As I glance out the windshield of my parents’ used silver Grand Marquis, I suddenly realize that everything in nature is temporary. The foliage along Route 6 in western Rhode Island, once green and vibrant, is now dying. A sudden wave of panic runs through me as I study the red and orange sunburst leaves. I grasp the wheel a bit tighter and steady the used car as I steer it across the Connecticut state line. It’s a Friday afternoon in November and my mother, father, and I are on the way to my uncle’s funeral.

It is no secret that my father has never purchased a new car. There have been several vehicles in my lifetime: a ’79 cardinal-red Pontiac Bonneville; an ’88 sky blue V-6 Oldsmobile; a ’91 black Cadillac El Dorado with a sunroof; and even an ‘83 wood-paneled Chevy Caprice wagon with a rebuilt V-8 engine and reinforced steel hitch that pulled our family trailer to Maine each summer. All of these cars are dead now, covered in rust in a forgotten junkyard somewhere outside of Providence. But, here I am again, driving another used car doomed to suffer the same fate.  I just pray that it won’t happen on this trip.

I despise these used cars because of the inconvenience they’ve caused me. There were the breakdowns and the flat tires. There were nights on the roadside waiting for AAA to come. There were the unbearable phone calls to my father who decided that I had made the rusty muffler fall off or the battery die. There were missed dates with pretty girls and unattended parties in high school. I often fantasize about the day when I can walk into a car dealership in Los Angeles and buy myself a new luxury automobile.

When my parents picked me up at Logan Airport in Boston that morning, my father proudly stood against this glistening silver Grand Marquis like a hunter posing with his captured game.  He’d wiped the down the hood with his best handkerchief and related how he’d carefully shopped around until he found something with low mileage, good tires, a warranty, power windows, and interior climate control. The dashboard even had a state-of-the-art stereo system so he could play his Irish folk music or listen to Red Sox games.

“It’s got these new speakers,” my father brags. “They told me that the sub-woofer gives the bodrahn a booming resonation. My Irish music never sounded so brilliant.”

The car, my father continues, is part of that used car salesman’s myth: The Florida Car. The kind of car owned by that old, retired schoolteacher who always kept it in The South for the winter, only drove it a mile to church and back on Sundays during the spring and summer, and never took it out in the rain.

“These new cars they’re making,” my father growls from the passenger seat, “depreciate as soon as you drive ‘em off the lot. Too fancy.”

And now, here I am, at the wheel of this new “used” car traveling for two hours on a frigid cold day to Hartford, Connecticut. I’m three thousand miles from my apartment complex in California, where I left sunny skies and a seventy-degree temperature. I couldn’t believe it when my Dad asked me to drive his new car. At first I wanted to believe it was a gesture that I am now an adult, but now that he won’t stop talking I know something’s wrong. He’s the opposite of my mother. When she’s upset she never says a word. Now he keeps squinting then rubbing his knee and I know something isn’t right.

“Personally, I enjoy taking these back roads,” my father says from the passenger seat, now dabbing his bald scalp with a handkerchief stitched with his initials—a Christmas gift from my sister, part of a set. “Better than those clogged up interstates, you know?”

Where I live in Los Angeles, I am surrounded by cement. It is a city that doesn’t offer any surreptitious routes like this, although I try desperately to find them.  Instead, I am forced to take the freeways: the 405 and the 101 always packed with traffic, always making me late for a show or audition. Sometimes the traffic and heat are so bad, you want to kill yourself. However, in New England, there is a sense of freedom on these former horse trails that once propelled Indian tribes, militias, and presidential carriages toward New York or Boston. These roads will always be here, short cuts, according to my father.

I notice him leaning down to massage his knee—again.

“What did you do to your leg?” I finally inquire in a concerned voice.

“Nothing,” he mutters. “Just a cramp.”

