Little Bill

It’s two days after my best friend Michael’s wedding, and I’m still a little bit in recovery. Here in Brooklyn it’s a beautiful day and everyone in the neighborhood is walking the streets, enjoying the sun, getting ice cream, sitting in the park and so on. It’s a day off, right?

Around here it doesn’t look like anyone’s realizing that it’s Memorial Day. I mean, of course they’re aware what the holiday is, but I wonder how many people are actually thinking about those who have fought in wars for us. That’s when it occurred to me that my own grandfather, Jack T. Bright — doesn’t that have a great ring to it? I’ve thought for many years of naming my own son that one day — flew a bomber over Germany in World War II.

My grandfather was the pilot of the B-17 Bomber named Sure Thing and flew twenty-five missions over Germany. Twenty-five bomber missions was considered a tour of duty, as the life expectancy for any war pilot is high, let alone for the members of a slow, hulking bomber crew such as the B-17. If they weren’t flying through thundering explosions of flack from the ground praying not to get hit they were warily keeping an eye out for the Nazi Luftwaffe fighter pilots gunning to take them down.

One relieving and tragic story my grandfather told me when I was in grade school — I was doing a Social Studies report on him — was his twenty-fourth mission where, after having done so well, the Sure Thing took a good amount of damage from Flack. After the bombardment, my grandfather looked in his lap and saw a good amount of red. The story, as he told it, was that he panicked and checked his body only to be relieved that something had punctured the cockpit and blew up a can of tomato soup. You’d think it was a scene from a Hollywood movie.

However one of his crewmembers, their bombardier, wasn’t as lucky. He was injured and forced to sit out the Sure Thing’s final mission, in which the plane and all of its crew came back in one piece. Later, my grandfather learned that his bombardier died trying to fulfill his 25 mission requirement as replacement bombardier on another bomber.

So, I am remembering my own grandfather, who loved to tell me stories about the war, taught me how to throw a ball and came back to marry my grandmother and have children. If he hadn’t come back, I wouldn’t be here.

I’m thinking of future generations who will look back on fallen soldiers in this current Iraq war and remember them and hope this war ends soon so they can come home and start families of their own.

A few months before turning thirty, I asked my father when it is we start feeling like adults. Dad’s response was, “Well, I can speak only for myself. That moment was when I first realized I was responsible for someone else’s life other than my own.” I think that’s a reasonable response.

Still, I don’t feel quite grown up yet. Maybe there’s still a good chunk of me that relates more with adolescence than with adulthood. At least, maybe I like to think so.

It’s like I’ve got this image of “Adult Bill” lingering off into the future, who has responsibilities (I have them) and pays his bills on time (I do that) and never, ever procrastinates (heh.) Adult Bill has a career and has set aside his dreams and maybe has a wife or a family.

Or a mortgage.

I’ve got friends my age (and younger) getting married, some of them on their second marriages. They’re having children. Not just a kid, but children. Am I looking forward to that? Am I terrified of that?

I just don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if life in a metropolitan area prolongs our “young adult” lives. I hear stories that people in New York and Los Angeles marry at later ages, have children at later ages than their peers in rural areas or even small towns, and I don’t even want to begin comparing myself with my parents! What are the reasons? Is it cultural? Is it that our elders are staying active in the business world longer as our life expectancies grow? Am I supposed to still feel like one of “the kids” at work even though I’m thirty?

Perhaps we should all blame John Mayer for coining the term — and concept — Quarterlife Crisis Are we all afraid to grow up, to become men and women instead of boys and girls?

I don’t think I have any of the answers but I’m curious to know when that stage of my life begins. I think I’m ready.

When do I start feeling like an adult? When I start behaving like one? When I start dressing like one? When I decorate my house like one?

The weekend has come to a close. It’s an open-window kind of night, where I can rest assured that the sounds of Bedford Avenue will be subdued, for a change. The cats are a few steps ahead of me tonight, curled up behind me, occupying opposite corners of the bed. It’s been a good and productive weekend. The house is unpacked; the floors are swept and mopped — it seemed to remove the final remnant of floor-lacquer smell to which I’d become accustomed to coming home — and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss are singing to me through my speakers.

I spent the entire weekend alone — working, cleaning, strolling around the hood, taking photographs, chattering online or on the phone, brushing the cats’ winter coats away. It was nice. Peaceful. Busy. Exhausting, but in that good way I mention below.

I’m ready for bed and, for the first time in a long time, I feel energized for the week to begin.

My new home loves me.