Tom.
NOTE: I wrote this back in 2016. I’m putting it here so I know that it’s safe and secure.
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If there’s one person to blame for the stream of nonsense that I amuse and torture many with on this god forsaken hive of rude comments known as the internet, it’s the man who let me on there for the first time. Modems connected to phone lines, screeching and hissing until hitting the satisfying beeps that let me know I was connected to the rest of the world. The highlights of my trips to Decatur, Alabama — my father’s hometown — was both seeing family and getting access to America Online on a clunky CRT Monitor in the hobby room of the back of 1411 Runnymeade SW.
Some also know this as the longtime, but former — home of Thomas Lynn Barnette. His wife, Diane, and long ago, their kids Chrystina, John, Kelly and Kyle.
At the risk of making this about me, and it is, because it’s my tale to tell, I always thought of Tommy as my second dad. His kids were my distant siblings. Kelly and Kyle, both several years older than me, but the same age themselves (they’re twins) humored my over excited ramblings and exaggerations, and let me root through their cast-off M.A.S.K. and Go-bot toys, marveling at the things my parents wouldn’t buy for me. Family dinners on Sundays when we visited were like reunions to me. Seeing John take all his food and mash it together made me happy for some reason, and I followed suit. It was so much more efficient! Chrystina, I didn’t see so much, because she was off doing smart folk computer things.
I remember often wishing I could live in Decatur, and that I could live with Tom and Diane and the twins, not even realizing that the twins were probably *not* going to live there much longer, because they were becoming adults. All I could see was brothers I didn’t have, toys that I wanted, Tom’s big architectural table and his cool tiny Bonsai trees, which I ogled and didn’t dare to touch.
I could always count on staying at my grandparents house on Evelee St., and staying in the same high-off-the-floor bed, surrounded by quilts and old photos and Reader’s Digests from a decade and-a-half before. I’d lay on the orange carpet, surrounded by orange la-z-boy chairs with the plastic still on them, as Lawrence Welk blared on the giant wooden television. I could always count on my Dad’s other brother, who at some point has gone by the names of Jerry or Lamar or “Bit” to come by on Sunday and, I guess, help my grandparents out.
I like Jerry okay. I don’t understand him, but that’s fine. I don’t understand a lot of things.
But I adored Tommy.
And before you think it, yes my uncles are named Tom and Jerry.
Well, they were.
Tom died this morning at about 1:00am from the 1–2–3–4–5 punch of having diabetes, lymphoma cancer, congestive heart failure, pneumonia and being 53 days shy of hitting 79 years of age.
So, here’s who Tom was — to me.
He was born on April 10, 1937 to John Edward “J.E.” and Mabel Barnette in Alabama. Same birthday week as myself and the twins.
He went to Auburn. He worked lord-only-knows how many years at Monsanto.
Auburn and Monsanto are both normally things that when involved with, normal folk would hold against somebody, but I never did. Not with Tom.
I adored the man with a passion. I idolized his cool demeanor. He never acted like he was shaken by anything. Where Diane felt somewhat neurotic at times, you could count on Tom being the counterpoint, shrugging his shoulders. “What are you gonna do?”
Always non-plussed, and quick with a joke in that low, southern drawl. A little nasal, but deep. He shares that same vocal affect with Jerry (or Lamar or Bit — whichever one you call him.)
Always with his glasses perched on the middle of his nose, so he could drop that chin when you said something worth peering at you over the frames at. The absolute stone cold dryness of his sense of humor has always been my goal in any attempts to be funny. To deliver lines so clean and cutting and just…funny, with no hint that you’re joking. No tell that you’re being sarcastic. It tickled me severely. I loved it. I loved him. I still love him. I always will.
He married my Aunt Diane when my Dad was eight. Tom was 22. That was in 1959. Let’s just say that my Dad was a post-World War 2 baby and just leave it at that.
That means that until 1:00am this morning, they were married for 55 years and change. These days, that’s what the kids call impressive.
Some statistics — because this is how my brain works.
Tom was here for 28,804 days. That’s 78 years, 10 months, and 9 days. 4114 weeks and 6 days. There’s many other breakdowns of this but it’s only interesting to me. Probably.
But in all that time, Tom brought this world that glare, that sense of humor, the untouchable love that he had for his wife, Diane and all his boys. His boys brought him grandkids, and those grandkids, in these last few years, brought him great-grandkids. He had told me he was now a “Great Grandpa” and I assured him that he was just an “okay Grandpa.” He found that amusing. It doesn’t mean he didn’t peer at me over those glasses, though.
Tom was 42 when I was born in 1979 which is just a few years older than I am now. I don’t know that anyone will look back fondly at what I bring to the table. I have no kids, and for myriad reasons, neither my wife or myself are expecting any, either. I have no siblings. I’m estranged from my extremely tiny family on my mother’s side, and the only shot I’ll ever have at being an uncle rests on my sister-in-law’s shoulders.
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I look at the stats of my blood relatives and my grandfather J.E. died when he was 88. Mabel was 83. My other grandfather Jess was 63 and Dorothy was 75. Tom was right at 80.
It’s hard to come to grips that I’m entering the second half of my life, if it’s even as long as the first half, and that I probably won’t have the same sort of lasting impact that the general incomparable goodness that Tom Barnette exuded had on me. He was warm, loving, quick with a hug, great with advice, funny as hell and always — ALWAYS — had my Dad’s back. He was my mom’s favorite, too.
