The Last Adventure

I've put this off for as long as possible, because in the long list of things I never wanted to have to sit down and write, this one's right down there at the lowest bottom. But the lady I'm here to talk about today would suffer no such talk of putting off, so here we go.
As many of you know, my aunt Anne (Nicholson) Blake passed away this week at the too-early age of 52. Her passing has left a hole in our close extended family that, even all these days later, we haven't even begun to comprehend, and I suspect that such will be the case for a long time to come still. All I can hope to do here today is to remember my aunt by sharing a few stories with you that represent the amazing person she was as I knew her; if my poor rendering provides even a fractional impression of the extraordinary person she was, you'll have a better understanding of just what a bright spark the world has lost.

Watching bits of the Democratic National Convention this week, I was reminded of a certain glass-ceiling-shattering candidate's (true) suggestion that "it takes a village to raise a child." In the village body of my own upbringing, Annie was in the governing cabinet. As far back as my memories reach -- surprisingly far -- Annie is present. I can remember being two years old and heading to the movie theaters for the first time to see Toy Story, for example, an experience which has obviously had lasting staying power... and Annie was there for it. I was so small at the time that I had to sit between her and my mother, and the two of them had to literally hold down my folding theater seat on either side for the duration of the movie, or risk it folding me up into the upholstery.
Annie and my mother always seemed to be a dual act like that. They were, in my mom's own words, each other's "original best friends." They grew up in an amazing household in the small town of Paxton, MA (right outside Worcester, since you've almost definitely never heard of it) with my two grandparents and an older brother, my Uncle Don. Annie, never one to suffer fools at any age, was infamous on the streets of Paxton for walking uninvited into my uncle's all-male neighborhood games, whereupon she would tell them in no uncertain terms that they were "doing it wrong," and promptly proceed to school them all. "You throw/hit/run/do sports like a girl" never flew as an insult in my family growing up, because I saw Annie do the same in her adult life -- I knew it was a high compliment.

She was one of the more avid sports fans I ever knew. Besides watching the Sox, Celtics, Pats, and especially the Bruins, she was a fitness fiend: she took 5am spin classes, kickboxed, played soccer, even fenced during her college days. She was a fiercely proud alumna of the College of the Holy Cross (Class of '86), and was instrumental in pointing me down the path to becoming a Crusader myself. Till the end of her days, Annie was the embodiment of everything I came to understand in my own time about Purple Pride and what being a Crusader meant in the context of the real world. My "Hoyas" and "Chu chu ra ras" will always have a bit more emphasis on them from now on.
During my own time in college, nothing could make my day or even my week like a surprise care package from Annie; she was always somehow able to glean the secret information of my mailing address from an unknown source, and many was the day I'd come home from a late night studying in the library to an unannounced batch of baked goods. This sounds great already, I understand, but the true value of these packages is something I really have to emphasize: without apology, Annie was the greatest baker I have ever known. "Man-hands Martha Stewart," as Annie herself referred to the cooking icon, had NOTHING on the baking ability of my aunt. Her s'mores brownies (every crumb as delicious as they sound) and cherry jam cookies will never and can never be duplicated, despite whatever poor attempts we might try and make in the future.
I have a lot of memories about travelling to local farms every summer and fall with Annie to pick strawberries or blueberries or apples or some other kind of fresh fruit, which would then be promptly baked into one of those amazing concoctions. Looking back on those times in retrospect, it's like something right out of the sun-drenched pages of a storybook or fairytale... they seem so ideal, so perfect, I almost have a hard time believing they ever happened. I can't express in words how thankful I am that they really did.

