reading with Tony
shared book old friends together
like he is right here
We married sisters.
I can say that about a lot of guys.
My wife had 8 sisters.
Though they are the husbands of my wife’s sisters, I think I am correct in saying they are my brothers-in-law.
The Oxford English Dictionary says of using ‘in-law’ that it is Sometimes extended to the husband of one’s wife’s (or husband’s) sister.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company, updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company states:
broth·er-in-law (brr-n-lô) n. pl. broth·ers-in-law (brrz-)
- The brother of one’s spouse.
- The husband of one’s sister.
- The husband of the sister of one’s spouse
I guess that is good enough for me and I am digressing from my story.
Last summer my wife returned from a visit up north and brought me back a book as a gift from one of her sisters.
The book had belonged to my brother-in-law Tony and my sister-in-law thought I would like to read it.
Tony and I shared a relationship of scholarly interest in the history of the United States in general and the American political scene back to the 1930s.
We had taken a lot of the same type of classes in college and read a lot of the same books.
For us, nothing was more fun then to find a quiet corner of a family gettogether and converse over the past mistakes of Harry Truman and the triumphs of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I remember one 4th of July when someone came by and asked if we had settled World War 2 yet and Tony replied, “No, but we just finished up the Neutrality Acts of 1939.”
Tony died back in 2019 and I miss him and his conversation.
We had not had much opportunity to talk since moving south but Tony and I had a history, one of those friendships that Julian Fellows describes in his fun book, Snobs (Downton Abby in the 20th century), when Mr. Fellows writes:
“nothing is more agreeable than the renewal of such a friendship after several years’ interlude, as there is no need for the preamble to intimacy. It is already in place. One may immediately pick it up, like a piece of unfinished tapestry, where one left off ten years before.”
With this in mind, I appreciated the gift very much.
I started reading, it was a book on FDR, and about 100 or so pages into the book, I came to passage that made me say, boy this is stupid.
I sat back in my rocker and with the book open on my lap and said out loud to no one, “Wonder what Tony would say to that?”
I returned to my reading and turned the page to finish the passage.
On the next page, Tony had taken a pencil, underlined the last line of the passage and wrote, “Nope!“
It was a nice little gift.
A few words, a pencil line, and he is right here.
No Haiku For You 