By Matthew B. Storey
This is a story about my friend and I, our lives, our friendship, our work. It goes deep, it goes long and it is pure honest love. For none of which do I apologize.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Nelson Mandela
My Grandfather was Lewis B. Storey, my Dad is Ross Barron Storey and is known internationally for his Art and genius under the 'B' name. My Dad has two other sons, my brothers are Sam B. Storey and Taage B. Storey.
Its a 'B' thang.
That hasn't been a glue between us, for sure, but it does let us know that, whatever else we don't have in common - we share the B and it says 'one of my kind'. B meant family. That matters.
When I was a teenager, I played Softball in a league on 20th Street. I was a top player and lived on 21st Street, but there was another top player who lived on 21st Street and was older, more established.
His name was Matty.
As I emerged, in the '70s, people would say our whole names - but you don't talk about people and certainly not ballplayers, that way. He earned the right to the single name, I was Matty 'B'. B meant neighborhood, community, notoriety, excellence. Didn't matter which Matty they were speaking of, we both mattered. The kid with the B was different though.
I had a job, in the '80s, in an office 100 feet under Park Avenue, with a supervisor named Frank. But everyone knew him as Frankie D, Matty B was his running mate, his lieutenant, his advisor. B meant loyalty. He was in charge, but we both mattered.
I got my Dog, Scout, in the '90s. When his mom and I got himit was in San Francisco, I was living in my Dad's city, reconciled after longandlong, and when I realized I loved him and we were OK - the B was back. Scout and I bonded like Sonny and Trees. Tight. He became Scoutie 'B'. B meant unconditional love. Dad wasn't like me, but he was my Dad. Scout was my baby boy, he got the B for sure.
My cat Steffi 'B' followed, and today I have not one, but TWO Teddy 'B's, amongst all my animals, those two are the ones who bond with me deepest and they get the 'B'.
Now, everyone who is close to me does not need a B, many who are close like family are not family.
The B's are ALL family.
A few years ago, I was playing in a Co-Ed Professionals Softball league. A 'ringer' brought in by a CEO from my weekend pickup league to insure the success of his Team, a small garment business playing against huge corporations with 1,000's of Employees. I am a serious player and an intense guy, and never before had played the semi-serious, non-intense sort of game these silly leagues are about.
We met in the middle, however, and had fun and became great friends.
Oh, and we won back to back championships, and city wide tournaments, going 19-1 the 2nd year.
Maybe we don't fight and obsess and drill and scream...but we were FUCK sure going to W-I-N.
One of the young women on the team caught my eye. A terrific athlete, a smart and engaging teammate and a terrible, terrible player. Despite my endless hours of coaching! I was smitten from day one with this young beauty. After making the requisite fool of myself over her, she gently ushered me aside, but not before I got to meet her family. She asked me one day, after our mid-July game, to mentor her Brother, Steve, about business and she introduced me to her Mom, Rose.
Their family name is 'C'.
It was the first time I'd even thought about a woman in my life since breaking it off with my last love, who was, and is, still my roommate and beloved friend, but never took the 'B'. In the years I'd been lying in fields of clover, pondering my navel and living experimental versions of myself, I'd also gotten older.
Too old for a woman the same age as all the women I'd ever been with, back when I was their age or close to it. It was humbling and I took on the task of helping her brother with the resignation of someone who would never deny a friend, never let down a beauty long desired and realized the task would not change the math.
And the math didn't change for me and this young woman, who has gone on to greater successes and locales. But it sure changed the Math for me and her Brother, as well as her parents.
Steve was 2 years older than his sister, returning from a 2 year stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guyana, the poorest country in this hemisphere. He had graduated from Boston University, with honors, in Chemistry.
And gone to Guyana.
That told me something. Something I look for. Something I like. Something of value.
I warmed to the task and was grateful for the chance to leave my Aerie, a self-imposed prison I retreated to during the Bush years, as I was in the midst of the tortured 2004 Yankee collapse (to Steve's Red Sox!) and devastating Kerry loss. I'd stopped doing much of anything professionally by this point, just banging out endless books and endless diatribes about economics, sports, politics...(something I still do, and will always...).
