We were brothers once . . . and young

Will you carry the words of love with you?
Will you ride the great white bird into heaven?
And though you want to last forever, you know you never will.
And the goodbye makes the journey harder still.
—Yusuf Islam, “Oh Very Young”

This is life before you know who you’re gonna be.
—Taylor Swift, “Fifteen”

We were brothers once . . . and young.


I’d like to apologize to you in advance for what will follow. Usually when I sit down to write, I have a pretty good idea of where I’m going to take you. Not this time. Today I’m going to wander and trust that we will eventually find our way to the right place.

In case I get us both completely lost along the way, I’m going to tell you that today’s post has something to do with my fraternity brother Michael “Sparky” Bushaw who passed away last week at the age of fifty. Last week I attended Mike’s wake and his funeral, and I wanted to write a tribute to him, but this may end up someplace else. I don’t know yet.

Let me start by telling you that I’ve had a couple of songs and a book title stuck in my head since I learned of Mike’s passing.

The first song is “Oh Very Young” by Yusuf Islam (who you may know as Cat Stevens). It’s playing on my computer speakers as I write these words. I’m not sure what Mr. Islam meant by the lyrics in his beautiful song, but to me they perfectly fit the feeling of loss at an unexpected and early death. In this song, he compares a loss to a torn and faded pair of jeans, and he’s right when he tells us that life’s “patches make the goodbye harder still.”

Oddly, the second song stuck in my head is “Fifteen” by Taylor Swift. The song is about a still-young but increasingly wise woman looking back to her first days of high school. And it’s brilliant. I’ve never been a fifteen-year-girl and I’ve never been further from my high school experience than I am right now, but somehow Ms. Swift’s song captures the way I felt in that period of our lives that that Mike and I shared. Mike and I were brothers in that precious chunk of time just before we found out who we were gonna be.

The book title I ripped off and repurposed from Harold Moore’s book about Vietnam.

We were brothers once . . . and young.

Mike and I were part of a small group of young men and women who found each other at the University of Georgia in the late 70s. We were in a fraternity, but it was unlike any other on campus.

We were much smaller than any other Greek organization at UGA, and there were never more than a couple of dozen members of Sigma Pi at any given time. We weren’t an actual chapter—we were too small for that. Technically we were a colony of Sigma Pi fraternity. Since we didn’t have a charter, the members couldn’t be initiated as full brothers into the “secrets and mysteries” of Sigma Pi until we achieved chapter status, which finally happened my senior year.

Since we were denied the secret knowledge, we created our own, including our own handshakes, ceremonies, traditions, dances and even one Gregorian chant. I was disappointed during our eventual initiation to learn that the actual “secrets and mysteries” paled in comparison to the ones we improvised.

We lived together in a rambling and decaying Victorian house on the corner of Baxter and Milledge that had been abandoned by a respectable fraternity for larger and nicer quarters. The house was freezing cold in winter, the furniture was in tatters and nothing in the kitchen worked, but the house was my personal wonderland.

In the button-down and polo fraternity world of UGA in the late 70s, we mostly lived and dressed like a street gang composed entirely of geeks. The other fraternities and sororities on campus shunned us, but we didn’t care. Mike was one of the few members of Sigma Pi who ever conformed to the unwritten dress code for University of Georgia fraternity men.

We were also the smartest fraternity on campus by far. The geekiness came naturally to us. Every term the university released cumulative GPAs for each fraternity and every term we topped the list. When you consider that we usually had at least one member pull a 0.0 GPA in any given quarter, our record was even more remarkable.

In some ways we were a collection of happy misfits, but we were a spectacularly smart aggregation of misfits.

The sororities may not have wanted anything to do with the brothers of Sigma Pi, but a number of equally bright and capable women were attracted to us for some reason, and we had almost as many little sisters as brothers. These were attractive and accomplished young women. What did they see in us?

We never quite achieved my roommate Stuart’s hoped-for “golden ratio” of one little sister for each brother, but we came very close. Stuart eventually married a little sister who had been my girlfriend until we crashed and burned in our senior year. Stuart and Janie have been happily married for something close to twenty years now.

Stories. I have so many stories, but I won’t share any of them here today. Some I will even take with me to the grave, but I will treasure each of them in my heart.

We were brothers once . . . and young.

We really were brothers and sisters. We shared our lives and our passions with a ferocity I can’t imagine today. We loved and fought and learned our way through the best handful of years anyone could ever be granted. Those were special years and in a category of their own.

After college we went our separate ways to become what we were going to be. Stuart became a doctor, Roy is a college professor. Greg works for the Department of Labor. Butch, Brett, Alice and a bunch of the others are attorneys. Alan is a pilot who swears he's never crashed or even bent a plane. David teaches high school. I’ve lost touch with a bunch of us.

My days at UGA were the brightest of my life and were followed by a prolonged period of darkness that I finally emerged from on the day I met Teri.

Mike remained deeply involved with Sigma Pi for the rest of his life, routinely attending convocations and other national and local meetings. There’s a tribute page to him on Facebook, and hundreds of brothers from all over the country have signed their condolences. Here's a link to that page.

We all had nicknames at the Sigma Pi house when I was there, but somehow Mike got a new nickname a few years after graduation and became “Sparky” to everyone in the fraternity. I’ve heard the story behind the name and it’s fitting, but I’ll save that one for now too.

Even though it had been something like 20 years since I had last seen Mike and over a decade since I had seen any of the others, there was no question of my attending his funeral service when I heard the news.

I had to go.

I had to mourn Mike’s passing and pray for his soul.

I had to mourn the fact that it could have just as easily been me.

I had to say goodbye to something in me that was gone for good. My last particle of youth? My last shred of innocence? I don’t know. Something.

I had to take the first step toward making good on friendships left untended too long. It’s one of the first promises I made to myself for The Best Year Ever.

I cried and choked up as I tried to sing “Amazing Grace” at Mike’s funeral mass. I was crying for Mike and his family but just as much for me.

I’m crying now as I type this.

Goodbye Mike. Goodbye Sparky.

We were brothers once . . . and young.