I make this fairytale association, perhaps, because Annie was in the company of only my father and grandfather in terms of instilling my love of reading. She had a seemingly endless array of storybooks and picture books, and for a child-toddler who insisted that every single reading and re-reading be done with the exact same pacing and intonation -- "No, Annie, no, read it this way!" -- she was second to none. Perhaps most significantly, it was Annie who introduced me at age seven to a small, little known chapter book, the first of a series, by name of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The rest, as they say, is history. I don't think I actually owned a copy of that first J.K. Rowling book for a long time, because Annie lived so close and we saw her so often that I would just use hers. Every Friday growing up, on school vacations and through summers, Annie would take myself, her son John, and my sister Heather on weekly outings called "Adventure Fridays." Every week, we would pile into her well-used maroon Ford Taurus, where Annie had the entire set of Harry Potter books on audio CD as narrated by English actor Jim Dale, "the man of a hundred voices." We would drive around the entire state of Massachusetts and parts beyond, to the zoo, the aquarium, the movies, the mall, the beach, the mini golf course, even just trips to my grandmother's, Jim Dale providing "Harr-ee! Harr-ee!" narration for our trip the entire way. I remember finishing the third book in the series on an Adventure Friday and leaving Annie that day with the farewell, "mischief managed," a phrase used in the story to wipe clean an enchanted map.

As I grew older, and new Harry Potter books sadly became a thing of the past (Annie and I went to the last few midnight premieres of the series together... not the movie premieres, mind you, I'm saying we waited together in a Barnes & Noble until midnight when the new books came out), I took a college class in "detective fiction," and Annie and I then began trading off books from the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie (and not once, in all our readings, were either of us ever successfully able to predict the killer, damn it). As the other member in our book club of two, it was Annie who I then naturally turned to when I first began writing stories of my own. She was my most nit-picking editor and frankest critic, as well as my warmest reviewer and most eager audience reader. I wrote a one-off children's story for an undergraduate assignment once which I sent to her for perusal, not thinking much of it; because of the feedback and comments she gave, and continued to give for months and years and drafts upon drafts upon drafts afterwards, I will now be working with a literary agent in the fall to turn that same story into a publishable manuscript. Annie's voice will now forever be constantly in my ear as I take up a pen or turn to a keyboard, and I can't be more thankful for that.

I don't even have time on top of all this to touch adequately upon Annie's stellar career as a lawyer after meeting her devoted husband John at Vermont Law School, her epic victories as a youth league coach in the Chelmsford, MA, area, or the hundreds of immigrant students whose lives she impacted as a teacher of English as a second language in the Billerica school system; she was a world traveler, gardener, bird-watcher, fashionista (three days before my freshman year of high school she threw out my entire closet and forcibly dragged me to the nearest mall to buy a whole new wardrobe, and never gave me the chance/choice to look back after), movie buff, world-class tea barista, Downton Abbey fanatic, blogger, and party planner extraordinaire. She was the living definition of teacher, coach, friend, cousin, daughter, aunt, sister, wife, mother.
She was also, besides all these things, a fighter. A survivor. A warrior.
Annie's first bout with the insidious disease that is cancer came with a leukemia diagnosis in 2002. She underwent chemotherapy and came out smiling on the other side, the disease in remission. In 2004 she literally became the poster girl for Lowell General Hospital's annual Cancer Walk, and the entire extended family all became card-carrying infantryman on the walking team Annie's Army.

She and my mom also made the annual 13.1 mile Dana Farber walk from Wellesley College along the Boston Marathon course; I would regularly hop in with three miles left to go and then eat more than anyone combined at the finish line festivities.
In 2013, we received the gut punch revelation that Annie's leukemia had returned. The world class doctors in Boston who had kept tabs on her during remission were stunned... this was the type of cancer which, once treated, was never supposed to come back again. While the rest of the family reeled from the news, Annie, true to form, hunkered down and prepared for the battle ahead. She was at Brigham and Women's Hospital undergoing a round of chemotherapy when I ran my first Boston Marathon that same year, and our plan was then to visit her once I had finished. Because of this, my mom and sister stood on the other side of the street from their usual location, the spot where they had watched my dad cross seven times previously, since it would allow for an easier exit to the hospital... and because of this, they were spared being blown up in a terrorist attack. Even in the worst of circumstances imaginable, even unconsciously, Annie was still busy saving our lives.
Annie underwent experimental stem cell transplantation therapy a few months later, which then allowed her to kick cancer's ass a SECOND time, showing how she truly was not one to be trifled with. While it successfully treated the cancer, however, the transplant created subsequent health problems for Annie which plagued her last few years. The soft tissue cells of her original biology began rejecting the new transplantation cells, effectively rendering her blind and unable to breathe, amongst a host of other problems. These caused frequent hospitalizations and, after a minute by minute struggle for the last three years, are what eventually caused her passing. Even as her body failed, however, her spirit and mind remained unbroken, or, if anything, shone out the clearer for all the world to see. Those care packages of baked goods, those meticulous story edits and Agatha Christie novels, were somehow done even as she battled all these obstacles -- while I would of course like to remember her most in health, I think some part of me will remember Annie and be awed by her especially during these years of sickness when she was still nevertheless able to accomplish so much.