“He hurt it falling down the stairs,” chimes in my mother from the backseat, in between puffs off her long Salem Light and work on her Dell crossword puzzle. It’s the first thing she’s said since they picked me up at Logan, when she inquired who dropped me off at LAX, hoping it was a girlfriend. When I told her it was my friend, Theo Schwartzman she asked me, “What is he?” I told her he was a professor at Santa Monica College and she corrected me by saying, “No, I meant, what he is? That sounds like a Jewish name? I didn’t know you had Jewish friends now. Aren’t there any Catholic boys in L.A.?”

I look into the rearview mirror and study her skinny face, aged and pale, the cigarette dangling from her lips as she speaks.

“And the fall? He lost his balance and fell halfway down,” she whispers through a cloud of smoke.

“Now that’s a bunch of bull shit,” my father shoots back. He turns to me. “I twisted on some ice on the back walk during the first snow storm.”

“You gotta be careful, Dad,” I begin.

“Don’t tell me about coordination, fella!” he retorts. “You had two left feet until you were fourteen.”

“His eyes are going, too,” says my mother over my shoulder. “He can hardly see out of his left one. I think it’s the cataracts. That’s why he got into the car accident.”

“Car accident?” I gasp. “What car accident?”

“Maybe you better cut down on the Chesterfields, lady and stop blowing smoke out of the proverbial flutter valve,” my father says angrily, turning and pointing at her as if she’s a temperamental child.

He turns to me and thumbs backwards.

“She’s gotta quit those cancer sticks. Are you still smoking?”

“No,” I insist. “I quit six months ago. But you have to put salt on that walk when there’s ice.”  

My father’s round face turns red with frustration.

“Keep your eyes on the damn road and mind your own business,” he says, leaning toward the odometer. “How fast are you going anyways?”

“Thirty-five,” I respond.

“Too damn fast. Slow down.”

“Don’t worry, Gabriel,” jabs my mother again. “He can’t see the numbers anyway, just like he couldn’t see that guy passing him on the left when he took off his mirror.”

I gently take my foot gently off the accelerator and shake my head, trying to block out the ensuing argument. I crack the window, letting the cold air in to relieve myself of the secondhand smoke.

It has been three years since I moved to California to become a comedian, much to my parents’ chagrin. I’d taught junior high school just outside of Boston for a while after college but felt paralyzed. I wanted to pursue my creative ambitions.

“Teaching is a good job. Reliable,” my father had stated many times. “You show me another profession that gives you that kind of time off. Pursue your funny business during July and August.”

When I decided to put my letter of resignation in and bought a plane ticket to Los Angeles my father tried to talk me out of the move.

“Why do you want to live in California?” he’d scoffed as I shared a cigarette with my mother.

“Frank, leave him alone. He’s made up his mind,” she’d said, resigned.

“They’re soft out there. No work ethic. No sense of family,” he had continued

Still, I bid them farewell. There was no looking back in my mind; I was going to Hollywood and starting a new life. I swore that the money I’d make would prevent me from living the life that my parents had: a life of used cars and two-week vacations.

But lately, I am starting to believe the joke is on me. Comedy in L.A. is a few nights a week at open mics in the back of Chinese and Mexican restaurants. Gigs at the Comedy Store or the Improv are hard to come by and my money is dwindling from what I had after cashing out my Massachusetts state teaching retirement fund. My father would kill me if he knew I had done that. I would take the source of other money to the grave, the one that had arrived in a discreet envelope just last month. And to add to my disappointment, I have been called back for this funeral with nothing show for my time away: no stories of success, no friendships with stars, nothing.  In many ways, I’m ashamed. I feel like am a prodigal son coming back home.

As the ride continues, I imagine that the Grand Marquis I’m driving is an oversized hearse. I adjust the mirror and stare back at my mother, who is now asleep, looking as if she is dead. The skinniness of her face is apparent, her cheekbones protruding in a way that I had not noticed before.  My father leans back and closes his eyes for a few minutes two. His red face worries me: diabetes, heart trouble, hypertension; maybe all of them combined. It seems they’ve aged so much since I’ve left home. I wonder when I’ll be flying back for their funerals.

