It is the Monday before Thanksgiving. Today is my youngest brother’s birthday. I was six when he was born, and 14 years later I took him to a Phish concert in Wisconsin, where my boyfriend at the time overdosed on LSD, lost his shoes, and ended up in the psychiatric ward of the nearest major hospital. I sold our tickets for the following night’s show and took Paul home to Chicago, not super eager to explain to our parents what he’d been exposed to: no actual drugs, but the afterschool-special-type results of mixing jam bands, camping, and irresponsible college students who had too much disposable income.

In hindsight, perhaps it was an important formative lesson.

The boyfriend didn’t last, but my brother and I continued going to concerts together. Bob Dylan, REM, Modest Mouse, The National, Maceo Parker. Our music history is long, and has included no further drug drama, unless you count that one Widespread Panic show in Berkeley when Paul was 17, but I don’t really count that. Everyone sleeps in a hallway at some point in their lives.

Now my brother is in San Francisco for the month, so I got to celebrate his birthday with him tonight, just as he was at my birthday dinner earlier this month. We haven’t actually lived in the same city since he was 11, and I like having him around. He babysits, and watches football with us. We talk about books. Tonight at dinner, everyone shared Paul stories. The time he fell asleep in his bed during a game of hide-and-seek and my mom couldn’t find him. The time he ran out the kitchen door and fell off the back of our house when the deck was being redone. The time his name in the preschool yearbook simply read P.P. Corliano—and no one knows why.

Paul was born on our grandpa’s 60th birthday. If Papa were alive, he would turn 91 today. It was at his funeral four years ago that I experienced the first symptoms of ALS, although I didn’t know what they were at the time. That was the last day I wore 3-inch heels. Scarlett was a baby, crawling around the funeral home and putting her mouth directly on the tightly woven carpet that greeted stampedes of mourners with their dirty shoes.

Losing my grandpa was devastating, but it didn’t feel like a tragedy. Scarlett made an unsolicited comment about it today, in fact. “Papa had a good life.” And he did. 8 kids, 22 grandchildren. A soda jerk turned sax player. A dog lover who smoked Swisher Sweets. A blue-eyed Polish człowiek who grew up baking potatoes in a field for fun, whose sculpted nose was much admired by those of us who came out looking more like the Italian side of our family—not that we’re complaining.

I’m thinking about those two birthday guys today, and I’m also thinking about my brother-in-law John, who passed away two years ago tomorrow. I’m thinking about the two women I knew with ALS who lost their lives this week. I’m thinking about how fleeting it all is. About what you remember, and what you forget.

One day, your grandpa is a pontoon boat captain in a mesh trucker hat, and your brother is the baby that everyone wants to sit next to in the car. You tell yourself that this is what life is like, because that is your life—the majority of days played out in the backyard, where that fat baby sits in the sandbox in his Superman cape, or in your grandparents’ living room, the center of an entire universe.

Then suddenly, you’re hiding in your daughter’s bedroom while she and two of her friends take an Italian lesson in the dining room, which is the center of her universe, and your fingers are cramped from typing, and she keeps popping in to look at you, because you are the memories she’s making.

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