Gimme Shelter: Farewell to a loving big brother

My father could pun at will. After any remark, uttered by anyone, he could make a pun, some good, some funny, most appalling. Fortunately, he almost always kept this annoyance to himself. My big brother, Jack, could quote poetry. He, too, picked his spots. It wasn’t showing off, it was nailing a situation or experience with spoken truth hinged on rhythm. 

An example: We were resting against our packs on a dock at a shabby little port in northern Greece. I was worried. Jack had planned this trip to hike the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos, telling me about one of the holiest places in Christianity, where 20 monasteries, a thousand years old, containing masterpieces of Byzantine art beyond price, are set along the wild coasts of a remote peninsula, which is a Greek Orthodox religious state, similar to the Vatican. 

But rather than pleasant Roman streets, Athos is mountainous, and there’s only one way in and one way out, by boat, and once landed, the only transportation is your feet on the trails. Any time before sunset the monks take you in and give you a bed and feed you, which turned out to be, as Jack said, “food that looked like it had been already eaten.” 

If you didn’t make it to a monastery before sunset, you slept rough. It was November and cold. What would happen if we broke our legs in the mountains, fell from a cliff into the Aegean? I turned to Jack and said, using a family expression, “It will be on your head.”

The old bucket that would take us on the two-hour sail to the Holy Mountain was coming in through the raw morning. Jack grabbed his pack, swung it up on his shoulder and said, “Come on, man. ‘A true-devoted pilgrim is not weary/ To measure kingdoms with his feeble steps …’”

“What?”

“Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

Ever since, when weariness is deep within me, I remember my brother slinging his pack up, his smile and his faith in me.

A scholar with multiple advanced degrees, author of two books, he also had been a successful business owner in Silicon Valley as well as a teacher of political and economic theory. He was an adventurer, making journeys to the rainforests along the Mexico/Guatemala border to hike in to see Mayan ruins — I was along, as worried and exhilarated as on the Athos trip — as well as tearing across the U.S. on 24-hour drives so we could see the Little Big Horn and Shiloh. 

He had set foot on every continent. After going to Antarctica with our sister Liz, he said there are two kinds of people in the world, those who say, after you’ve told them you’ve been to the South Pole, “Wow!” And those who ask “Why?” 

To the latter, Liz always responds, “I went for a wedding. I’ve got family there.”

Our adventure on the Holy Mountain — four days out of the world — inspired Jack’s inner quote machine. The trails of Athos are rock-strewn and rugged, so narrow you must walk single file. One day we hiked up along ridges, past sheer drops, above empty capes and bays, the sea channels running aquamarine and purple. Hours later we came down into an olive grove and rested on a stone wall over a dry creek. The wind was blowing so hard that brown sea foam filled the air. 

“Olives,” Jack said. “Olives are a sign of hope and dreams, since it takes 20 years after planting for trees to bear fruit. It means you’re settling down, dreaming of a prosperous future.”

“I’m dreaming of dinner,” I said, picking a leaf from a tree.

“‘Hold fast to dreams/ For if dreams die/ Life is a broken-winged bird/ That cannot fly.’”

“Shakespeare?”

“Langston Hughes. Let’s go, dreamer.”

His presence then, and his memory now, his encouragement from the time I was a little boy, his love for me, have always helped me nurse the poet’s injured bird. 

With the sun going down and the nearest monastery at least an hour away, Jack said, “‘Wandering lost among the mountains of our choice.’”

“Hughes?”

“Auden. Come on, we’ve got to keep wandering. ‘The trees are in their autumn beauty,/ The woodland paths are dry.’” 

“I’m not going to ask.” 

“Yeats.”

Following him up the path, I said, “A hundred years ago we’d have porters to hump these packs for us.”

“You’re forgetting where you came from,” he said over his shoulder. “A hundred years ago, we’d be the porters.”

His toast was, “Happy days.” We toasted a lot, and saw a lot of dawns from kitchen windows and on city streets. Once, chasing down the night in New York, I said I had to get some sleep. “Sleep?” Jack said, and quoted Benjamin Franklin: “There will be sleeping enough in the grave.”

Since his death in October, I’ve had one of his favorite Dylan Thomas verses running in my head like a melody that won’t let you go: “Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,/ Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

Happy days, and farewell, beloved Jack.