My eyes focus back on the road as a blur of orange catches our attention. It is a construction crew, a team of four workers taking their time to patch up a small stretch of torn up tar and macadam stone before the winter moves in. In L.A. this would be a Hispanic team plugging away in the hot sun, but here it is a bunch of white working stiffs, shivering in the cold, staring back at us as if to say, “I wish I studied a little bit harder in school.” I jam on the brakes then maneuver past them carefully, moving across the double-yellow lines. As I catch the eye of the worker holding a “Caution” sign, I feel ashamed.

“Get around ‘em,” my father commands awakened from the commotion. “Watch that bump. Stay out of trouble. Careful, careful now.”

My mother leans forward and puts her bony hand on my shoulder. She’s awake again.

“Nice and easy, Gabriel” she says. “We’re not going to be late for the wake. We have plenty of time.”

But for my Uncle James, time had run out. Eight years of prostate cancer which he fought bravely up until the last months. He’d dropped fifty pounds and his skin had turned from simply pale to jaundice. Family is kind in times of sickness, trying to stay optimistic, saying things like how much he looked like his father, my grandfather, near the end. But the reality was that he was dying. The chemo had deprived him of his masculinity. To make matters worse, the cancer had gotten into his bones. In just a few months, he was gone.

Despite these images of his demise, I have a craving for a cigarette. I feel the pack in my jacket but shake off the thought like one of those cautionary lung cancer commercials or that damn billboard on Santa Monica Boulevard that posts the current deaths due to smoking.

“Your mother smokes in my new car. The whole goddamn interior is ruined,” his father complains. “It’s killing this beautiful car! Thank Jesus she doesn’t smoke in that stupid Volvo your sister bought since she’s pregnant.”

“Where is she?’ I ask.

“She’s meeting us there,” my mother replies as she cracks her window and tosses a cigarette out.

“So how much you making as a comedian?” my father inquires.

“Not much,” I admit.

“When are they gonna pay you?” he continues.

“First of all, who’s ‘they?” I ask. “And second of all, I get paid when I write or say something they can sell.”

“Maybe this Schwartzman fellow knows somebody who can pay you for jokes.”

“Dad, he’s a professor.”

“But he’s a Jew, right? He has to know people in your industry. The Jews run Hollywood,” says my father. “You’re the wrong religion. Better convert. Change your name. I can’t think of any successful Catholic comedians besides George Carlin.”

“Isn’t that a bit anti-Semitic, Dad?”

“It’s true, Gabriel,” my mother chimes in. “The Jews have run the movie-business since the beginning. Comedy too: Marty Feldman, Shelley Berman, Jerry Seinfeld, Sid Caesar, George Burns.”

“Don’t forget Bob Newhart,” my Dad adds. “I actually always liked Newhart.”

“I don’t think he’s Jewish, Dad.”

My father waves me off and looks at the radio hungrily.

“You wanna turn on the game?” he asks.

“No,” I say bluntly.

He grimaces and flips it on anyways to a static-filled radio station discussing the line-up of tonight’s Celtics game. I wonder how much longer we have in this journey.

* * *

When we arrive at the Best Western in Hartford it is dark and I drop my parents off by the lobby entrance. I swing the car around the back of the hotel and park, thinking how my father would have taken up two spaces to make sure that no one would open their door and damage the paint on his “beautiful” new used car. I rest my head on the wheel, unsure if it is jetlag or pure exhaustion from the anxious ride with my aging parents. I get out and light up a Camel Light, wondering if they have a bar like the Best Western in Beverly Hills where I perform my stand up routine on Thursday nights.

As I smoke in the parking lot, I admit to myself that my Uncle James was probably one of the few people who actually supported my move out West, maybe the only one. I recall how I met him for lunch at The Black Rose in Boston, where he claimed the Guinness tasted as good as the pints he’d had in Dublin. Lunch was always our special godfather and godson tradition when I was a kid; only then it was milkshakes and burgers at McDonald’s.  But as I got older it became trips to Red Sox games and a few beers.

