How to Love a Wolf: Michael Shanahan, March 12, 2020
How to Love a Wolf: Michael Shanahan
Today I had lunch with a friend and colleague in the local diner, Aladdin's, a Granville institution where bacon and hash brown dreams come true. We were digging into the rather enlarged chit chat of the day when I leaned forward and turned around, glancing over my right shoulder, as one does, to check to see who else was present. A bright-eyed and strangely familiar young man sitting diagonally at a two-top met my gaze with a smile; and without hesitation said, "Hi Aunt Molly."
I paused. A beat. Then jumped up from the booth as if controlled by a force outside myself and exclaimed, actually loudly: "Oh my God...Michael!"
My first cousin Tim Shanahan's son Michael is a student at Denison. We'd never met.
How is this possible?
God, who knows.
We embraced. We embraced in the time of Corona. I felt happy. I felt the weave, the pills, and age of Michael's blue-checked flannel shirt. He sat with us, me and my friend, for a few minutes as I ordered my decadent greasy meal, and as it came, greasy and decadent and salty. I asked my friend many times: "Do you see the resemblance?" He said, no, but what a nice kid. Later, he said, yes, now I see it. Yes, I see it.
***
I don't know how families manage to drift apart yet stay together. But they do.
Fascia. Go figure.
Our family: the big, Irish, Catholic (present writer excepted), fraught, lovely, loving, angry, smart, dramatic, kind, a-r-t-i-c-u-l-a-t-e, did-I-say-fraught (?) family. It was so moving to be called "Aunt Molly," over and over (even though I could walk anyone through the cousin, second cousin arrangement.) My heart swelled that this lovely young man thought of me, tenaciously, as Aunt Molly. (Of course I will likely often and sometimes only and for long stretches always think of myself as a young girl barely his age; a wolf, maybe, but not an Aunt.)
I think of course of my dad, who is Michael's great uncle; Michael's grandad's brother. My dad: who I love so much.
Oh, the Shanahan family. How I have pushed up against my Shanahan-ness! My family-ness! My connected-ness! Yet the moment a Shanahan opens their mouth I see myself and feel weirdly proud and weirdly calm. Shoulders drop.
I am a lone wolf, and my dad has always committed to seeing me in my lone-ness, my wolf-ness, even when disbelieving it, even when adding skepticism to my fervor, and especially, thank God, when I have been on my human knees needing the strength of a person who is familiar. And to whom I can whisper, "I am on my knees. Please help me."
In this Corona-time we all, I think, think of family. I sure do. I considered an escape to Canada just yesterday. Worried over my family there. My dad.
I pull back when feeling grows too large.
Michael said, "I thought of you just yesterday...because I don't know if we'll be back." He is a senior, and packing up, like his peers, uncertain if they will celebrate their graduation.
This is life. A connection with family by utter chance, as a global pandemic unfolds, in the smallest town I'll ever live, and my own alma mater, a place so deeply fraught and so deeply promising I can hardly keep up.
My melancholy is profound.
(It is my dearest friend, next to movement and the ineffable.)