The beginning of November always weighs heavily on me because it’s when my pappap’s birthday falls. I try not to let it bother me, but it’s like his ghost is always there, hovering. It’s not like I don’t want it to be, though, but that doesn’t make me feel any less sad. Part of me doesn’t want to “get over it”, no matter how many “friends,” family members, or therapists tell me to, because the hurt in my heart reminds me of who I am and where I came from.

I had wanted to post this photo last week on his proper birthday, but I couldn’t find it.

I tore through all of my photo albums, to the point where I started to think that I had constructed the photo in my subconscious, and started to panic because I’m afraid to start forgetting things about him, like his loud laugh, or the way he would tap his pinky ring off the church pew and say, “One day this will be yours” (for the record, it’s not mine). I don’t want to forget about the time he got pickpocketed in Rome and remained so calm, yet lost his shit when some asshole grabbed the cab we were waiting for.  How we would go on family vacations to Wildwood, NJ and he and I would sneak out for ice cream after everyone else went to bed. How he would listen to his Mike and the Mechanics tape in his truck and say, “This song reminds me of my father” every time “Living Years” came on.

And my photos of him, don’t even get me started on my photos of him. My aunt is so afraid I’m going to raid my grandma’s house of all the Lalique and jewelry when all I would actually take is every photo album I could carry in a potato sack. OK fine, and there’s the fucking fantastic sculpture of Marquis de Sade that I have always had my greedy eye on. I recently asked my aunt Sharon for the purple heart that he earned in WW2 and she got completely spastic on me.

I don’t have anything of his. I don’t want it for materialistic reasons, for greed, I just want to have something that he once held. I don’t care at this point if it’s a scrap of a shirt. My family won’t let me have anything and that’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes. I guess it’s my punishment for being the black sheep.

But I finally found the birthday photo the other night, in this big red velvet album full of my baby pictures. I’m guessing from the not-yet jaded look in my eyes that this was back in 1980. Chooch and I sat on the couch and pawed through the album and every time we turned a page to find his face perma-glued onto the yellowed backing. I would proudly say, “That’s my PAPPAP,” like a kid boasting the best toy ever during show and tell. And that’s what makes it suck even harder lately, not the fact that I don’t have that shiny toy to brag about anymore, but that Chooch never got to know him. And those two would have been crazy about each other.

My pappap was the one who made all of my birthdays amazing. He raised the bar so high that sometimes, in his death, I don’t even want to bother to celebrate my big day. And looking back, I realize that aside from a lousy birthday cake, no one ever really did anything for his birthday. If I could have one last chance, one last opportunity to light up some trick candles, I’d make sure he knew for real how much everyone loved him. I guess he did know, even in the absence of actions, but still. He deserved a party. A really fucking lavish party. With clowns and twenty bottles of Dom. Or, at the very least, a card with all these sentiments scrawled in ink.

He never expected anything from any of us: my brothers, my mom, my aunts, or my grandma. All he wanted was happiness for everyone, and it seemed like so much of the time, someone was always mad at him, always for materialistic bullshit.

This was Halloween, 1983. I found it during my search for the birthday cake photo. I can guarentee that whoever took this photo, whether it was my mom or grandma, someone was pissed that my pappap was walking past in the background. I’m certain there was an annoyed hiss of, “You ruined the picture, John!” but for me, I look at this and think, “Oh good, another picture of my pappap,” and I bet the rest of them would think the same thing.

When you’re a little kid, the smallest happenings can seem like these life-stopping newsworthy events and you sit there with your mouth agape and your eyes so wide and grip the edge of your seat, waiting with bated breath to see what will happen.

Everything is a big deal when you’re a kid.

I was probably around four or five when my Pappap came home from work with the mail. It was a summer afternoon, so I was on the back patio, probably with either my grandma or my aunt Sharon. My Pappap rifled through the mail and noticed that his youngest daughter Susie had a letter.

He called up to her on the sunroof, and she shouted for him to try and toss it up. I remember sitting on a lawn chair, their lawn chairs had these taut vinyl slats in varying shades of green and white but sometimes the skin on my thighs would graze the scalding metal of the frame in between the slats and I would get tiny welts. I’m sitting on this lawn chair, playing chicken with the fiery metal, and thinking, just knowing, that this wasn’t going to pan out the way Susie would have liked.

I watched as my Pappap tried to toss the letter against the wind, hoping to get enough momentum that it would skim the top of the ledge, but instead it fell back and skidded straight into the gutter.

My Pappap had to throw himself into full MacGyver throttle  in order to rescue her precious letter, subscription notice, credit card bill. Who knows what it was. But even after he mounted a patio table and used the aid of scissors to guide the envelope from the dastardly clutches of the gutter, Susie still had to exert a modicum of energy to lean down and grab it.

And I’m watching this, from the green and white vinyl slats of the lawn chair, thinking that I’m a part of something big, something huge, a memory that we’ll all share together and laugh about at holidays. And everyone else went about their day, because things like this, they’re not enough to fill an adult with giddiness. They’re glitches in regularly scheduled programs, they’re "oopsies" moments that evoke a few chuckles but then get lost in the back of the mind while bills are being paid and the news is being watched, until the memory is eventually eradicated altogether. But not kids. Kids retain these things and latch on to them and call upon these tiny moments when they need something to smile about. Kids revel in it and wish everyone had seen it and kids inflate it into something so much bigger, larger than life. It becomes real life Saturday morning cartoons.