“Don’t tell your dad that I’m here to celebrate,” he had instructed with a grin. “He wants me to talk you out of this.”

“It’ll be our little secret. I’ll take it to the grave,” I promised.

We sat and talked about family and life over a good lunch of bangers and mash and cabbage then started on some pints of Guinness.

“You have to follow your dreams,” Uncle James had stated after our third beer. “I’ve got a beautiful family. Grandkids, a life that only a king could only dream of. But if I was to die tomorrow, I’d give it all away to do what you’re doing.”

I nodded but he didn’t truly believe the words coming from my uncle’s mouth.

“Come on Uncle Jimmy,” I said. “You’ve made it. Your legacy is set.”

“No, no. It’s true. Hell, I waited until I was retired to get on a plane and fly over to Ireland even though I always wanted to go when I was younger,” he had continued. “Now, I’ve been going twice a year just to catch up. Your view of things changes when a doctor tells you in some cramped examination room that you’re soon on your way out. All that’s left is a bunch of regrets, lad.”

“Don’t say that, Uncle Jimmy.”

My uncle had smiled then leaned over and ruffled my hair. It made me feel like I was six again.

“Listen,” he had said. “What’s that line, I like, the one from The Great Gatsby? Come on, teach, you know.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I haven’t read it in awhile.”

My uncle closed his eyes to try to recall. “Let us celebrate a man while he’s still alive, not after he’s dead,” he had said. “Wolfsheim, the Jew mobster said that. I’ve been going back and reading the classics. And I’m going to confession again.”

He smiled, then his hand went into his jacket and he took out an envelope. I began to cringe awkwardly as he slid it across the table.

“Just a little something to help, to get you started,” he had said. “Just until you’re as big as Seinfeld.”

I shook my head.

“Take it,” he had insisted. “You’ll do the same one day when you have a special nephew of your own and are asked to be his godfather.”

That was the last time I saw my Uncle James. I remember the color in his face, the life still in him. And now, I would see his pale lifeless body in a casket of my “twin uncle” as my mother called him.

I finish my cigarette in the darkened parking lot and walk slowly to the lobby of the Best Western, feeling a little depressed.  I start looking for the bar but my parents are there waiting and I feel guilty about wanting a drink, so we slowly make our way up to the room on the second floor. I set my bags on the straps of the luggage-holders and looked around, my eyes fixating on the bed. I grimace. There is only one.

“We can order a cot,” my mother says. “I told the desk clerk two double-beds, not one king-size. He was apparently too busy listening to that rap music.”

“Ah…he can sleep on the floor. It’s good for the back. Save us some money,” my father chimes in.

My mother ignores him and moves to the phone, picks it up, and dials the front desk. My father walks up behind her, speaking over her shoulder.

“Tell them we’re not paying extra,” he exclaims. “These hotels, they’ll rob you blind. Remember the one on The Cape on our last anniversary?”

I depart for the bathroom quickly, strip down, and run the water until steam rises up, then shower for ten minutes.  I get out, towel off, shave my stubble, and put on a pressed shirt and my dark Brooks Brother suit then combed my mop-like hair as I stare into the mirror. I button up the jacket, straighten my red tie, and exit the bathroom back into the room. My father, now shirtless with his hairy chest and round belly hanging out, turns and studies me—curious.

“Three buttons. Fancy,” he remarks. “Didn’t realize we had Harry Hollywood with us over here, honey.”

He’s right. It’s a very sharp English cut suit, a purchase that was funded by the envelope from Uncle James. I’d worn it to audition for a game show and then an open call for the Tonight Show but was not selected. I remember standing outside the studio in Burbank in ninety-degree heat, trying not to sweat as I studied the smirking comedians in jeans and t-shirts. Still, I want to look good for the wake. It makes me feel important, as if these things had gone differently for me. There would be relatives there whom I hadn’t seen in years, ones who never fully understood my exile to Hollywood. Even if it wasn’t true, I needed to look successful. I had always imagined wearing the suit to pick up my parents from LAX after getting my first big break, but they have never once show any interest in visiting Los Angeles.  My father even goes as far to use the excuse that my mother is afraid of flying.

