What's Too Painful To Remember, We Simply Choose To Forget

This marks taking my 6th trip around the sun flying solo.  Six years of having total control of the TV remote. 6 years trying to figure out how to fix a toilet (I still have trouble asking about ballcocks in front of mixed company, even if the term was invented by a Mexican priest-go look it up).  And six years of wondering how the Hell this all happened.

A couple of months ago, I sent all of our old VHS tapes, some of Wingman's band's cassettes, and even old family slides to a company to be preserved.  Some VHS tapes were ruined in Sandy, so there are gaping holes in our family's lives. Like the family picture in "Back To The Future", it's scary and it's sad that some of the memories I have of Wingman are beginning to fade. Fortunately, most of the fading ones are the bad ones.  But in knowing the guy for more that three decades, there are still things that I look back on and smile. 

Wingman loved the Yankees as much as any guy could love a team.  He convinced the film company he worked for to buy season tickets, which got us to plenty of games and landed him some coveted signed pictures of his favorite players.  A little bit of him now lies directly between Don Mattingly and Reggie Jackson in Monument Park. And last year, when Summer Son found the one-of-a-kind Aaron Judge Golden Rookie Card in his Topps card box, I found myself wishing he was around to giggle at the thought of seeing a card that the kid later sold for about what two years of college tuition costs.  Maybe it's better that he wasn't around, because I could see him wanting to own it.

The smell and taste of  Jersey tomatoes will forever be associated with him. He would move a garden hose around the yard every morning, (we didn't have a lawn irrigation system like I have now) to grow a crop of Beefsteak tomatoes, basil and jalapeno peppers. He preferred his tomatoes on a crusty roll with his own homemade pesto, while I liked them on simple white bread with mayo and salt. I think about him with every, runny, squishy, drippy mouthful.

The last song he was trying to learn before he died was Neil Young's "Harvest Moon". He would actually get choked up listening to it, and since he couldn't read music, he would play it over and over trying to learn the chords by listening. Whenever I hear it, I'm reminded of his passion for music. And in the music that I had recorded on a thumb drive, was the only song he ever wrote and sang called "I'm Your Pilot."  The most notable line that still makes me wince is the last one: "You bring me down, down, down..."

Wingman had a terrible fear of heights, which included not only planes (quite ironic considering the title of his one-hit wonder), but included famous landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, buildings, amusement park rides...even ladders to do chores.  Despite that, he painted our two-story house single-handedly and would hang the five-foot wreath I insisted we had to have on the second-floor side every Christmas.  It's all that I can do to drape the same wreath over the side of the deck with bungee cords.

And finally, the end of Toys R Us this summer was the end of another Wingman era.  Toys R Us was his account when he was a film editor in NYC, and he spent months editing the famous "I don't want to grow up, I'm a Toys R Us kid" jingles into commercials to entice kids about the toys they just HAD to have. Toy commercials that, like politics, were targeted to big city kids (Atari, Nintendo, etc.) or kids in the heartlands (games, dolls and action figures). From my seat behind him at the editing table, I recall some of the outtakes that didn't make TV...like Barbie being taken apart by a Star Wars monster, with G.I. Joe drinking a beer and taking a pee with his Kung-fu grip.

So this weekend, I'll be sitting and remembering the good times while watching a Yankee game with the remote planted firmly in one hand and a tomato sandwich in the other.  I'll to go to the Quick Chek Balloon Festival and marvel as a hundred or so hot air balloons ascend into the morning sky. And I'll listen to music that recalls the better times in both of our lives.