Steve came from a nice Rhode Island suburb, outside of Providence. An 3rd Generation Paisan whose parents lived in a leafy developed area adjacent to the older 'downtown' neighborhoods of their parents, who immigrated first to Rhode Island. A place and a family where connectedness is primary to identity. His grandparents worked as Civil Servants and Factory workers. The jobs of first and second generation immigrants from anywhere in 20th Century America. His parents were well educated, an accountant and a school teacher, their intellectual lives and perspective had broadened, but their devotion to family and community every bit as unshakeable. His sister, the beauty, was a gifted mathematician who held an engineering degree. She had broken the bonds of the local community, gone to Philadelphia to school, then to NYC for public school teaching in situations beyond her ken and, finally to San Diego, to the ideal environment for her triathlons and easier pace of life. She was no longer in Rhode Island, but her connectedness is essential (and her San Diego guy, like her NYC one before, is from Rhode Island!). His other sister, the youngest, took more to the grandparents world and to the local bonds. She lived for awhile in San Diego, but her heart, her guy, her family and her identity are in the Ocean State and that's where she belongs.
I could tell Steve was not to be contained by Rhode Island. And I suspected he'd take to NYC in ways that his sister never would and his parents, or other sister, would not really be able to identify with. And, over time, as we discussed things, twice a week in person - Weds evening and Saturday afternoon and daily via email conversation, I realized that NYC, and even America, would not hold him as they did me, like his parents - I was a construct of an earlier time and my ties were laid, for better or worse. His tracks were yet to be set, and he was determined to use his scientific method to explore and develop those tracks along the best tracks available. Like his Mom the chef, making the meal but adjusting the ingredients to account for new information.
I knew Steve's world, although it was not mine. I'd grown up amongst the sons and daughters of Italian-American immigrants, their families, their generational struggles, the reconciliation of the deeply conservative Catholic devotion to family and neighborhood with the free expression and interaction of the North Eastern, Urban dominated lifestyles. Raised with the mythology of the old country in the new country as even that country began to blend and morph into something newer and less easily understood. I knew only too well the stresses and responses engendered by newer waves of immigrants repeating the experiences of the grandparents and inconveniencing the established, who now included themselves. When I was a kid, those families were leaving my Manhattan for suburbs or family oriented, Italian centric places in the boroughs. Where the life taught at home, in church and at the Knights of Columbus could be more easily projected, and protected, than it could amidst the blending, whirling dynamism and diversity of 3rd Avenue.
I knew his parents discoveries in their daily lives were tough to translate to those who had come before, or traveled less far in their own discovery and I marveled at the grace and expertise they utilized in finding ways to make the blend work. His mom was a marvel in the kitchen as is her beautiful daughter (can't help it, but hey it's my voice!) as had been HER mother, and her husband's mother...
But Rose had taken charge of the ingredients and informed by nutritional understanding and endless attention to detail, turned the calories around, substituted seamlessly and made the stomach busting fare healthy and every bit as delicious as the original versions. She and her husband got fitter and healthier every time I saw them, even as they watched their unreformed friends diets fatten them up and begin to age them prematurely. These were people, who despite different lifestyles, I could relate to.
Not revolutionaries seeking to blow up the older ways, but modern people, affectionate and devoted to the past and those who made it, but able to separate what was essential and timeless about that and what was tangential and unessential, even, like extra calories and gigunda portions - unhealthy.
My kind, after all.
Steve and I put the time in, from day one and forged first an intellectual bond. He is a scientist, a stoic, a listener with photographic recall and rigorous discipline. He has his mothers attention to detail, his fathers decency, his sister's intellect and his other sisters reverence for what came before and where he came from, without reverence for the particular elements of mythology, which, like those calories, are no part of the magic.
