by Azadeh Amirsadri
I am in Del Mar having breakfast with two of my adult children who are telling me what sort of man I should date, and I wonder when did we switch roles. When did I stop being the one they were a little apprehensive about introducing a new person to and I became worried about their approval? Is it because I am too open with them? Am I too accepting of everything they do? Not that at their ages, I would want to control them or anything, but still. Is it because the last guy I dated was too enthusiastic about building an addition to my house to live in after a few weeks of our meeting, even though a few things were starting to not go well? Is it because in my euphoria of having found love again, I briefly looked at every red flag presented to me and just filed it away in a very far away part of my brain? Or is it because my daughter saw who he was when they first met when he told her that he is a silo and can move easily between different groups. Did she sense that he was all compartmentalizing and barriers, to my openness and connections?
I don’t stay with those questions long enough, because we are surrounded by the Lululemon crowd at this beautiful outdoor cafe. What Tom Wolfe called the Social X-Rays are brunching, and unlike my kids and me, they did not order extra pancakes on top of their regular orders. We seem to have to taste as much variety as possible, so every order has an extra side order. This crowd though is slightly less social x-ray and more face-fillers and pouty-lipped. A part of me is envious of their toned bodies and their casual Southern California relaxed vibe, workout outfits, and flip-flops, and another part of me is amused at the whole face thing. After our meal, which looked amazing but tasted quite bland, we went to the beach and soaked up all the sun we could for one day before two of us had to go back to the East Coast to attend a funeral.
Michael was my brother-in-law and became my brother-in-love. From the first time I met him in 1984, while his mother disapproved of her middle son’s relationship with me, and his sister warned her brother not to eat the food I made in case I added some sort of sorcery to it, Michael was all kindness and acceptance. He was amused, yet not surprised by his younger brother’s choice, and welcomed me and my children to his family without any questions. He was curious about me and my history, wanting to know more about how I grew up in Iran and France, my catholic school experience, my learning English days, and my religious and national holidays. He and his wife hosted us at their house in Pittsburgh and we all still remember the pizza they bought that was so rich, it was wrapped in newspaper to absorb the grease.
Michael was one of the most intelligent men I have known.
He loved history, politics, and how the geography of a country impacts its history. He could connect the stories and cultures of people in America, Europe, and Asia, without having visited all of those places. He was a reader and storyteller at heart, an expert on his family’s history, from his mother’s side, as descendants of slaves who settled in Virginia and owned a farm, to his father’s side who immigrated from Barbados to the United States. He knew about the Negro Baseball League in Atlantic City where his father and his family played and the many summers going to stay with his paternal grandparents at the shore. He had studied at Princeton University and talked about how white students and some of the faculty treated the few black students on campus. He told stories of his parents traveling with their children all over the country every summer and places in the south where the restaurant owners would refuse to warm up his little brother’s milk bottle in the 1960s.
Michael was an avid observer of people and a critical thinker. He could explain American history and ideology like the best professor and explain how it all fits into the narrative of this country. As a young man, he had traveled the United States by bus and shared stories about being a black man in the South.
Michael was also a movie buff who could talk and dissect movies forever. One of his wishes was to be in a movie, so when Denzel Washington filmed Fences in Pittsburgh, he had a small cameo in it. I watched the movie for both the story and to find Michael, rewinding the part where he is walking up a hill.
Every Thanksgiving, we would all go to the movies on Black Friday and that was one of my favorite activities because Michael could talk about the movie and all the plots and subplots, the actors, the set, and the music for hours. We would get into heated discussions about who was hot and not so hot and usually ended the discussions when one of us couldn’t take it anymore. He loved music and listened to different genres, teasing his brother on his taste. One time he was with us, we went to a record shop in Philly and he purchased a few records, one of them being Madonna’s Like a Virgin. I warned him that he was wasting his money as she was probably a one-hit wonder. He predicted she would make it; there was just something different about her, he said.
I visited him last summer and reminded him of my very wrong Madonna prediction and we just laughed about it. The anger I had seen in him from the previous visit had dissipated into resignation. I got to thank him for always being kind and welcoming to me and my family, for telling me the best stories, and for having given me his coat one cold fall evening at Hampton University’s Homecoming, while his mother was not being the kindest to me.
We lost Michael to ALS this month. While his body fell apart, his brilliant mind was the same every time we visited. I will miss this prince of a man.