Memorial for Boppo

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Boppo Memorial 8/24/12

I don’t have too many happy memories of growing up. But of the ones I do, they usually involved Boppo. Boppo, of course, is James R. Harmon. A veteran of the merchant marines in World War II, an insurance man, a telegraph deliverer, a landlord, a husband, a father, a sometimes worm farmer, and my grandfather. But ever since I was born, he’s been Boppo.

                There are so many great things I could say to try to honor his memory. His industriousness, working well into his 80s to maintain the apartments he’d worked so hard for. His resilience, growing up poor in the Great Depression and gaining so much in his life. His passion for lifelong learning, reading National Geographic and other publications every week and maintaining an active curiosity about the world despite never even completing high school. His love for jokes, his generosity, and so so much more could fill this space. But, to me, the one thing that stands out about Boppo more than any other trait is his strong, dedicated, and so enduring ability to love.

                “Love” is an easy thing to say, but, especially over the course of time, it’s a much harder thing to do. So often we let our fears, our pain, our pride get in the way of letting ourselves meet others where they are and open ourselves to loving them. But although he had his share of hardship with an unstable family as a boy, poverty, the death of his beloved wife, Madge, over thirty years ago, Boppo made love look easy.

                He made it look natural, so natural that it was easy just to take it for granted. He was the sort of person I might introduce a friend to once, and the friend would remember him forever as “the sweetest man [they’d] ever met.”

                When I was younger, I worried that he felt like he had to be generous to get affection. And he certainly was generous. He spoiled me as a child with toys and arcades and trips and food and anything I wanted that he could buy. He was the sort of person who would let neighborhood kids come in to his apartment whenever they wanted and grab a Coke. The sort of landlord who’d be flexible if not downright forgiving when rent was due. The sort of person who’d go down the line at Wright’s Cafeteria at Christmas and give each employee a $20 bill. I worried that he may have felt like he had to give all this money away, because that was the best way to show he cared.

                But as I got older, I realized that it was moreso a matter of priority. Growing up with nothing, he knew that money and material goods were luxuries, not requirements. That, at the end of the day, what truly matters is love. And whatever he could do for love, he would.

                He did the small things. Like trundling up to our daycare once a week to pick my sister and I up in his big blue van, taking us to McDonalds and then entertaining us with arcades and Legos and TV until we went back home. He was always willing to take care of a dog, fix a toilet, drive to help you where ever you were with never a complaint. He enjoyed simply spending time with us, watching cartoons on Sunday morning, going out to eat, watching movies that he may have found too racy or too confusing but thoroughly enjoying the experience simply because his family was with him.

                But he did the big things too. While my family’s home may have been a source of fear and chaos, Boppo’s apartment was a refuge every Saturday night. He would welcome us, spoil us, love us unconditionally. And he would enjoy every minute. Where my father often thought of us as burdens, Boppo always wanted to be with us more. He was always happy to have us visit. Always sad to see us go. He, just like my mother, would and did sacrifice anything for us to be just a little happier.

                And he was brave in his love. He was the only person to ever call the police on my father, during one of my father’s rampages, in an attempt to try to protect us when no one else would or could. And when I transitioned, as so many others receded or fell into their own fears and worries, he alone reached out. This 90 year old man with little formal education, raised in the Bible Belt, who watched Fox News all day called me just to make absolutely sure I knew that he loved me no matter what. Unlike anyone else, he needed to make sure I was ok, that I felt safe around him, that I knew he still wanted and loved me. He didn’t let anything get in the way of love. Because, to Boppo, loving me, loving us was all that really mattered.

                And, of course, that’s just some of my own experiences of his love. Everyone who met him, even for a few moments, can testify to how loving a person he was. Whereas as some families grow apart or always were distant, Boppo’s only got closer. In his final months, he was attended daily by the family that meant so much to him. He was surrounded by loved ones the night before he died. And, in death, he looked like someone who was assured of the deep, deep love in his life.

I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know how he overcame the hurt, the loss, the attendant pains and sorrows that his life knew as well as any other. I don’t know how he loved not just because that’s what one is supposed to do, but because he genuinely felt it. I don’t know how he so internalized that, ultimately, love is all that matters. I really don’t know. But I do know that because of him, because of his life, because of his memory, because of his immense and indelible impact upon me, I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to do the same.

We’ll miss you, Boppo. Your physical presence is gone from our lives, but we will always, always feel your love. And we will always love you, too.

The Same World

I have a friend, a best friend, who tells me the world is self-preservation. Everyone, taking taking taking, protecting themselves, leaving empy cum-stained sheets and tear-soaked pillows with as little remorse as they were taught to feign in some half-forgotten church service gloomily lurking in their past. She sees the child-fuckers, the nihilistic capitalists, the apathetic self-deluding masses and knows that trust is an invitation to be stabbed in the heart again and again and again.

She writes poetry and fiction, of empty households and barely-teenage girls having sex with too-older-men and there is no rage or trauma or hurt, just parasites that feed upon each other. And I read some of it and think “My God, this is so indelibly bleak.” And I tell her that its only flaw is that it is not realistic. This is not how people are. This is not how the world is. Her vision is well-earned, no doubt, but surely it is coated in a veneer entirely of her own making.

And then she tells me. Months later, for I am so fervent in my belief. She tells me, “Juliet, you are the only person who’s ever read my story and thought it was unrealistic. When I first read it to my class, everyone raved about how very real it was. It reflected life in a way that resonated with each of them. You’re the only one.”

We talked about it. And I am struck by the mutually exclusive validity of our subjectivities. For me, people are mostly good with good intentions. We are ignorant and we are weak and we are flawed, some of us moreso than others, but so many, so very many so often rise above. There is good, there is beauty in everyone. And when I get past the fog of myself, I am startled by how clearly that beauty shines through.

We talked, and my friend agreed that if I rewrote her story, others would find it realistic too. For I pursue and call out my truth as relentlessly as she does hers. We sing different songs, but they are both music all the same.

This is a world where my father was sexually molested as a child and on Saturday night his demons found me in a dream and shattered me to pieces so I sobbed in the dream half-awake and half-asleep and I found no way to put myself back together again.

This is a world where a person I have known for three months would not let me suffer in self-imposed silence and persistently offered herself until I came to her on Monday afternoon and she beat me with love in an unyielding barrage of unrelenting compassion until I melted down and she held me and I was regrown anew.

This is a world where a former coach at an illustrious public university created an organization that was supposed to help young boys and, over the course of decades, used it to rape at least a score of them while so many very powerful people knew and did nothing.

This is a world where some of those boys will turn into tormented men like my father, self-centered vacuums that consume and blame everything around them in a desperately futile attempt to close the gaping hurt another broken man, in a matter of moments, so thoroughly wounded them with.

And this is a world where some of those boys and some of our friends will find themselves almost by chance at a Take Back the Night rally (as I was two weeks ago) and they will say “I have never told anyone this before, but…” and the whole room, already saturated in tears, will burst apart anew in shared suffering and everyone will say and mean “We support you” and a stranger will hold that young man and he will be powerful and beautiful and will, in his life, help scores and more of other little boys and girls turning men and women who will all be so much better for him.

This is a world where my friend calls me crying in the middle of the night because the strange man outside her apartment is salt, is salt, is salt and I can only pray she's ok tonight, for the the weeks of sleepless nights ahead pale in comparison.

 And this is a world where that friend managed to call me, where she trusted me, trusted me enough to call me, bleak world be damned.

And somehow, it’s all the same world. Somehow.