I hate that my living so far away kept me from seeing him more often, but I am happy that a few years ago, through the luck of a live event my job at the time was broadcasting, took me to, of all places, my Dad’s hometown of Decatur. I got to visit with Kyle and Diane, but most of all…Tommy.
We cut up and made sly little cuts at each other. Reminisced about J.E. and Mabel and Aunt Matt and Pearl and Carl and his big bike he’d ride around in and the squirrels in Papaw’s backyard and I kept thinking the Kurt Vonnegut line “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Tom and Diane had moved to Diane’s mother’s house following her death. I always was amused that they’d moved to “Penny Lane”, because of the Beatles song. In the last few years, both of them having health problems, had moved to a condo sort of situation. I never got to visit them there. Haven’t seen any of the family in years, either. Both from the nature of my job and the fact that I live pretty far away from all of my family and going to visit is a bear. I talk with John and Chrystina and Kelly and Kyle on social media. They put up with me, despite my flaws, and don’t treat me weird for being the weird one. They just love me. Just like their Dad did. Just like I do to them and their Dad.
Tom popped up on Facebook a few years ago. I don’t know if he just didn’t see my page or if Diane told him not to come to mine because I cuss too much and am occasionally ornery. (Quit snickering.)
I don’t know that he really ever got on much except for the very first time he got on and sent people a bunch of requests. To my knowledge this is the only public message he ever posted on that site.
“May 30, 2012 · Howdy all! Thanks for accepting my friend requests. Be sure to write to me often as I am bored and need something to do.”
I sent him a friend request. Then, this morning, two years after I sent said friend request, I clicked the button that said “Friend Request Sent” and cancelled it.
That’s the first and only time I ever saw him write anything on any website. It’s probably an example I should follow more, too. Go live life and quit trying to prove that I’m doing it.
I am not going to his funeral. This isn’t out of disrespect because I don’t know that I have more respect for almost anyone than I do for Tom Barnette.
It’s because I can’t deal with it.
I don’t want to travel that far to see him like that and I don’t want to hear anyone who doesn’t know him, talking about him at his funeral. I’ve had my fill of that the last couple of years, hearing preachers using the end of someone’s life as an excuse to preach a sermon instead of paying tribute to a tangible person. With Faye, and before that, John and before that J.E., Dorothy, Mabel, Jess — the list goes on. I can’t stomach the aggravation along with the grief I am already feeling. Much like religion, I prefer to observe in private.
But that’s in the future. Right now, there is pressure welling up behind my eyes and in my face. It is immense and the tears are coming. It is hitting me that he’s gone, and that we’ll never tell each other we love each other again and I hate it. I will miss those big bear hugs and him always whispering something to me when I got in close. But you don’t get to have that. That’s mine.
What is mine, though, that I don’t want, is that once I saw tributes to Tommy start popping up — was the fact I could not let my father find out his eldest brother had died this way.
So I called my Dad and told him that his oldest brother had died.
I don’t want to wish that task on anyone, anywhere, ever.
I hung up the phone and was destroyed.
I wish we had more time, Uncle Tommy. I’m angry at myself that I take family for granted. That I allow life and distractions to take away from things that are important. That I take for granted that everyone is just there, in idyllic Decatur, Alabama, waiting for us to drop in from Big City Nashville to grace them with our presence.
Now almost none of them are there. Kyle and Kelly and his wife Beth and their daughter are in East Tennessee. Chrystina and Monica and their gang of four are outside Atlanta. John and Stephanie are still in Decatur, but both of their kids are moved out and married, one with a kid. And I didn’t make it to either one of their weddings and I’ve never met their spouses.
The person I feel the worst for out of all of this is my Aunt Diane. We’ve always had a weird relationship, in that I always feel as if she is merely putting up with me being there because Tom liked me. But then again, I have trouble reading her, which I don’t have an issue with with most people, so maybe I just take what she says out of context. I love her, though, because Tom loved her. Because my surrogate siblings John and Chrystina and Kelly and Kyle all love her.
I hope she can find peace in all of this. She’s had a hard road the last decade or so, too, and I’m sure this is just the icing on the cake that she never wanted.
I love her dearly, though, even if she was just biding her time with me. I love all my family for putting up with me, because I know I can be a handful. That I’m the one who yells liberal garbage and makes fun of church and dislikes football. I don’t fit in and I know it and it’s taken almost 37 years to come to some functioning terms with that.
But Tom was the rarity in my life. The person who just made me feel comfortable in my own skin. One of the only people I trusted absolutely and who accepted me completely.
And now he’s dead in Decatur and his kids are having to deal with the aftermath and it breaks my heart. It makes me question everything. It makes me look at my own mortality. At my parent’s mortality. I wonder when I will have to deal with one or both of them passing. I could have already dealt with it. They were in a terrible car accident a few years ago. Dad was in another horrific car accident last year. It can happen in the snap of your fingers…yet we all act like it’s not going to. It’s the biggest delusion of all that we can just keep being petty and weird and insulted and secretive from each other like all of it is going to last forever and that your time wouldn’t be better spent loving the family that loves you back. But instead of harping on this and being cliche or maudlin, I will just urge those of you who knew Tom to celebrate his legacy of just being a sincere, good, loving man.
