain our wonderful homestead. We were well loved, provided for, and protected. Life was rather simple and humble, but rich nonetheless.

Mike led our two-some into all kinds of adventures. He invented sports and games that kept us entertained in our yard. This Game, That Game, and Whatchamacallit were Mike’s inventions that quickly became after-school favorites of ours. Meanwhile he was ever the announcer, narrating our games with color commentary that turned our backyard into Busch Stadium and each at-bat into a nail-biting drama that had tens of thousands of imagined fans on the edges of their seats.

One year Mike got a control-line, gas-powered, plastic PT-19 airplane that he flew in the backyard, with help from his able younger assistant. Two control strings tethered the plane to a plastic handle that one held to move the plane’s control surfaces to make it fly in circles around its pivoting pilot … who of course got dizzy and eventually flew the plane into the ground.

But it was made of rugged plastic and was literally held together by rubber bands, so that it could fall apart on impact and be quickly reassembled and launched again and again. I vividly remember the cold of the fuel on my winter-chilled bare hands as we tried to finger-start the engine by repeatedly spinning the propellor until it finally got compression and our PT-19 was ready to fly again. I still remember the joy of this and so many other adventures that Mike led us into.

Meanwhile, Mike’s friendship with our neighbor Tom Kowalski added their family’s four boys to our two-some, and together we played baseball, football, street hockey and more. Bicycle demolition derbies turned our back woods into an adventure-land, and when part of the woods was bulldozed for some reason, the resulting dirt mounds created a war zone across which we formed sides and lobbed dirt-bombs and scrambled like warriors intent on somehow winning a war with no rules.

Looking back so much of this feels idyllic. Our upbringing prepared us well for life, both through its many blessings and its set of quiet hardships. I had Mike, along with six other, older siblings who set great examples for me to follow. And we had Mom & Dad, who loved us so well and sacrificially. Now, they also passed along some things that would challenge us all for years to come. There were the generational fears, which likely flowed out of deep family tragedies of old. And in my experience there seemed to be a heart-stifling unwillingness to talk about hard things or heart things. Recently I have been exploring these kinds of things, trying to understand my roots and how they have and continue to shape me. This led me to start writing stories as a way to express myself creatively while also trying to sort things out, past, present, and future.

It was in early 2021 that I started shaping my writing into these Real Time with my Father stories. I suppose I had more time due to the isolating Covid-19 pandemic. But I think it was also due to one of the great blessings of that difficult season. Early in the pandemic, my wife Grace and I began to spend an hour or two on a video call with my brother Mike and his wife Margaret. We did this every other Tuesday. Before then we only connected by phone a few times a year, and visited them in New York only every other year or so. But Covid brought us together in this new way. Of course, Mike brought his game-inventing spirit to the calls, most often by becoming Alex Trebek and asking us all Final-Jeopardy questions.

And I soon began to bring my stories into these calls as well.

When I had a new story drafted, Mike, Margaret, and Grace became my audience as I shared it for the first time. As an author, getting to read a fresh story aloud is a big moment, rich with a mix of hope and joy as well as fear and hesitation. But they were great sounding boards, and it added another fun dimension to our bi-weekly calls.

In late 2021 I started posting some of my stories on a private website, so I could share them with a few others. And that’s when Mike unexpectedly yet wonderfully began to serve as my chief editor. He of course grew up right beside me, so he knew me and our childhood experiences better than anyone. And like me, he had been on his own journey of experiencing our Dad both during boyhood and adulthood. Since Mike knows me so well, his perspectives on the stories have been so uniquely valuable! Moreover, it turns out he is a really thorough and thoughtful editor, with a most affirming tone!

Indeed, Mike has been my greatest encourager for my whole life. While he has many of his own impressive accomplishments and successes to be proud of (such as his 30-year career as a New York City police lieutenant, for example), he has always found ways to celebrate and encourage me, boosting my confidence and inspiring me to courageously pursue big things in life. Mike has always been uniquely and energetically for me — perhaps my biggest fan.

Now isn’t it interesting that Mike’s little PT-19 launch assistant went on to become a US Air Force officer, at one point serving as an overseer of maintenance and preparation for launch of a whole squadron of F-16 fighter aircraft! And isn't it curious that his dirt-bomb-war buddy went on to become a civil engineer later in life, helping prepare the ground for new construction projects. And come to think of it, I suppose that Mike's creativity in inventing game after game growing up helped foster my own bent of always bringing creativity into the things I do — and which I am now trying to do as I write these stories about our Dad. It is clear to me that I wouldn’t be who I am, or where I am, or writing as I am, if it were not for my brother Mike being the lead editor of my life, encouraging and cheering for me from day one until today.

Mike, I'm not sure how you will feel about editing this story, since it's largely about you, but I know how I feel. I am excited to share it with you, and to honor you through it. Thanks for being a great big brother, and for being my lifelong editor.