What can I say, Tom Brokaw?

I was having a fascinating conversation the other day with a brilliant artist as we work towards rebuilding Pacific Palisades. I inquired if he knew from his youth whether or not he would actually embrace the career path he is currently traversing. He started to share a story about a Dr. Seuss book called My Book About Me, and it brought back my own special memories in the immediate; I interrupted animatedly and went off on my own tangent, barely allowing him to finish his story. That book was very important to me in childhood, and while I can barely remember what I wrote or how well I traced my hand when Dr. Seuss instructed me after mastering the outline of my little foot, I decided to revisit some of the questions that influenced my 5-year-old self by purchasing a post-fire edition that should be arriving shortly. All of my cherished books (as is the case with my neighbors and community) were swallowed whole by the Palisades fires to be coughed up in a confetti of ashen, white paper scraps.

My book about me was a fairly circuitous journey, as being born into the oddest family of multiple religions, ideologies, and cultures made things quite confusing in the middle portion of my life. Who are we kidding? I am still confused. There were so many languages spoken, so many different and varying interpretations of everything from God to Queen and country, I found myself insecure about how to navigate it all; most significantly, who would be the missing piece for me. (Ah, The Missing Piece, another great book from my childhood by Shel Silverstein.) Seuss and Silverstein, amongst other writers, lined the extensive shelves of books my parents were generous enough to buy for my older brother and me. I was also crazy about the artistry of Ezra Jack Keats, and Goggles was another favorite for Keats’ watercolors as illustrations. But I digress, a sad occupational hazard I have yet to master.

When I think about the book about me, I always seem to identify most with my grandfather, and why I have long held out hope that somebody one day will be kind enough to introduce me to Tom Brokaw so that I can write some of the chapters of me left out of the story of my life that he wrote about so beautifully. There’s a connection, I promise.

My grandfather’s mother, Helen, was the youngest of four children who was in utero when her father died in his 30s from pneumonia in Edinburgh. My grandfather’s grandfather worked for Andrew Carnegie, and I am not sure if the decision for the family to move to America was precipitated by Carnegie’s business interests. Helen had one brother who went on to become The Reverend William Allen, whom I heard my grandfather refer to as Uncle Willy. He died before I was born, as did his sister, Mamie, but in my lifetime, I had a lot of beautiful and supportive interactions with Helen, her sister Winifred, aka Auntie Winnie, and Mamie’s widower husband, Ferdinand Hafner. They had come to Los Angeles in the 1920s to set up shop in Long Beach, Naples, and Seal Beach. My grandfather’s family was wonderful to me, and I loved every minute spent with them. I liked the way they didn’t judge my grandfather for being so divergent from them in dress, accent, and religious affiliation. He was Helen’s son, Amir Francis, and they loved him fully, even though he was so different from them. That sincere affection was also afforded to my mother and then to me, who oddly resembled them more than I did my grandfather, who also didn’t stand in judgment of my choices. There were many summers spent with copious amounts of alcohol and cavorting in my uncle’s backyard while people in hijab were reading Quran inside. And I would often wonder, who the hell are these people, and why did I always feel like I was fluidly somewhere in the middle? I knew of the Yankton, South Dakota relatives. But what I wasn’t afforded was relationships with the members of the family who migrated from Scotland there, having no real desire to travel there or reach out. But the journalist Tom Brokaw was uniquely connected, and he waxed nostalgic about my family in his books. It’s for that reason that it has long been on my bucket list to meet him.

Aunt Margaret was Helen’s niece and probably the one I knew best. Married to a man named Austin Reep, she had two sons, Jim and Tom, the former being one of my favorite people. Only 20 years my senior, he often asked about my career aspirations and was always so affable and supportive in everything I wanted to accomplish in my life. Both he and his mother would tell other members of our ragtag team of a family how proud they were of my poise, academic success, and intelligence while worrying aloud why I was the only one in my generation yet to be married. Talk about pressure…but we laughed a lot and spent time together on the beach and the lake when Jim’s company, First Consulting Group, went public, and he gifted himself a monstrosity of a home on Whitefish Lake in Montana. The heartwrenching tragedy occurred when he contracted cancer in his 40s and only lived to enjoy that home for but a handful of summers. I remember how often I would visit when he was at his most vulnerable, and the day we drove from The Palisades to his home in Anaheim Hills, and how when he was informed I was there, he replied over the intercom politely, “Not today.” I was crestfallen, and his wife assured me I shouldn’t take it personally; he doesn’t want me to see him as he was withering away, even though I had seen him but a week before. I now understand from watching my mother become emaciated from that cruel and horrible disease, less than a decade later, how quickly things change for the patient within mere days. I also remember being woken up in the middle of the night by my mother, who said he was in the hospital in Long Beach and we needed to go now. His organs were shutting down, and we were asked to come quickly to say goodbye. When that tragedy gave way as they often do to a funeral, people I had never met converged on California, and it was then that I met Uncle Don Allen. Don Allen was not only my grandfather’s first cousin and Aunt Margaret’s brother; he was of great significance in Tom Brokaw’s life.

Tom Brokaw's memoir A Long Way from Home is about the people who shaped him in small-town South Dakota, especially the veterans who returned from World War II and became teachers, coaches, business owners, and civic leaders. Brokaw wrote that these men rarely talked about their wartime experiences but taught the next generation through example and through discipline, teamwork, humility, and responsibility. He wrote of how Don Allen was not only a World War 2 fighter pilot, but one of his coaches who taught him what it meant to truly excel while maintaining the role of team player. Aunt Margaret said Tom was a long-time family friend and that he might have hosted a book signing in Don Allen’s home in South Dakota, as the family was also mentioned in The Greatest Generation, another one of his titles.

I’ve never been to South Dakota, and even though I know people, as mentioned, who know Brokaw quite intimately, I have never had the pleasure of meeting the man. And conversely, he never got the chance to meet my greatest generation, who will always be my beloved grandfather and best friend, 1917-2012. Amazon sent the Seuss book in record time, and perhaps I will revisit it to see where I made good on the promises I made to my five-year-old self and what five decades on, I still have left to discover. And if I ever do get a chance to meet Brokaw, great. For now, what he wrote in his book about my family will have to suffice…