Frampton Comes Alive, Food, and Divorce.
Remember albums? Listening to a whole collection of songs, from A side to B? When's the last time you listened to Frampton Comes Alive?
My brother John is going through his CD collection and rediscovering the joy of listening to an entire album uninterrupted. Recently I was lucky enough to be there for this classic, and while we jammed to Frampton, I put together a little nosh, and played with a new app: Evernote Food.
Evernote Food is an app for your smartphone. On it, you can document a meal: dinner out with friends, a new gourmet recipe you're trying, or just hanging out with your bro, like I did here. Click to see our amazing meal of crackers and fresh midwestern cheese:
Our Dinner in the Woods
I think the idea of the Evernote Food app is to document more expertly-prepared food, but I used it just to document our time together. Which we don't have often enough.If you've read this post about my brother, you know that he was diagnosed with a brain tumor last December. He and I have lived 1800 miles apart since I was a sophomore in high school. It's been hard to live so far away from one of the few people on the planet who knows you better than anyone else.It's even harder when you know you should be spending more time with them, being a part of their everyday life; a regular face among their crowd of friends gathered for drinks on a Tuesday night for no good reason. You should be a part of that.When somebody in the group says, "Hey, remember that time we ___?" You should remember it because you should have been there. But you weren't because you wound up six states away, one of the cons of your parents divorce.If it sound like I'm a little bitter, I am. Divorce is just one of those things. When you're a kid and it happens, you just have to make the best of it, like this scene from Talladega Nights:But as you get older, and are raising your own family, you begin to think of the decisions your parents made. Right around the time your kids get to be the same age you were when your own parents split up, you start looking at the situation with new eyes.You think, Would I have made the same decision? Would I have done things differently? Would I have split up my family?I don't know. It's over 30 years ago for our family, and the repercussions still echo. At least they do for me and John. It's hard. I mean, when you see people together who are obviously miserable, but are keeping it together "for the kids" sometimes you just want to tell them, oh give up already!But then you see those same kids at the airport, with their backpacks and boarding passes, off to see their other parent. The one they don't live with. The one who carries pictures in their wallet and shows the ladies at church or the guys at the work, "Here's my kid," in a wistful sort of I-wish-I-was-picking-him-up-at-the-schoolbus-stop-instead-of-the-airport sort of way.And you wonder: If this parent knew how it would be, would they re-think that divorce? Probably not. I know in our case it would not have been different. But I just wonder sometimes. It's hard not to. Wonder, I mean.So John and I will do what we've done for so long, and continue to make the best of it. We will visit whenever we can. And unlike some siblings who've been able to grow up together and as adults, do nothing but fight with each other, we cherish our time together. We eat cheese and apples and double-dipped chocolate malted milk balls and call each other disgusting names and rock out. To Frampton.http://youtu.be/DON-4ZubYbgWhat's YOUR favorite listen-all-the-way-through album? John can add it to his list - Leave it in the comments section below.