In the small hotel room, I watch my mother get ready and study her thinning frame as she walks around in her white slip, another long Salem Light dangling from her mouth. She has aged over the last few years and she looks even older in the bright artificial light of the room. I feel a gnawing in my stomach about the fact that neither of my parents has been to the doctor since the Kennedy administration. I grab the remote and turn to CNN in hopes of some distraction but it’s just a report on a sniper who is still wandering the countryside picking off victims. More death. I wipe some lint off my dark suit and announce that I am going to get the car.

* * *

We arrive at Maclean’s Funeral Home in East Hartford around eight and I drop my parents by the front steps and park the Grand Marquis next to a long black hearse, noticing they are about the same length.  I walk slowly up the steps of the home and feel the surge of heat as I enter.  For the first time all day, I feel warm and relaxed.

As I enter I catch a glimpse of my cousins and aunt standing in a line by the casket. Five boys and one girl, the men all with salt and pepper beards, looking like noblemen or princes out of some Shakespearean production. But they also look tired.

I turn to a collage of photos laid out of my uncle, my godfather.  Some are old, black and white shots of a skinny dark-haired young man playing basketball, another of him walking down the aisle with my aunt my father has never liked, then one with my grandfather and his eldest son at a graduation. My favorite is one taken in the seventies, Uncle James is laughing, a gap in the center of his teeth, a cigarette in one hand, a can of Bud in the other.

Then, there’s a transformation in the color photos to a distinguished gray-haired man with his grandchildren, playing cards, another of him traveling through Ireland for the first time. I know I will not see the same man lying in the wood casket up front and that scares me.

I walk past my father, who is loudly discussing the Notre Dame-BC match up this weekend and how his cousin, the famous attorney, wouldn’t be coming since he had traveled out to South Bend for the game and the plans couldn’t be changed. “They’re wearing green this weekend instead of blue,” he shouts at the priest who is inches away from him. “Every nine years a miracle happens for BC. Flutie’s Hail Mary in eighty-four and Gordon’s kick in ninety-three.  Could be a big one for them this year, Father.”

I swerve around the priest, afraid he might ask me if I attend St. Monica’s each Sunday, if I go to confessions like I’m still a good altar boy. 

My sister taps me on the shoulder. It seems that she is always pregnant at funerals.  She says that it’s good that I’ve come all this way, and that “Mom must be happy”.  She’s expecting her fifth child in December, probably another girl to my father’s dismay. She’s alone; her four kids back at the hotel with her husband and their nanny. My parents used to tell me to get married and have a nice family like my sister, but they’ve give up all hope on that idea. I don’t even tell them about the pretty girl Schwartzman introduced me to on a blind date the other week that I’d like to see again, a nice Irish-Catholic girl from the Studio City.

And after a moment, we approach the casket together. She takes my arm and we kneel and pray.

His face is gaunt and sunken, his cheekbones pushing up the jaundice skin. We stare in disbelief at what the disease has done to him, wasting him down to 140 pounds. I turn my eyes away and, instead, try to focus on the silver Celtic cross leaning on his shoulder. We stand slowly and bless ourselves, moving to the condolence line, shaking hands with my cousins and express our sadness. I answer a few questions about California and how great it is but stop short on elaboration because I feel guilty about taking the focus away from my Uncle James. For a moment, I have a yearning to run from the line and return to the warmth and the sun immediately.

My sister and I sit in some folding chairs and catch up.  She’s doing well, living in Belmont, driving the new Volvo, and enjoying her married life and her girls. She’s nervous about the impending birth of her fifth child but mentions that she’s also closing a Real Estate deal on Monday so she hopes she doesn’t go into labor early. Then she quietly asks me if I need money. I do, but I tell her “I’m okay” since I feel guilty about the money I still owe her that her husband will never know about. With all the debts I owe on loans, I feel like a degenerate gambler on the inside. I force a smile and then notice a man who has just entered the room. He is wearing a blue strap medal around his neck.

