Heroes

I see the term "hero" get thrown around a lot. Perhaps the most egregious misuse of the term is calling the victims of 9/11 heroes. I'm not talking about the firefighters and police - it's the poor folks who went to work that day not knowing that was to be the last day of their lives.

I think the reason why it's used in so many ways is because of its emotional weight. It carries different meanings for different people at different ages. Ask me at age 4 who my hero was, and the answer was Superman. I believed this so much so that on my first day of preschool I refused to give up my own name when asked by the new mother-figures I'd come to call teachers; instead I began my school career shouldering a new persona like one hunches into an overcoat. Superman was my name that day, and Superman it would be, until 15 minutes later when the roll was called and, through process of elimination, the stubborn little kid in the back of the room coloring by himself had his secret identity exposed. Son of Jor-El, kneel before Mrs. Zod.

Before pre-school, I was largely raised by my grandparents during the days my mom went back to teaching. Her father's name was James, and he taught me how to gamble, how to craft wood into all manner of useful things, and the names of every WWII aircraft, many of which he flew. My own father's name is James, as was his stepfather James DeMaseo, who we knew as Papa D. Dad once took me on a fishing trip with his friend, James, and it was on the crystal calm of Conesus Lake that I worked into my head this bit of child logic: At some point in my adult life, when the tufts of wires formed under my arms and I my belch stank of Labatts, I too would assume the name James.

Each James in my life has fulfilled said role of heroship. In first grade day my blood stained the snowy hill at Bassett Park from a head wound that delivered me into a warm sleep. I remember waking up in the nursing home that my father carried me to, traversing a quarter-mile of woods and hills in the process. Years later, I took a plum assignment at a newspaper to cover a special exhibit at the Eastman Museum in Rochester that featured Vietnam-era photographs, and the journalists who shot some of the most iconic images of the war. I snuck my dad in the press conference so he could met a few of these guys, and watching the ease with which they slipped into their brothers-in-arms speech was captivating. It gave me a new, and maybe the first, appreciation for what the military was to my father and family, and began to peel away the inky prejudices I felt from my first experiences in the lodges and VFWs I was dragged to as a child.

Papa D will always be remembered for his bar, and the way he used his whole head to chew. Both these memories have strong ties to Thanksgiving, as that's the one time we saw him and the rest of my dad's family consistently each year. That bar was, and is, his bar. Though he died many years ago I saw the Papa Dee's sign outside it just last year, in the same colors my aunt the art teacher hand-painted herself. At thanksgiving the women took over the bar's small but adequate kitchen; we kids explored the dirty nooks and crannies otherwise forgotten - one closet in particular had a 1940s-era vacuum with an enormous grey bag that, if you were small enough, could just barely cover your cousin and you and earn you the titles of Hide-and-See King. Papa D, meanwhile, held court behind the smoke-choked tavern, lording over the family and sneaking maraschino cherries to the kids when their parents weren't looking.

Today my thoughts wandered off of the press releases and e-mails, each popping its own little demand into my electronic subconscious, and for a brief moment I got a chance to revel in knowing my apartment was, for the first time in many moons, clean. And I thought of our small apartment and its amenities, and how it will always be Marcy and my first place together. I thought of other small spaces: That closet at Papa D's bar, the many layers of blankets in a nursing home bed that kept me warm before the paramedics arrived, and Grandpa and Grandma's house. Grandma still live on that second floor of the house on Buffalo's West Side. I go back only occasionally now, but I remember how big it still felt when I was 3 and 4 years old. But in that small home my grandparents managed to raise my mother and aunt, two great ladies in their own right. They shared the apartment's only bedroom, looking out on the vast expanse of siding from the house next door. My grandparents, meanwhile, shared a pull-out couch in the living room.

And they survived the Great Depression, and World War II. Hell, they survived Nixon.

And I thought, "Now there go two heroes." And it makes my own little corner of the world feel that much bigger.