The first time I remember hearing the story was on a long car trip with my dad and some family friends. We were driving to Gettysburg, and he was waxing eloquent about his grad school days in Chicago. I was only half-listening, and then, all in a moment, I was fully listening because the story he was telling was not one I’d heard before. The characters and the setting were all new. In my memory the first telling of that story went on for forty-five minutes and felt like a whole tv miniseries, fantastic and weird and wonderful.

I’ve heard it a few times since and it doesn’t seem to last quite as long anymore or be quite the fully immersive experience. Over time it has become less funny and more moving to me, and with each new time I hear my dad tell it I find myself with more questions about its heroes. But here—to the best of my ability—is the tale, likely embellished over time in small hazy ways by both my father’s memory and my own:

My dad moved from California to Chicago for grad school around the summer of 1981, but California was not the only place his people were from. His grandmother was from Louisiana out in Goldonna, which I’ve always pictured as sepia-toned, railroad-track-laden swampland. He wasn’t really in touch with any family from back that way, but his grandma of course still was, and when he left for Chicago, she reminded him that he had kin there. One of her Louisiana cousins, Aubyn Hoyle, and her common law husband, Joe Sebold, had lived in Chicago for several years. Like a good boy, he would, of course, need to look them up. 

Perhaps he did or perhaps his Grandma Veonia, called up Aubyn herself to pass along my dad’s number, but the fact remains that they invited him to spend Thanksgiving with him that first autumn. Aubyn and Joe were going to show him a day on the town.

They pulled up to his apartment at the University of Chicago in a pick-up which didn’t seem to have enough working parts to power a lawnmower. They were probably in their forties, but because of hard-living and a scant amount of teeth, looked much older. They were, however, thrilled to have a chance to be hospitable, and to a polite young relation on top of that.

The first place they insisted on taking their PhD-bound cousin was to see their doctor. Doctors, they felt warmly, should associate with doctors, and theirs was especially good, they assured my dad. So soon they were climbing up long flights of stairs to see Dr. Aspirin, their veterinarian. Despite the fact that it was Thanksgiving Day, his waiting room was full of folks who did not look entirely well themselves speaking a variety of languages with decrepit animals languishing across their laps and at their feet. Canine skin diseases seemed to be prominent. Aubyn and Joe marched my dad to the front of the line and asked the wildly overworked receptionist if they could see Dr. Aspirin. “This here’s our kin, and he’s studying to be a doctor, so we want him to meet our doctor.” The receptionist said she would see what she could do, so Aubyn and Joe and my dad settled in with the rest of the hoi polloi to wait. They waited and waited, which of course was to be expected at a doctor’s office, particularly when you were just there to make a social call, but eventually, the honest-to-goodness Dr. Aspirin appeared. He was a tiny Filipino man in a white coat marked by all manner of fluids. Aubyn and Joe explained who my dad was and what they had in common, and the doctor shook his hand very cordially. Aubyn and Joe were well-pleased.

The next stop was Navy Pier which, in the early eighties was no great attraction, but a crowded gray hulk reaching an arm out into Lake Michigan. And then onto what my dad’s hosts assured him was their favorite piece of sculpture in the whole city. And it was, in its own way, a marvel. Forty feet tall, on a rotating platform at the edge of a junkyard were washers welded to lawnmowers fused to the bumpers of old trucks all sticking out at various angles, forming a looming silhouette of machine life and art. It looked as if the thing had grown there, though in retrospect, it couldn’t possibly have. As they wended from stop to stop Aubyn and Joe kept up a regular chatter in the front seat, often turning around to my dad to address him about various aspects of their lives or their city. At one point Aubyn, craned back and announced, with a clear belief that my dad needed to be informed, “You know, dog is God spelled backwards.”

Thanksgiving dinner was special, Joe told my dad, and turned out to take place at a cafeteria in which the turkey consisted of a variety of meat substances stuffed into a fowl-shaped mold, like a sausage casing, and then revealed in glory to the beholder. It was simultaneously a feast for both the eyes and the stomach, as well as appropriate for Aubyn and Joe’s great dearth of teeth. After dinner they took my dad back to their apartment, which was up many flights of stairs, just as Dr. Aspirin’s office had been, and, once inside, was piled high with all manner of things. But as one does with kin, they extracted the family album from one of the many piles and laid it across my dad’s lap for him to appreciate. He opened it, and three cockroaches ran out, skittering across the room and away to cover. Aubyn was not concerned by this intrusion, but began the pleasant due diligence of pointing out all the photos of his grandma as a little girl, as well as legions of relations he had never met.

At last, as my dad was hoping to make his exit, Joe announced that they needed to show him “what they made.” So they led him to the second bedroom, and he opened the door and peered in. But instead of disordered hills of junk, he found tables covered in careful architectural miniatures: the White House, the Empire State Building, the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, all built entirely of popsicle sticks. They were intricate and ordered and clearly represented many hours of work. Aubyn and Joe glowed with pride behind him. These people had dedicated themselves to building a world. My dad couldn’t think of what to say, and so he asked, “Where do you get all the popsicle sticks?” It turned out to be a foolish question, because they then led him to the kitchen and opened the freezer, which was full, of course, of popsicles. Joe smiled his toothless smile.

My dad never saw them again after that one Thanksgiving with all its revelations, but there is a coda to the story. Years later, he was contacted by a lawyer who told him that Joe Sebold had passed away and left my father a few acres of land down in Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana. There were no buildings to speak of on it, and it was hot and sodden and isolated. My dad was in the midst of finishing his doctorate and getting married, so he did the practical thing—he had the lawyer sell the land sight unseen. But Joe had, at the last, done that thing he and Aubyn knew best—reach out to kin, and hold nothing back, offer the very best of what you’ve got.