“Did this guy run the Boston Marathon?” I ask nodding to the medal-clad man.

My sister shrugs and we watch him console my aunt and cousins and somehow get caught by my father and pulled into the loud conversation on college football. Then, more men arrive with medals, eight in all, very somber, all in dark suits and green ties, as they look up to the casket.  The priest steps to the front of the room and announces that there will be a prayer ceremony, to gather around and join in.

I watch as the eight men move to the front of the room and line up orderly in front of the casket in military fashion. I wonder for a moment if they’ve drilled for hours to get to this moment. I look to my sister again, notice her strawberry blonde hair is longer than the last time I saw her.

“Who are these guys?” I whisper. “Should they be here?”

She grins and shrugs again, just as confused as I am. A short, gray-haired man who appears to be the leader of the crew steps forward and takes out a piece of paper, his hands shaking nervously.

“Brother James Dugan Bradley was a member of our organization for over thirty years.  We, the Ancient Order of Hibernians of East Hartford, Connecticut would like to express our sincere condolences to Mrs. Mary Margaret Bradley for the passing of her beloved husband as well as to the children, grandchildren, siblings, and friends of this generous and loving man.”

He nods to my father and my aunt, his hands still quivering as he looks out to the crowd. Another man steps forward and breaks the awkward silence.

“Our Father…”

We break into spontaneous prayer for a while, Hail Marys, Our Fathers, more Hail Marys, a few Blessed Be To The Fathers, Son, and Holy Ghost. Then, as quickly as they arrived, the men with medals march out, back to their Hibernian camp, to train for another wake, play some cards, sing Irish songs, and drink beer.

“What the hell was that?” I ask my sister.

“I didn’t even know he was a member of anything other than his church and bowling team,” she replies. She kisses me on the cheek, says calmly, “It’s really good to see you here, Gabriel, I’m happy to look at you. By the way, I think this one will be a boy.” She pats her stomach. “It just feels different. We wanted to know if you would be its godfather if it’s a boy?”

“I’m a poor comic,” I say. “I’m no godfather.”

“Well,” she says, “it will be a good excuse to come home. You could do all those godfather and godson things I was always so jealous of that Uncle James did with you, like going to McDonald’s and Red Sox games. Anyway, just think about it.”

I get up and walk out to the front of the funeral home, distracted but amused by the little escapade, and walk out into the parking lot. I take out my Camels and pack them tight. I put one in my mouth and take out my lighter but feel a presence next to me.

“What are you doing?” says a little boy’s voice.

I see my cousin’s youngest, named James III, standing on the front steps, aloof. He is in his tan parker. I quickly take the cigarette out and hide it, then smile at him.

“Nothing,” I reply. “I was just hot in there.”

“I thought you lived in California. That’s what Grandpa told me. Isn’t it hot there?” he asks.

“Yeah. I guess I’m a little sad that your grandpa is in Heaven.”

“No, he’s not,” says little James.

“Sure, sure, he is,” I reply, saying what I think is the right thing, what Uncle James would want me to say. “He’s with Jesus now.” I pause awkwardly. “Why are you out here, James?”

I wonder if he’s been here the whole time avoiding the open casket.  He shrugs at me and watches the Ancient Hibernians get into a Toyota mini-van.

“You see those guys?” I ask pointing to the men.

He nods and opens his jacket to reveal a blue and gold medal. I nod and look at it.

“They gave me Grandpa’s medal,” he says turning the piece around to reveal James Dugan Bradley engraved on the back. It seems to sparkle underneath the light and I lean forward and ruffle his hair.

“Grandpa’s in my heart,” he finally tells me.

I look at him sadly and smile. We turn and watch as the Ancient Hibernians peel out of the parking lot playing “Danny Boy” on their radio, singing along. The driver gives me a tip of his tam o’shanter hat as he goes by.

“Mine too,” I say softly.

I begin to feel the cold coming down upon me, and wonder how many hours I have left before I fly back to California.