Aunt Pauline — Dec. 9, 2022 - Johnny Boy Marketing

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Familial Reflections 👪
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It’s hard to think of my Aunt Pauline as old, hard to imagine how it is that she’s just about to leave her 80s and, thus, it’s hard to understand how she could be in such poor health right now.

Aunt Pauline is Father Dearest’s older sister. She and my Uncle Frank are my godparents, which I guess should carry some weight, considering I’m technically an East Coast Italian. I don’t, however, remember having any religious conversations with them, and my uncle never whacked anyone, as far as I know. He was a NYPD detective who worked in Spanish Harlem near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. One day, this rough, gruff-sounding man found God and went onto become a deacon in the Catholic church. It never smoothed his edges, though.

Together, my godparents had eight children (see “Catholic,” above), four boys and four girls. There’s Joey, Bobby, John and Tommy, Theresa, Kathy, Delores and Carol. Joey died of cancer a number of years ago. My uncle passed away awhile back, as well.

Because of all these people and our proximity to each other while I was growing up, the typical large, loud Italian get-together was the norm for me. I literally thought all families’ events were like my family’s events.

Our Christmas ritual was to go over to Aunt Pauline’s house for Christmas dinner. We’d open gifts in a mass of people, presents and discarded wrapping paper, then eat at a table that seemed to stretch for miles and only got longer as my cousins first married, then had kids of their own. I fell in between those two groups, younger than my cousins, older than their children. I was closest in age to Tommy, but even he was a decade or so older than I am, I think.

Sometime in the summer, there’d be a huge mass birthday party. A bunch of us came into this lovely world in July and August, so there are numerous pictures of little me surrounded by Mother Dearest (born the day after me, though some years beforehand, duh) and a few of my cousins blowing out candles on a massive cake or with huge hunks of watermelon, the juices invariably spilling down my sweaty red face and onto my shirt.

So many of the stories of my youth are told with the backdrop of this family, whether it’s the time Tommy accidently whacked me in the eye while playing pool when I drove my Big Wheel a little too close to the table or the time my sister and I went to Long Beach Island, NJ, with my cousins for a week and I met a girl from Austria. She and I were innocently getting to know each other when a thunderstorm hit, and so we took cover under a deck. In the pre-cell phone days, I had no way of letting my cousins — who technically were my caregivers for the week, though they also gave me beer and taught me how to play gin — know I wasn’t dead. Carol’s husband Steve went out into the storm looking for me and pulled a hamstring in the process. Sorry Steve, but it was totally worth it.

Then I went to college. For a variety of rock-solid, really smart reasons, there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to stay close to home, and I landed in Iowa. Midway through freshman year, my parents called and told me they were moving to South Carolina. A year later, their new house was finished, and I no longer had a real home to go back to. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been back to New York since then.

Because of that, I haven’t seen my aunt or my cousins in at least a decade, probably closer to two. I kept up with a few of them on Facebook for awhile, but they are either right-wing wackos or way too into the drama that I now can’t seem to stand to be around, and so it’s best for me not to see their online presence.

Which leaves me wondering what I’m feeling right now.

Mother Dearest texted me yesterday to tell me my aunt was back in the hospital. She was there a few weeks ago. The Parentals have a tendency to — how shall I put this? — not be the most reliable source on a person’s proximity to the Grim Reaper. They had my grandmother shaking his hand for more than a year before it was actually her time to go hang with him. So when they tell me things are “not good,” I tend to wait for independent confirmation. Thus far, I have received none of that from a reliable source.

Listen, Aunt Pauline is 89 years old. She’s had a magnificent life. She’s an artist — a prolific landscape painter whose home once was filled with canvas upon canvas of her creations. She’s been a singer, a community theater actress, a leader of Jazzercise classes for old people. If she decides she’s done here, hey, I’m all for that. If she’s not and has some fight left in her, more power to her.

I wrote earlier this week about my changing views on the concept of family. I understand the “supposed to’s” of this situation, that I’m supposed to be sad and I’m supposed to head to NY for a funeral should she die and cry with people who are essentially strangers and who know me less than my anonymous readers (Hey you three!) do. My family excels in after-death promises. We’re really good at talking about how we’re so glad we’re there for each other and how we’re going to keep in touch and be closer and blah blah blah. Nothing truly changes in my family. Most live by this motto of “moving forward” after conflict, but we never seem to address the roots of that conflict, so, at best, we move laterally … and then we’re somehow surprised when the same shit happens over and over and over again.

I’m done with that. I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not playing anyone else’s game who is interested in doing that. I might still love most of those who do this, but I’m done. It’s childish and unproductive and just plain stupid. I am choosing to surround myself going forward with family — blood or otherwise — who is interested in being real, in addressing issues that may arise like grown-ass adults, who want to show and receive drama-resistant love.

I don’t know that anything close to that awaits me in New York, and I don’t really want to hear any more bullshit promises about what things are going to be like. Those people are strangers to me. I could walk past them on the street and they wouldn’t recognize me. That really doesn’t fit into this new definition of family, it seems.

So I hope my aunt pulls through if she wants to, and if she doesn’t, I hope she goes onto the There in peace. She’s always been a good aunt to me, and I’ve never doubted her love of me.

I’m not sure how you would feel if you received a call from your boss (a company VP) on a Friday afternoon and were asked to come down to the executive conference room. I know my first thought was, “We have an executive conference room?”