The societal custom in such a case, vexingly to me, seems to be saying that "so and so lost their battle in the end." Annie did not lose her battle. Her every waking moment was a battle, day-in, day-out, for years on end, and she won victories every new successive day. That is not defeat. Annie is now celebrating those hard-won victories somewhere, I've never been more sure of anything. Her whole life was a series of not settling, of challenging herself, of tackling adventures. When she was tired of watching the boys screw it up, she jumped in and changed the playground games; when she set her mind on it, she became a lawyer, and a damn good one; when she was oppressed by cancer, she beat it back... twice; when she wanted to make the most out of her renewed take on life, she touched the lives of countless others by becoming a teacher and excelling at it. And she balanced all these remarkable accomplishments with her favorite and most important adventure of all, her family, and gave selflessly and wholly to everyone lucky enough to be in it. That's who she was. That's who we've lost. Through the past week, however, all I could think of was, appropriately, a line from one of J.K. Rowling's most beloved characters.

"To the well-organized mind," Albus Dumbledore says, "death is but the next great adventure."

Annie, you had one of, if not the, most organized mind I've had the honor of knowing, and I know that all you've done is move on to your next and greatest adventure. I wish you all the luck and happiness I can as you embark on it. For all the ones you gave us here, for all the memories, for all the love, our million thanks and awed appreciation, which we can never repay. Love you, Annie. You will be missed desperately.

Mischief Managed.

"I'll Write My Way Out"

I can remember how a friend of mine at school told me that she'd once had a history teacher who tried impressing upon the fifteen year old minds of her sophomore class that humans only recognized history when it was printed down for us in the print pages of a textbook, rarely -- if ever -- as it was unfolding livetime before us on our television screens.

Without meaning disrespect to that teacher and her years of experience, I can cite no less than four times in the last few many weeks where I'd take it to court that I'd disproved that theory. Such has probably been the case for a while, but now especially I feel like we're all witnesses to a general world atmosphere of a powder keg ready to blow. I personally can't remember another stretch of time where every log-on to Twitter was greeted with news of yet another gun violence death or a prominent world power Brexiting stage left. These are textbook-fodder events we've been going through on a day to day basis recently, and even though I thank my stars to have been personally removed from all of it, today's age of social media saturation means the degrees of separation between primary and secondary experiences are being chipped away with every cell-phone cam recording. 

Again, I can't stress enough how grateful and how aware I am that I'm safely on the periphery of all these events, but I'll admit without shame that I can only take so much "bigness" in the news before I need to balance it out with the small-scale, the personal, the day to day. I write. I run. I draw. I listen to music, often (very often) while doing any of those. 

Last week, in the midst of an otherwise busy summer, the Cooks took a trip down to the Big Apple, where Mom and Dad had a joint birthday celebration and I checked off the bucket list item of seeing a live Broadway show. Disney aficionados that we are, we were over the moon to be amongst a sold-out performance of The Lion King (and for anyone wondering, it was phenomenal... something I can't recommend enough for your own bucket lists, if you're able).
Oddly, though, that once-in-a-lifetime experience wasn't my lasting Broadway takeaway from the trip. Nope. That honor goes to the production happening literally the next block over, which we weren't even able to get in and see for ourselves. We and millions of other Americans are alike in that regard, because the bespoken production is the most unprecedented theater phenomenon I've witnessed in my lifetime -- and I suspect quite a few people in the older generations can say the same. As you can tell from this trip being my only Broadway expedition to date, I'm far from the savviest person on the theater scene (I still to date haven't seen Phantom of the Opera OR Les Miserables in any form in their entirety, much to my sister's shame), so tolerate that I'm a late bloomer with these things, and appreciate how monumentally my small-scale, personal, day to day music life has been altered for the better:

While on Broadway, I discovered Hamilton.

