J is for those J names

November 10, 2023

J is for those J names

***I’m going to try to post something every day in the month of November. I definitely may not- it’s just a goal and I’m not going to be upset about missing it! Hopefully in my spare time, I can come up with a post per day. My prompts are going to be the letters of the alphabet. I will write about something that starts with the day’s letter- think Sesame Street meets the blogsphere. Of course there are more days in the month of November than there are letters in the alphabet. I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it!***

My favorite J names- the guys who mean the most to me (besides Donnie) all have names that start with the letter J. Here are my favorite J guys-

John- my oldest brother John. John is almost four years older than I am. As the oldest kid in our family, he experienced all the milestones first and I always looked up to him. The biggest thing that I recall about our youth is John’s near obsession with the sport teams whom he rooted for. Specifically, he was (and is) a huge St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan. I guess he got this from my dad who liked the Cardinals. However, my dad was more one of those, “Gee, I hope my team wins,” type of fan as opposed to John’s adulation of the team. Do you know how well KMOX (The Voice of St. Louis) doesn’t come in from St. Louis all the way to Indiana? Yet the staticy, tinny sounds interspersed with the occasional sound of a baseball game coming through a transistor radio formed the sound backdrop of my youth whenever I was near John in late spring or summer. One time, John was driving one of my friends and me somewhere. The radio was set to KMOX and the voice of St. Louis was struggling to transmit auditorily comprehensible sounds of a ball game in St. Louis. “Do you think you could ask your brother to change the radio station?” my friend whispered to me. I shook my head no. I didn’t even ask. John wasn’t going to change that station for anything!

Another thing about John is that he and his love of another sports team, Indiana University basketball, is the main reason that I attended Indiana University! An odd reason for sure but I was going to attend a state university which narrowed the list down and IU was a good school so it perhaps isn’t that odd. But the main reason I chose that school is that I’d become an IU basketball fan because of John. My two other brothers were huge Purdue fans (the two teams were big rivals) and I felt sorry for John that he had no one to root for IU with so I decided to become an IU fan. Once a fan, it made sense to go there for college, right??

John is a lifelong bachelor living in western IL (not too far from his beloved STL!) and when the pandemic reared its ugly head in 2020, I decided to reach out to John more. Before the pandemic, we would text and talk on the phone sporadically. When everything shut down and people retreated inside their homes, I made it a priority to call John every day. Now three years on, we still talk on the phone almost every day. We usually don’t talk for long and the weather almost always comes up. I can tell you the weather variations between western Illinois and western Ohio to anyone who would like to know! We also talk about current events (we actually don’t see eye to eye on everything (most family members and I do) but we agree about most things politically) and the general state of the world.

John is a bit of a pessimistic person (it runs in the family...) and worries quite a bit. He was actually the one who realized that something was wrong with our brother Jay when Jay didn’t text or call John back. This happened about six years ago. John texted me that he was very worried that he hadn’t been able to get in contact of Jay. I told John that very likely everything was OK. Maybe Jay had lost his phone or it was’t working properly. Goodness knows that Jay wasn’t very healthy. Hopefully worst case scenario was that he was in the hospital without his phone.

John’s fears, were, unfortunately, founded. Our brother Jay had died.

Jay was my second to oldest brother. When he was three, this would have been right around the time I was born because he’s three years older than I am, Jay was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis. Jay’s ability to move was severely hampered due to the disease. He spent part of his childhood in a wheelchair. He joints (or near his joints) would fill with fluid and he would need to go to the nearest children´s hospital, Riley’s in Indianapolis which was a 2 1/2 hour drive from our house. When he was home, he had to wear plastic, removable casts on his arms and legs overnight. Jay could walk, when he wasn’t in a wheelchair but he could not run or jump. His disability cast a pallor over his childhood and ours as well. We felt bad for him and then felt bad that we felt bad. No one wants to be pitied. But no one wanted to be the kid who always had to look on instead of joining in play.

I can only remember one instance of my mom going Mama Bear my entire childhood and that was when Jay received a C on his report card in PE one year in elementary school. Mom was enraged. “He can’t do the activities the kids are doing. He’d love to but he can’t. The gym teacher will remove the C from his grade card!” mom bellowed to the principal. In the gym teacher’s defense, she probably thought that she was being nice? I mean, technically, he failed the class if the criteria was doing a set of activities and he didn’t do them. Though, one would think that someone’s inability to physically do them would alter the expectation for that student?

Not to be excessively melodramatic but Jay never enjoyed a healthy day in his life after his diagnosis. The strong medications that he took for his arthritis adversely impacted his esophagus and other organs. As an adult, Jay was prone to ulcers and terrible heartburn. He also had poor circulation with the tips of his fingers and toes often blue. The latter condition was a symptom of the condition that ended up taking Jay’s life, called CREST before he was fifty years old.

When he was alive, Jay bravely lived with the physical and mental pain of his various conditions. I know that he is in heaven with our mom and dad and I take much comfort from that!

My little brother Joe- little Joey- just the nicest guy in the world. He started as the best little brother in the world and has, actually, maintained that position in my mind! Joe is about 22 months younger than I am which is the largest age gap between any of my siblings and me. I spent way more time with my sister growing up. But, when she started being more interested in friends and boys and fashion when I was still a kid, Joe and I played together a lot. Joe had a sweetness to him that would toughen up a little in adolescence but would return with a vengeance when he was an adult ;).

Joe is the best athlete of the bunch of us. Our school was a small one- secrets were few and talent was rare. The high school football coach heard that Joe was a fast runner and wanted him to be a running back on the football team. Mom had plans for Joe that didn’t include him getting tackled by those quite a bit larger than he so he never ended up playing football in high school. He was a really good baseball player but a chance encounter on a golf course changed his baseball dreams. A friend of Joe’s invited Joe to go golfing with him and his dad. Not surprisingly, Joe was a really good golfer. He went golfing just a couple of more times and decided that he really liked it. He joined the golf team in high school instead of the baseball team, like we´d all assumed he’d play and ended up being one of our school’s best golfers ever. Not bad for a kid without a dad to take him golfing (I mean Joe had no dad to take him golfing since our dad was dead by the time Joe was in high school but had dad been alive and well, he would not have taken Joe golfing since he was not a golfer) and played with cheap, used golf clubs cause aint no one in our family had the money to buy him a nice new set of clubs.

Today Joe lives three hours away in good ‘ol Indiana. We don’t see each other as often as would be ideal due to calendars getting filled up but we keep in good contact via text and see each other at important gatherings.

So those are my OG J’s. The newest J to me is, of course, our very own Jacob. I do like that Jacob’s name starts with a J like all three of my brothers’ names do. Not that the J factored into our naming him Jacob- we along with thousands of parents decided to name our boys that in the early part of the century (Jacob was the number one boys name in American from 1999- 2012). For us, it was because we liked the name not due to what letter it started with. I’ve written about Jacob a time or two or a thousand so I won’t say much more here because I need to wrap this up... But one thing I love is that Jacob is good friends with twin brothers who seem like great guys. He met them in college through an honors fraternity and as it turns out, they grew up not far from us here in Springboro. Their names are Joe and John and it makes me irrationally happy that he is friends with two brothers named Joe and John 🤭

A few pics- many really good pictures with Jay in them are in storage somewhere (probably from when we compiled some for his funeral)

Jay and his dog Cubby

Jay and me from a long time ago!

I like the smile on Jay´s face here. He was also a quiet, contemplative guy.

I don´t know why Jay was not in this picture. I know I have a good one of all three brothers at my sister´s wedding but it must be with a stack of others that I can´t find. Her are Joe and John.