June 28, 2025
Cal's Celebration of Life
The Burren Backroom, Somerville
Of the many things that I’m grateful to Cal for, our beautiful daughter, and the way Cal cared for her with such unconditional love, is right there at the top of the list.
Cal was a saver. Rachael and I recently cleared out his overflowing storage unit (which we could not have done without the heroic help of my nephews and friends), and as we waded through every key Cal had ever encountered, the high school jacket, the bows and arrows, and the 1990s electric typewriter in its original box, I stumbled upon a couple of nondescript notebooks. Page after page, filled with Cal’s distinctive scrawl—no cross-outs, no start-overs. At the top were the words “I Am Born.”
The notebooks described a childhood growing up on a farm in the breathtaking mountains of Jamaica, with no electricity or running water. An older cousin would carry Cal on his head to the bush in a wooden box, and from that box, three-year-old Junior (as Cal was called) had a job: while the adults worked, he was entrusted with watching the simmering lunch pot and calling out to his grandmother if the fire was dying or the pot needed stirring. His responsibilities—and his abilities—would only grow from there.
In the absence of his father—and for most of the time, his mother, who was a traveling nurse—Junior was raised by a grandmother whom he called “Mama,” who was equally at home birthing babies as she was hurling a machete through the air with perfect aim … to stick in the ground beside the foot of a bully who dared to harm her grandson.
Mama Lil (as she was known) was the village doctor, midwife, and undertaker, when she wasn’t running the farm or cooking dinner for the local reverend and his unpredictable entourage. Junior’s chores on the farm may have been many, but there was always time to play and laugh and pull pranks and listen to the adults tell spooky stories while the children helped to peel a roomful of ginger.
Cal’s grandmother was his rock, and his defender. So when, at the age of 9, he was summoned to America to join his mother (whom he called “Aunt Hazel”) and a new stepfather, Cal expected it to be only temporary. He could not anticipate, when he landed in frigid, snowy Boston, that his life would change so profoundly—and that he would not see his grandmother again for 15 years.
I felt blessed to accompany Cal on that trip back to Jamaica, in 1978.
Cal and I had met at Tufts a couple of years prior, at the height of the busing crisis—me, all of 19, and him, 21. (To be precise, he often told a story about spotting me years before we met, and feeling an instant kinship … But, I digress.)
When we crossed paths in Miller Hall almost 50 years ago, I was recovering from a young breakup and depressed enough that I was thinking of leaving school. But Cal, for whom learning was a higher power, persuaded me to stay (and it didn’t hurt that this guy, with his strong shoulders and kind eyes, was happy to usher me into his world—to hang with the cool kids at the radio station, where he hosted his Friday-night reggae show).
It may have seemed like an unlikely pairing (and to my father, who taught in public schools and worried for my safety, it was an ill-advised one). But as two smart kids from the city who were working our way through school, we found a comforting common ground. Cal was the affable foil to my shyness. And he was a giver—more than almost anyone I have ever known.
It soon became clear, to my dad and everyone else, that Cal was a safe place. He supported my whims: on a first date, when I admired some blue roadside flowers from the car, Cal pulled over, ran across lanes of traffic, and yanked those weeds up for me, roots and all. When I was interested in photography, he built me a full home darkroom, as a surprise. When I aspired to do a photo series involving a mannequin, he came home hoisting one under his arm, with body parts protruding from his pockets.
The word “gentle” is often used to describe Cal, and if you saw him coaxing my mom to eat, on his visits to her rehab, you would have no doubts. At the same time, his sense of personal justice was biblical, and you would not want to cross him. That “flushing someone's head down the toilet” incident that Rachael mentions? It happened after a 10-year-old Cal was called the N-word for the first time.
But Cal also knew a different kind of power. In one story that my father would have chuckled at, my Aunt Rita, who was known for her astonishing (shall we say) lack of tolerance, somehow took a shine to Cal—her one exception. Commanding Rita’s respect, her family says, should be counted among Cal’s greatest achievements. In the end, Rita requested that Cal be one of her pallbearers.
Cal and I weren’t together for all of those 50 years. But we were never “estranged.” We were always, deeply, connected. Summer trips to the Vineyard and Prince Edward Island, with two kids, two greyhounds, and a cat, in a standard-size van. A visit with friends in Mexico, where Cal casually pulled out a contraband pocket-knife and beheaded a scorpion. But beyond the expected holidays or school events were the endless shared, ordinary moments that create a common vernacular. A lingua franca. For Cal, for both of us: family was sacred.
There’s so much more that I want to say—about Cal’s resilience; how he never stopped learning. How he reinvented himself as many times as life threw him curve balls. How he moved from the DJ booth to the mechanic’s bay to the pilot’s cockpit to the stage, building sets for the most prestigious area theaters. How damn smart he was, and how funny.
How he was my rock, and my protector.
In the end it was only love, come full circle. When Cal got sick, and I was his proxy, we were both on the phone with hospital registration, who wanted to know my relationship to the patient. “I’m his former wife,” I said. “We don’t have a category for that,” the woman told us. She started to list some alternatives, but Cal and I were already beating her to it. “Partners in crime?” I suggested. “Best buddies?” added Cal. We didn’t know what she chose until I saw “life partner” written on the board in his hospital room. And I realized how apt that was—partners for a lifetime, in all its permutations.
When Cal left this world for another, it felt like losing a protective layer of skin. It still does. But what helps is to share his stories, and to hear the stories of the many people who knew and loved him. To that end, we’ve transcribed his memoirs and started a little website-in-progress (you’ll find the url on your program).
And to you, Cal, who have always been family, and so much more, to me, for now I’ll leave words that were passed along from my grandmother, my Irish grandmother:
Goodnight, happy dreams, dream of the angels, I love you.