I don’t remember what the damn letter ended up being, or who it was that shared enough of my sentiments to treat this as the Kodak moment it truly was, and I don’t think we ever reminisced and hyucked about it over turkey legs and sweet potato pie, but I know that every time I see this picture, I laugh and remember being so small and watching something so big.

Every Saturday night, my Pappap and I would go to church. Sometimes we were joined by other family members, or my friends who were looking to score a good meal afterward. (I maintain that this is the sole reason why my Pappap was so adamant, religious if you will, about attending mass every week.) If my step-dad was in tow, that meant we couldn’t slip out after Communion, but instead were forced to return to our pew, pasty wafer refusing to dissolve before first gagging us and adhering to our uvulas, until the priest formally urged us to go unto the Lord. My aunt Susie would join us if she had a hankering for osso bucco and Naple’s was the restaurant of the night. I never wanted her to go because it always turned into a tense night of us vying for my Pappap’s attention. She’d pinch me under the table when I was young and humiliate me in front of cute bus boys when I was older. My Pappap had forged friendships with the owners of some of the best restaurants in town. Fortunato’s was one of those restaurants. I would always order Veal Denny, which was stuffed with crabmeat and had a delicious fromage sauce ladled upon it. It was served on a silver plate flanked with slices of marachino-marinaded apple rings. I loved those apple rings. It was hard to say what my Pappap would order, but it was always Lambrusco filling his glass. There was a whole group of us there one night, a long time ago. Susie was teaching me how to turn ordinary wine glasses into melodious instruments, hoping it would chagrin my Pappap. But the chagrinning would all go to my step-dad, who became obviously flustered as the owner emerged from the back and approached our table. "Oh Jesus, would you knock that off?" my step-dad begged. "You’ve made the owner come out now!" The owner was a robust man in his fifties with a stern face. We had eaten there often enough for he and my Pappap to form a friendly rapport with each other, and I was afraid I had managed to ruin that with my unruly tableside manner. When he reached our table, he brandished an enormous crystal goblet from behind his back. "Try this," he said with a sly smile. That thing produced the deepest, bellowing hum and I have yet to replicate it to this day. My Pappap leaned back and grinned, taking joy in the fact that someone else was able to please me. The owner died sometime in the nineties and his restaurant has since become some run-of-the-mill Chinese dive, which has a really delicious dessert of fried bananas but Henry and I have never gone back. Sometimes I think about that Veal Denny and I wonder if I’d have succeeded in being a vegetarian for so long if Fortunato’s and my Pappap were still around. My guess is no.

Everything changed after that February night in 1996. When I returned to school, I was met with sympathetic faces and had faux-friendly exchanges with girls I hadn’t spoken with all year, like Keri, who was always too spineless and weak-willed to create her own judgements of people. I wonder if I would have taken her back if the situation was different, if I hadn’t been reduced to a despirited girl barely floating down highschool hallways; all I know is that at that time, under a current situation bogged down by gravity, I was willing to latch on to anyone for support, even those I wasn’t sure I should trust. And Keri has proved that she is not, and was not ever, one to be trusted. Justin broke off our second attempt at coupledom. Said it was the long-distance thing. He transferred out of my high school the previous year, and even though he only lived a few miles away, neither of us had cars. But I know he couldn’t handle it, was tired of trying to find the right words to comfort me in lieu of his protective arms. I had become emotionally taxing and burdensome, always wanting to hash out the whys of the situation, always wanting to find other things to cry about. "No, this movie is really sad. Really, I’m crying about the movie. Not….that." I greedily tore through an entire box of Kleenex while watching Higher Learning on Lisa’s bed that winter. "I mean, it’s sad, but c’mon, Erin," she said in disbelief. Home life was more chaotic than ever. No one was really talking to each other, tongues paralyzed and brains drained of normal comfort responses and the capacity to show compassion and empathy. Rather than unite in tragedy, we all drifted apart. Susie and Mark and my mom and step-dad all began the slow, excruciating path winding down to the bowels of slander and divorce. Easter was the first holiday in the history of my family that no one greased a casserole dish, brandished a carving knife, or capped pies with a dollop of whipped cream. I didn’t care. It gave me more time to cry uninterrupted into my pillow. Me, I started falling asleep in classes, my As morphing into Ds and Fs, and I was sneaking off a lot to hang out with Jessie, the "bad girl" who smoked pot and slept with possible gang members. She lived down the road, the adoptive daughter of a couple with a big house, big dogs and big mob ties. We would skip school together, dye Easter eggs and drink liquor with her boyfriend’s older friends. Six months later, I met Mike. He came with the appealing factor of attending a different school. My friend Christy knew him. She begged me to leave him alone. "He’s an arsonist! He’s been locked up for it! Please stop using such poor judgement." But poor judgement and I, we were inseparable like two young boys who had just smeared each others’ fingertip blood into a Rorschach picture. I spent a year and a half being emotionally ravished and scarred by Mike, I dropped out of high school, I picked up hitchhikers, quit jobs after a day, drank myself stupid, had sex with reckless abandon, one nervous breakdown always waiting in the wings. Things would have been different if that night never happened, sure. But I wouldn’t have Henry. I wouldn’t have Chooch. It’s enough to drive a person crazy, dwelling on cause and effect, wondering if it was some sort of subliminal swap with God. Him for them. This for that. But I wonder, if my Pappap was alive to celebrate his birthday today, would I have still managed to spend two hours locked out of my house? Probably.