Well, I guess not technically. Because I don't live in a vacuum, I of course had some general awareness of composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda's hip-hop musical about America's "ten-dollar founding father without a father." I'd seen snippets of a 60 Minutes feature about it, had seen Miranda carpool karaoke it with James Corden, and most impressively, had heard it discussed during the last twelve months or so in reverent tones, by some of the unlikeliest people I'd have ever imagined to care about such a thing. That these ripples existed, and were able to reach me way out on the far outskirts of theater "know," signaled to me that Hamilton was already something different entirely.

So when we drifted into a Broadway store in a Hakuna Matata daze and I happened to see the Hamilton cast album on a shelf , I figured that "when in Rome," I might as well see what all the uproar was about. I popped it into the CD player during the drive leaving NY, and suddenly I find myself here ten days later, attempting to flawlessly karaoke hip-hop lyrics about the Battle of Yorktown (or, more accurately, the lyrics of all three principal leads, simultaneously), without any explanation as to how. The CD being without a warning label, I was unaware and unprepared for the all-consuming effect it's had on my life in the time since the Broadway shop. I get that I'm far from the first to discover this, but with only the evidence of the cast recording to go on, I want to state for the record that this thing is, in a word, flawless. 

Besides chronicling the majority of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's remarkable adult life, rising and falling through his pivotal role in the tumult of the American Revolution and the subsequent implementation of the government system that's come down to us in the years since, the musical has some of the most ingenious and densely-packed writing I've ever come across in any form, and is actually in many senses a love letter to writing itself (you can understand my attraction). That it also accomplishes all these things through the use of race-blind casting and 21st century hip-hop sensibilities isn't just a novelty trick to put bodies in seats or gain a spot atop the charts -- it's integral to what Hamilton's all about. To paraphrase Lin-Manuel Miranda's own words, it's a perfect synergy of America NOW telling a story about America THEN.
Listening to Miranda and his castmates rap battle and freestyle in debates about government control, the United States' uncertain role in foreign affairs, and the devastating effects of gun violence in the form of both war and honor duels -- when a black actor portraying Vice President Aaron Burr drops a showstopper angrily bemoaning how he's left out of "The Room Where It Happens" as country-changing deals are cut inside without his inclusion -- it becomes harder and harder to delineate where that line between then/now even actually is. 

Most haunting, both in my first listen and the near-incessant listenings that have come since, is General George Washington's warning to Hamilton that "I know that we can win/I know that greatness lies in you/But remember from here on in/History has its eyes on you." It's a reminder to his young right-hand-man that every subsequent decision he makes, public and private, big and small, historical and personal, will be remembered and scrutinized by the generations to come. How, then, should he act, given this warning?
How, then, should we?
When generations look back at us in their history-teacher-approved textbooks, how will what's printed remember what it is we've been seeing on our TV screens? What's going to be our legacy? It's a problem that vexed our founding men and women themselves as they  navigated their own powder keg atmosphere, the ramifications of which changed the face of the earth in its burning, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that we continue their struggle with it.
Works of lightning-in-a-bottle, straight-up, flat-out (and any other way you want) sheer genius like Hamilton, while helpfully reminding us of this legacy, are therefore more important to me for another reason altogether. They are instances where art -- where creativity and passion and talent and even love -- fulfills its most inspirational role of uniting people... of taking human experiences (of which Alexander Hamilton's was unquestionably one), warts and all, and alchemizing them into something universal and remarkable. That is a legacy to be proud of.
Ironically, I'm jumping onto the Hamiltrain here right at a close of sorts: although the show goes on stronger than ever, it will do so without  Lin-Manuel Miranda and a sizable part of the cast, who don their revolutionary gear for the final time tonight, actually, before leaving to pursue other projects for a stretch. Mr. Miranda et al, please allow this to be my Alexander Hamilton-length thank you letter for reminding us all how music, theater, words retain their most important power, even -- especially -- amidst historical happenings like ours. So go. Get out there. Come up with your own.

Don't throw away your shot.