Of monuments, arguments and Thanksgiving
My older brother Michael taught me many things. He taught me to hold vinyl records gingerly at the edges, and how to wipe them down with a soft cloth before returning them to their sleeves.
He taught me to love classical music. And he taught me about jazz. He took me to the American Film Institute, sparking a lifelong love affair with vintage movies. And he gave me “Dracula,” sparking a lifelong love affair with vampires.
Michael, 17 years older, taught me how to tie my shoes, scrub under my fingernails, parallel park, brew loose tea, play bridge and Scrabble, and how to differentiate between “nauseous” and “nauseated.”
We were always close. But when George W. Bush was president, a chill entered the relationship. At family dinners, Michael, a conservative, would mock me about my critical columns on the Iraq invasion.
When he died after a bout with pneumonia in 2007, I grappled with how my job had hurt our relationship. I never wanted to go through that again.
And then Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court.
My brother Kevin had been his basketball coach at Georgetown Prep in Maryland. They stayed friends for the next 35 years. Kevin gave interviews to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, describing how the teenage Kavanaugh showed leadership on the basketball court.
Months before, I had planned a trip for Kevin’s birthday to Monument Valley.
We were due to f ly out there the first weekend in October. Then, Christine Blasey Ford was dragged into the spotlight. Her scalding accusations against a man about to ascend to the Supreme Court riveted a nation.
The Jesuit-run Georgetown Prep, where Kevin had coached and where his three sons had gone to school and where Neil Gorsuch also went, morphed from being heralded as a Supreme Court feeder school to being depicted, as Kevin disgustedly put it, as “a drunken roadhouse overflowing with testosterone.”
Kevin was distraught. He went on local TV to defend Kavanaugh.
My sister told me that if I sided with Blasey, Kevin would cancel our trip west.
As with Michael, I was once again balancing love of family with my job. I wrote two columns about the Blasey-kavanaugh hearings that upset my family. Kevin did not cancel the trip. The Saturday we arrived, Mitch Mcconnell rammed through Kavanaugh.
At night, we repaired to a tiny theater where they screened “Stagecoach,” “The Searchers” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.”
By day, we drove around admiring the breathtaking mesas.
Based on a recommendation given to me long ago by John Mccain, Kevin and I went on a day trip to the beautiful Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. With trepidation, as we drove on a long stretch of road on a Navajo reservation, I broached the subject of politics.
Kevin voted for Trump because he wanted a conservative Supreme Court and he didn’t want Hillary Clinton in the White House.
When I pressed him about Trump’s pattern of behavior, Kevin admitted that he often winces at the president’s “style” but simply waits for the “crazy” periods to pass and focuses on the things he likes.
He said he watched Blasey’s testimony and said: “I thought she was sympathetic but not credible because she had no facts. I think something happened to her, but it wasn’t him.”
I told him that I worried about the estrangement I went through with Michael, but that I had to be honest in the column. I thanked him for not going on TV to burn me.
“If you did an unfair hatchet job on him, I’d be very upset,” Kevin said of Kavanaugh. “But politics should not be the determining factor in your life,... You should realize that family always is more important. I always used to teach my kids growing up, when they’d have fights, I said, ‘Just remember, when you really need somebody, the only one that’s going to be compelled to run toward you is your family, not your friends.’”
When we got back, the Kavanaugh swearingin at the White House was starting. We sat down in front of the TV, near yet so far apart.
When Kavanaugh thanked his “amazing and fearless” friends, including those from the “coaching” world and his “tightknit Catholic community here in the D.C. area,” I looked over. A tear was running down Kevin’s cheek.
And then I started to cry, too, because I was thinking of Michael and what was lost, and Kevin and what I hope won’t be lost. And because, more and more, it seems that Donald Trump’s genius for hate and division has driven us all into a canyon that we won’t easily be able to climb out of.