Thankfully, if you take the warehouse off this building, it’s not a huge facility, and I know where the executives’ offices are, so I used my ingenuity to find it.

What I saw when I located it was even more terrifying than the phone call. There, seated in the conference room was not only my boss but the president of the company. Next to him? The owner of the company.

Yeah. That.

Thankfully, it didn’t take long for them to set me at ease. This was a happy time. The company was letting people know about their bonuses. I was under the impression I was not getting a bonus this year. I started with the company in late June, and the pre-hire documents I received told me employees aren’t eligible for a bonus until after the second year.

What the triumvirate wanted to tell me was that they’d made an exception and pushed up my eligibility due to the work I’ve done so far.

You guys, I just about lost it right then and there. And I did lose it when I walked out of the room and went outside to catch my breath.

This has been a long, long road. My career has been off track for a long time now. It started out with such promise. I was the hotshot young newspaper guy, an editor at the age of 22. Then, the industry started dying. Rapidly. It didn’t matter how good you were. What mattered was how much you cost the company and how well you could follow orders to cut costs, which meant cutting people.

So I jumped ship (way too late) and went into marketing and communications. And for awhile, that was good. A series of unfortunate events started in around 2013 or so, and things got progressively more off course from there, leading to a moment in 2019 where I was thoroughly convinced I sucked creatively and had absolutely nothing to offer.

So I took a job with Shriners Hospitals. And I loved it. There, I learned that it was just the previous stop that didn’t seem to understand my creativity. I worked hard at growing that creativity, both at work and through this website. I created characters on here like Q.F. Conseco and Paulie Magnotti and B. Goode and others, partly for shits and giggles, partly to find myself amidst all the voices in my head.

The problem was that the Shriners job was about a 25% pay cut from the job I left after signing the Thing That Does Not Exist. It was great to be creative and know it. It sucked to watch our savings disappear.

So eventually, I asked for Shriners to keep its promises of rewarding me for the work I was doing, which was being used as an example not just for St. Louis before for the entire international system. I was told that three boards would have to consider any salary increase, and my boss, who seemed to love the volume and quality of my work, made it clear she was less in love with fighting for me to be paid fairly for it.

So being on the vanguard of life like I am, I invented quiet quitting before it became a thing.

I did the work they paid me to do, stopped doing what they didn’t pay me to do and started looking for another job. And I found one, marketing real estate, with a team run by a guy who is a great salesman. He showed me his books. I asked all the right questions and I used my superpower sensory perception to try to feel my way through the situation. I looked at his forecasts. The thought was that even if they were off by a third, my quarterly bonuses still would be a huge boost for the family and we’d be able to replenish our savings.

It turns out that, even in the middle of a white-hot housing market, his forecasts were not just a third off of but were 100 percent off. There was no profit to share because, while he might be a good salesman, he knows two things about leading a team and running a business.

Jack
Shit

When that became clear, I didn’t hesitate and started looking to maybe perhaps get paid what independent salary data was telling me I was worth before we as a family actually ran out of money.

And that’s how I landed here. Here, they pay me a very generous base salary, with profit-sharing into my 401(k) at the end of the year. And then they go and do what they did today, which is put their money where their mouths are. They’ve been telling me I’ve been doing a good job, though much less frequently and less loudly than my previous two jobs. I’m 1 million percent cool with that when they are putting actual dollars behind their thoughts of my work.

And so today? Right now? I feel really good about myself. On top of the work I’m doing here, I’ve built up my side gig, Johnny Boy Marketing, in eight months to be a significant source of extra income. Because my day job actually lives the whole work/life balance talk, I have time to work here, do my side gig and run a household with a teenage boy at home and a 20-year-old in college.

I’m thankful — for a lot of things. I’m thankful for a supportive Wifey Poo who has gone through a lot of shit with me, who has had many reasons to not be here and even more reasons to be filled with worry over where our family was headed. She is the rock on which I have been able to rebuild my career. I know that. She knows I know that. I will never be able to thank her enough for it. She’s an amazing mother to our kids, she’s contributed income to our budget while still homeschooling the boys, and I never for one second have worried about who my kids were with while I was at work doing my thing. I am blessed.

With great humility, I’ll also say that I’m proud of myself. It has taken a lot of work to get to where I am today, personally and professionally, and very little of that work has been pretty or easy. It’s been ugly and exceedingly hard.

I made the decision a year or so ago to confront the demons I’d never admitted even existed, and I did that without much support. Doing the work made things worse for awhile. That happens. But what matters is that I did it. It has been horribly difficult, and the battle scars are seen in the gray that dominates my beard, the bags under my eyes and the growing number of wrinkles on my face.

Honestly, I don’t expect to live a long life. Everything that I’ve gone through seems to be goolgeable as a thing that lowers your life expectancy. Add them all together, and I should have been dead 10 years ago. I’m not being fatalistic. Just realistic. I hope I have many years ahead of me to enjoy the fruits of all these labors, but even if I don’t, I’m good with that. I’ve seen what awaits. The There is absolutely amazing and filled with a peace and contentment for which there are no words.

So tonight, I’m going to go home, I’m going to hug my family tight, and I’m going to do something to celebrate. I don’t know what. A cigar and a good bourbon seem in order. Maybe that’ll do.

Whenever it is my time to check out, you guys, all I want to be remembered for is as a guy who didn’t give up, despite all the shit … as a guy who never stopped trying. Someone out there want to tell me they’ll make that happen?

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Aunt Pauline — Dec. 9, 2022

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