In secret soon before my father died, I was writing a memoir about him called Dad is Good. In it, I refused to talk about the daddy issues I mention elsewhere. I resolved only to talk about the qualitative goods of fatherhood in general, of my father in specific. To him.

Then he died stupid early right as he turned 65. He’d planned to retire in Tennessee with my hilarious black Dominican step mom. He had the means. But he died. Some of the Steve the Legend stuff came out of that. A sequel to Bell Hammers, etc.

So in private, I’ve been revisiting that memoir and trying to unblock all of these good memories of dad. I wanted to share a little of that today: dad is good at redefining family.

Now that I think about it, my earliest memories do exist and do exist a bit scattered, something like Stephen King’s: slightly out of focus. But I will continue to think through the lens of the good my earthly father gave me.

I remember him playing games with me. Lots of boardgames, not so much specific toys (though he certainly helped me form a robust imagination, as I’ll get into later). He’d get down on my level.

Around this time he had a massive beard and black hair, the very image of the seventies without its most dated trappings embodied in nineteen nineties blue collar wear. I remember how he would get down to play a game of tiddlywinks, Lincoln Logs, or this weird vibrating bird with a massive neck that ate worms. All plastic. The world ran on the petrol that’s killing us.

I giggled often, but was highly curious in a very sociable home. Not necessarily extroverted — though that in part — but I had the sort of narcoleptic sleep apnea habits that would cause me to fall asleep in my food early on. That combined with my intense need to be left alone to draw, to pretend, to make up a story was all inherently — I would later guess — difficult for my verbal and communal processing father.

But he managed as well as could be managed, often giving me specific drawing projects and the like. Though he grew harsher later, I benefitted early on from his refusal to be over restrictive with what movies I saw. So he watched over me as I watched what I called the Wizad A Poz and Ting Tong. You know, the one with the lions and tigers and bears and the one with the giant ape.

They quickly because favorites I’d share with him, early mythopoetic structures for my mind. Of the journey home by way of seeing the true spirits of the locals who annoyed you, seeing them anew in a fantastic environ. Of the beauty and the beast mythos writ large in post industrial New York City, the place I would later live longer than in the Joplin of my post-college years.

It became groundwork for my future obsessions with myth and fantasy and urban landscapes and eldritch worlds and the meaning of virtue and the hatred of violence. Specifically towards nature, the beasts, and one another. I think too the various oppressed peoples of different backgrounds in the world of the yellow brick world did something for me that a film such as the Lone Ranger may have missed.

Dad would talk through the meaning of these things with blue collar words that poetically hid deeper, darker waters. I don’t remember the structure or form of the conversations so much as having had them on the couch. This is a man who introduced me to Citizen Kane because he thought it important, not because anyone told him he should think so. Afterwards he would let me lay on his hairy chest and fall asleep. For we often went bareback in the Schaubert household.

In that respect and early on he taught me to respect the family name. And the family crest. The grasshopper that came to indicate all manner of providence to my sister. Some collective burden was laid upon me early, though perhaps not so early as that — there are only 300 or so Schauberts in the United States. It fell on us boys, as last in our known family line, to propagate the line. Little did others know that demanding I wear t-shirts bearing other family names would so mortally offend me later. Particularly bare months after my father died and brought the count to 299. It was as good as wishing the 300 of us remaining died off entirely.

So yes, he made the name important. And that’s right: names mean things.

Though I don’t know that I have brought the kind of honor that most of my forebears and siblings and cousins have brought, I do hope that I have added some meaningful value to our name. I do hope that its weird spelling is known a bit wider when I’m through. We certainly didn’t benefit from Franz Shubert or Shubert Alley, the anglicized folks named with similar more palatable variants like the Shoemakes and the Broganers and the Zapateros and Scarpas and Savatiers and Cobblers out there. God bless you, one and all, but you’re no Schaubert. So I’ll do what I can for the line.

I learned very quickly, precisely because two children born early had a kid early in their marriage, that I had seven out of eight great grandparents, four grandparents, two parents, two (later four) uncles, three aunts, three great aunts and uncles, two and then six first cousins, something like eight second cousins, and maybe thirty or more third cousins.

Marion County’s often compared to the Shire. I have a buddy from high school who often jokes, “If you follow the branches, our family tree makes a circle.” He and his best friend, another mutual friend, found out many years later that they were distant cousins, Tooks and Brandybucks, so to speak.

You add in the uncles of my cousins with whom I regularly spent time, and you’ll start to see that “family” for me meant something like a couple hundred people all living in the same place. For my wife, it has been nothing for her to grow up in St. Louis and have to drive six, eight, ten hours to see her first cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. For me, leaving the riverland was leaving most of my soul for New York. And I’m still in doubt as to whether the loss was worth it.

I’m patching the hole in my soul with whatever family we find. The Romani side of me Aunt Midge swore by will make do. The Blackfoot side. The Wiggins. The Irish rovers from the Isle of Man like the McCormicks.

