A Touchy-Feely Roast of George Franklin
Atlanta, GA
June 10, 2018
We try (ahem…) not to discuss politics in our emails.
So instead, we will discuss politicians!
Or, rather, one politician…
A “low key simple guy”, as he described himself earlier this week…new to the arena but long in the game, raring for an upset in his rookie race, riling the Deep State cronies, reviling Family Values phonies, and restless to Make Michigan Great Again.
Some emails are easy to write and hard to send. This is one of them.
It carries genuine sentiment and pure intent…but delivering it may, like providing 17-year old scotch to 18-year old boys, provoke an unbearable reaction that goes straight to the recipient’s head.
Fortunately, this was a week of relative calm…providing time to consider my options.
Alexander and David were away…one pulled south to the Naval Flight Academy in Pensacola, the other shifted north to a Boy Scout expedition in the Georgia Mountains.
Like diverging seismic faults in a parallel universe, these movements produced tremors of placidity at our domestic epicenter. Commotion subsided, the WiFi relaxed, sheets took the form of perpetually made beds, the dishwasher ran only once.
Under the reign of this Pax Solitudina, I was able to pause…and to review with more rigor the correspondence that regularly enlivens my inbox.
Reading between the lines of George’s email a few days ago, I sensed subtle nuances hinting at a reference implying that today may, reputedly, be his birthday.
Furthermore, I learned he considers “touchy-feely stuff” to be “overrated”.
Roasts, presumably, are not…particularly given where he hopes to spend the next two years.
I count a select few people that I can say I have never not known. My mother is obviously one…and her younger brother is another.
For that I am eternally grateful. I honestly could not ask for a better uncle.
I recall him inviting his 15-year-old nephew for a “guys’ weekend” in DC, centered on golf among what Brett would on his own later visit call the “unfair” hills of Congressional Country Club.
The weekend also featured an excursion to Baltimore for an Orioles game, and evening outings at a few Georgetown bars.
Again…I was only 15, so don’t think Congressman Franklin wouldn’t know how to get things done in Washington.
His expertise is not, however, confined to the domestic realm. He gets things done over-seas as well…or, at least, on them.
His parents celebrated their Golden Anniversary by inflicting their four children, plus their children, on a luxury liner in the western Caribbean Sea.
Like a colony of yellow-jackets, we’d scatter during the day, returning to the hive each evening to recount or lie about whatever mischief filled the intervening hours.
Among the agreed ground-rules was that all expenses would be borne by the families who incurred them, excepting bills for dinner, happy hours, or other gatherings when significant numbers of us would congregate. Those charges would be allocated to a “Group” tab, which all agreed would be equally divided at the end of the cruise.
We must now take a semantic detour, however superficially unnecessary it may seem to those of passing acquaintance with common vernacular, and veer into a metaphysical discussion of language…and of scale.
Size matters. Sometimes things evolve, or devolve, to an extent that they cease being what they had been and assume an entirely different essence.
A nuclear bomb is not a large firecracker. The Pacific Ocean is not merely an overgrown puddle. Being dead is not the same as being asleep a very long time.
And a congregation of many people that sheds all but its final two constituents does not retain the qualitative characteristics of a “Group”.
A couple? yes. A pair? certainly. A duo? Without doubt. A twosome? By definition.
A group, however, bears a quite different connotation. Such is the common vernacular.
Of course, the common vernacular is not the lingua franca of the lawyer, the lobbyist, or the politician.
Parsing is.
Legalese, fine print, and plausible deniability are the linguistic lances that enable passage thru juridical jungles and legislative labyrinths, no matter how dark, dank, or infested.
Thus armed aboard our ship…the youngest Corporate Vice President in the history of Kelloggs, a future member of the Western Michigan Board of Regents, attendee to Muhammad Ali at Ground Zero after 9/11, acclaimed author and current aspirant to represent Michigan’s 6th Congressional District, joined his maritime accomplice, who shall remain nameless but whose initials are “Brett Breen”, to descend sans souci into the hull of Moral Hazard.
After siphoning monetary fuel from the common financial tank and spraying it each evening across the tables and bars of the ship’s casino, they claimed “Group” status and surreptitiously earmarked into the family invoice a provision that the community reservoir be tapped to quench the resulting blaze.
It was a brilliantly audacious maneuver, characteristic of one who knows not only how to effectively cross party lines, but also to deftly cross the line at a party.
Likewise, the later incident at Palma Ceia, when he thought his father (who was not there, and had no idea we were) would “get a kick out of” our charging his account for a group (of considerably more than two people) meal.
We’ve all heard that story but, like the account of my mother abandoning me at Jesuit High School, this one clings to George like cigar smoke to Winston Churchill’s overcoat.
I recount these episodes not with consternation, but with admiration. Not with shock, but with awe…and with a chuckle reminiscent of the laughter George is so comfortable dispensing at his own expense.
Regardless, no one could claim George hasn’t deposited more of his time and resources into the family kitty than he has ever withdrawn thru clever connivance or sophomoric shenanigans.
He would offer the roof over his head to (almost) anyone in his family, and at one time or other has done so for practically everyone reading this.
He definitely has for the one writing it…almost every summer our boys have been alive.
His generosity and Molly’s have created a chain of incomparable Lake Michigan memories, with each year forging a more indelible link.
George jested that in this family it is the cost of the gift that matters, and that touchy-feely other stuff is overrated.
Similarly, Oscar Wilde said that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Quite the cynic himself, I think he may have meant that as a compliment.
In any event, he would no doubt join me sending best wishes for a great birthday to one of the least cynical people I know.
Between the two of us, we could charge it to the Group.
JD