Like his Dad, he had the ability to avoid allowing his deeply felt emotions to cloud his judgement. In many respects an opposite to the Matt he was meeting, a big picture thinker, an epicurean, a hedonist, an emotional wreck, alienated from family and personal history. A border line maniac who'd figured things out and was loudly going insane watching the world move in all the wrong directions, a slow moving train wreck unfolding as a 200 pound loner tried to hold it from certain disaster.
Steve has been raised in the carefully constructed cocoon of suburbia, of his Italian heritage, of his family. His brilliance was ticketed for Medical School, or law school, or business school and, eventually to local politics. Which is where smart, telegenic, Italian kids from Rhode Island are expected to go. There would be a pretty Italian girl whose smarts and presence would both translate to the family and add the next generational lift, the kids, the lessons for his siblings...
At least, that was the plan.
It has almost nothing to do with who he is.
Which is something I learned, in my email box, in our twice a week meetings, in regular visits to the family enclave, in my relationship with his Grandmothers, who share their name with my Mom, and Steve and my closest colleague and confidante. His Dad taught me, at 40, everything I never knew about what a parent is supposed to be. He never was anything but who he is, but always was about anything but putting his needs first. His wife, his family, his children, his work, his home. Solid. Unshakeable. Loving.
In his Dad, I saw what I had not known as a boy and what I did not possess in myself. When I met his daughter, I was still a man who held my younger dreams of marriage and family. She taught me to realize things had changed, he taught me that would not have been the right path anyway. Both were healing lessons, hard to swallow. Like that cough medicine in your cabinet that works, but twists your face on the way down.
In his Mom, I saw the absolute dedication to quality, in all aspects, that could only be admired - if sometimes obfuscating the way the larger picture coalesces. Details ironed out require such single mindedness, we need all perspectives and focuses to make the bigger picture develop.
In his younger sister, I saw the fierce opposition to changes and modernity, the unwillingness to modify or adjust the details of the Grandparents construction for the substitutes proposed by her parents or her 'clueless' brother.
And to lots of folks who love him, thats what my Stevie is. Just as that is what Matty is.
Lots of people who knew me 'when' are disappointed in me. Too. You are so smart. Why aren't you married? Why don't you work for a firm? Why don't you have kids? What happened to your suits? What happened to your travel? What happened to your dreams? Why do you live in Manhattan still, or again...blah blah blah. I was never concerned about the rabble or the opinions of others, so it never took any courage for me to forge my own path. I was always someone who was adored, or reviled.
I'm used to it.
Steve was the Prince. He was going to be the one to take it to the next level. And he is, and he has.
But it doesn't look like it was expected to and won't. And he takes flak, has lost prestige, even suffered, incredibly, disdain from those closest in. It has hurt him deeply, but it's reality and, as mentioned, he lives in that place and has taught me to, as his Mom and Dad taught him. They don't always understand his path either, but they know him and they know me, and they know we are wicked smart, we are committed and tireless and that we love them. They don't know where the story goes, or how it headed this way or that, but they trust in their boy. With good reason.
When I met this young man, he was a brilliant kid who was trying to grok a wider world. He was a person of many moods and tastes, from different influences trying to sift his self image through a blueprint designed by others. If I taught him anything, it was to STOP DOING THAT.
The only opinion that matters in life. Regardless of proximity, is your own. The only one who knows who you are - is YOU. Steve knew who he was, he just wasn't giving himself permission to be all of it and to do so in his way. That permission, as Nelson mentions above, was not mine to give, the direction, not mine to chart, the answers not mine to suggest. I told him that he would make mistakes in life, as I did, as all of us do, but, if he listened to me - he would not have to make the same ones that I did. And, if he did that, in combination with his intellect and drive, and got away from trying to please others with that which could not be reconciled with himself - he would be pretty much unstoppable.
And he is. And we tight. And we have only just begun.
There is a lot more to the story, but it'll have to be discovered in future days, future columns, future developments.
For now, its his Birthday, he goes from Jim Brown to Tony Dorsett. From 32 to 33.
And he does so under a new name, a special one reserved for special creatures in my life.
Stevie B.