It’s the cobbler, the farmer, and the slender Meigs side that’s struggling. The side that sired the Prussian architect Eduard Schaubert, the one who made his name restoring the temple of Athena. The side that gave birth to my great-great grandpa Montgomery C. Meigs. I almost quoted the entire wikipedia article, but I’ll leave that for the book. Suffice to say, he was a Union Brigadier General and Quatermaster General in the Civil War. He’s the one who mastered logistics for the army, which won the war.

Anyways. The family has roots in everything pre-Americana. And one way or another, that means large families who think of “family” as more than nuclear. Or more than nuclear plus grandparents and maybe a couple of uncles. Who even refer to distant cousins as “uncle,” particularly when they spend more time with your kids than their actual uncles. This is, in a way, a mirror of the spiritual promise that “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold in this life and the life to come.”

Amca Murat gets it, our Muslim Turkish uncle. The one I helped with the cookbook. So does my big brother from Zimbabwe, Muchengetwa Bgoni.

However, some New York friends have a hard time understanding growing up in this way. They think I’m joking when I say I would spend weeks at a time at the stepson-by-dating-of-my-uncle’s — ∴ cousin’s — house riding ATVs and shooting guns at quails. They have a hard time understanding how in the Halloween season, we would go to our second cousin’s house just thirty minutes up the road. In a poor rural community, that felt equivalent to what an 8-hour day trip to Maine from Brooklyn feels like. We went to play Super Mario 3 and watch Jeopardy with my great uncle and clown shows for my second cousin’s birthday parties.

How my uncle-by-marriage’s father was in my life more than my wife’s grandpa because of annual hayrides at his farm. How my great-aunt in another town bore two third cousins into the world with whom I often played swords (one lives in Japan now) and Mortal Combat (I never told my mother, hi mom). Ate fish sticks (which I hated) and watched Ninja Turtles films (which I loved). Turns out as an options trader later told me, I simply needed to try fish that I ate by the water from which it was taken.

My bass pro father was happy to oblige. He later introduced me to blackened grouper.

I could go on, but you get the point: the family and the rural environment and especially my father instilled in me the idea that family was exponentially larger than my nuclear family. When I think of the breakdown of the modern family, I don’t think about the breakdown of the mother, father, and siblings eating together nightly. Though, statistically, the healthiest families are still those that eat one meal together every night.

Rather, I think about the breakdown of the larger biological hierarchy that works something like nested nodes or fractals or a Slinky or even a large treehouse that interconnects the spreading boughs of some great bay fig, perhaps the one outside the San Diego zoo. In this large, sprawling, interconnected idea of family, family tree becomes a family canopy, the sort of rainforest habitat that holds a stratified biodiversity.

My Great Aunt Shirley can still rebuke me in a way no one else in my family can precisely because she’s my Great Aunt Shirley. And a great aunt at that. She’s the one who was married to my Great Uncle Bryan Coffee, the one who always said, “If I’m ever falling off a roof, I’ll just grab an extension cord cause they get caught on everything.” He shows up as “Ryan” in Bell Hammers and is pretty much the only character who is cut and dried the way I remember him. That’s not entirely true. Maybe it’s truer to say he’s the only character with one source of inspiration, the one with the real man hiding just under the surface, orca and sea lion.

At my grandpa Jerry’s funeral Aunt Shirley had tears rolling down her cheeks. She had just lost her husband and now was losing her brother. Came over to me and grinned her girlish grin that she has never and will never lose. Over to us kids. She looked at me and Heath, me and Lauren, then some of the cousins behind us.

She turned back to the three of us and said, “I know you kids think you have the best brother in the world, but you don’t understand: I did. One time, he went over to Mr. Henke’s house and saw the sprouts comming up and said, ‘Those are nice carrots, Mr. Henke.’ And Mr. Henke said, ‘Oh those are beets, Jerry.’ And my brother said, ‘No they aren’t.’ And Mr. Henke said, ‘Yes they are, just wait a few months, you’ll see.’ But that night, Jerry came out late with a short handled shovel, dug up all those beets and planted carrots. Months later Mr. Henke came back and said, ‘Young man, I need to apologize to you: I did plant carrots after all.’”

Now who else other than my great aunt could tell me that story? How else could I find out about more secret stories about my already hilarious, already legendary grandpa without her? I can’t.

That’s the white stone theology coming out: there’s something my Aunt Shirley offers the world — a word of God and man and me — that I cannot find from any other human. it’s entirely caught up in her secret name on that white stone, the ideal God had in mind for her will and her person when he thought her up. The secret known only to the perfected Great Aunt Shirley — the Shirliest surest Shirley — and God.

That secret ought to be uttered to us all and in a large, local family. With it you get a headstart in moral education even in the worst circumstances because you have more of that primary school of moral education. We are not self-made men, but God made, more and more if we let him, and his first method of choice is big-F family. The seventh generation, as my great aunt Marilyn on the other side says, become the storyweavers.

That’s me.

And dad made sure I knew I was redefining family as big and broad and beautiful.

What was your dad good at? Or what was good about him? Tell me in the comments.