J is a Unit of Energy
The grandchildren were all youngsters when their grandpa — my dad — died. They certainly were not interested in sorting through the belongings he left behind, which were primarily books and baseball caps and a decent start on tracing his family’s Irish lineage and immigration, plus files of correspondence and papers, and…a leather box of cufflinks.
No one wears cufflinks any more. I don’t even think he did, much, outside of the one time I saw him and my mom in black-tie attire for an event. That says something, since it was a well-known fact my dad was nearly always in dress-shirt and trousers, until his last years. In my childhood, there once was a disturbance on our tiny street at 3am, and all the neighbors were peering out their screen doors. My dad went out, and walked with the distressed person, up and down our street, until they were calmed and able to agree to seek further help/care. Much later, I heard my dad’s friends saying incredulously that the wildest thing was Jack McCarthy came out of his house in shirt, tie, and trousers, at 3am, to calm the neighbor. We were like, of course he did.
The dad we got in the game of life was top-notch. Oh, he had flaws, and didn’t sleep much, loved junk-food, and was not a great driver, but we won every aspect of the dad-lotto. When the grandkids came along, he turned the ‘funny’, ‘charming’, ‘silly’ knobs up past 11. He was hilarious. The stories are legendary. Mostly my kids remember him ordering ‘Surprise Me’ at any restaurant or ice-cream shop, or telling the vendor at the ballpark that he needed another drink because his had a hole in the top and it was now empty. Maybe they remember him playing rec-league softball, well into his 60’s, or sending silly postcards from his travels, or creating inappropriate photos with their ‘Flat Stanley’ school projects. I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure they don’t remember him wearing cufflinks.
My dad died as we were moving my parents out of our childhood home, where they’d lived for 41 years. It was a mite chaotic. We felt pretty strongly that we didn’t want to move Dad’s belongings to the new condo after he died, for our mom to deal with, so that meant we were culling through his stuff on the fly: keeping, gifting, donating, in compressed real-time. My sister and I sorted through the leather case he’d kept on his bedroom bureau all his adult life. Tie-clips, cufflinks, a watch, some coins and $2 bills jumbled together. Much of the jewelry had been inherited from his own dad, which sort-of-explained the proliferation of cufflinks. My sister said, ‘we both have boys whose names start with ‘J’, so grab those cufflinks for them some day.’ And we did.
‘Some day’ came along more than a decade later, as my middle son asked his lovely girlfriend to marry him. I told him I had a number of wedding bands (story for a different day) handed down in my family. As I shared with him what I had, I showed him the cufflinks as well, each emblazoned with the letter “J”, which was also his initial. Each set was stylized differently, some looking like 19th-century-calligraphy, others like art-deco linotype. I explained how they worked (‘you need a specific style of shirt’) and then they were officially on to ownership by the next generation. I didn’t think about them again. Until last weekend.
Last weekend, my son got married. In the late hours on the night before the wedding, gathered with friends and family in the upstairs bar of a local Italian restaurant, my son pulled me aside. ‘I’m wearing Grandpa’s cufflinks’, he told me, pulling his jacket sleeve up so I could see. ‘And I’m wearing another pair tomorrow.’ In truth: I was doing fine until this revelation. Back when he first was engaged, his soon-to-be-in-laws asked how many grandparents he still had. ‘None’, he answered. He’d not old; his grandparents just didn’t live long. And it dawned on me they certainly did not live long enough to see him married, and they should have. At the edge of being sad about this, he continued, ‘I’ll be repping Jack McCarthy all day.’ My older son overheard that, and jumped in the conversation, asking to borrow a different set of cufflinks himself. ‘Let’s do it! J-cufflinks all around!’, and that is how this new wedding tradition saw daylight.
On wedding morning, I asked my son to be sure the photographer got a shot of the J-cufflinks in action. Better yet, send me one yourself, I added. He did. Seeing their wrists side-by-side, hours before one stood up next to the other on a day filled with promise and promises, these two guys who were so different growing up but have become each others’ wingmen and go-to, was everything I’d hoped I’d learned about raising boys. Honoring each other, and the first best man in my own life, was no small thing. I had no idea about raising boys, growing up with all sisters, and as wonderful as my dad was, much of what I learned about living with boys/teens/men, I learned by, well, living with these two boys as we were raising them. (Bless their little sister who came along years later and gave us sweet ballast and balance.)
And on wedding evening, after the toasts and the cheers, as my son and I danced to a song that we chose because it hits all the notes for us personally, he was a little choked up as he told me he was so glad I was there, on his actual wedding day. When he was very small, I had been very sick, and my whole goal was to see my kids grown. My kids know this. Not everyone gets that wish, and on a dance-floor under sparkly lights, with friends and family watching, I was grateful for wishes and dreams, for science and medicine and research, for my own indomitable Irishry, for kids who make me laugh, for Guy Clark voicing the best advice I could ever give this one son (‘Always trust your cape’), and for my own young men in the dressiest dress-clothes, bringing the “J” energy, and repping their grand-dad to the party. It was joyful, jovial, jolly, jubilant, and the start of every next journey for my one who starts with “J”.
