The Waterboys, "The Whole of the Moon"

Today’s my uncle’s birthday. It’s not my place to say which one, other than that it’s a significant birthday. We won’t be able to see Zio today, because he’s still in Florida, where he spent the holidays. He may in fact be aiming to steer clear of Pearl Street, for fear we’ll be making a fuss over him. Which of course we will in any case, at the first opportunity he gives us.

Zio isn’t just my uncle—he’s my godfather. I think this means he played a ceremonial role in my baptism, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. At some point when we were growing up, my sister got it in her head that godparents were the people you’d go to live with, if your actual parents got into a car crash. Her godparents were my Aunt Dona and Uncle Dale, who lived out west. Mine were Zio and my mother’s cousin Linda. “We’ll be separated,” Tia told me. “And you’ll probably have to rotate between Uncle Rusty [as we then called him] and Linda, because they don’t live in the same state.”

That sounded like a raw deal to me. I had a good idea about Zio from when he came in from Boston for the holidays, but I barely knew Linda. How would school work, half in Massachusetts and half in Ohio? Also, Zio worked for the airline and was out of town a lot. When he had flights to work, would he just leave me at home to fend for himself?

Fortunately, Tia’s definition of godparenting was never put to the test. My parents are alive and well today. Still, knowing what I know now about who Zio is and how he lives, I couldn’t think of a better outcome for an orphaned Abruzzi. Zio is generous, fiercely loyal, well-read, principled, and an excellent cook. He is an epicure, tastemaker, and Italophile. Zio loves the arts, has a terrific sense of humor—i.e., he laughs at my jokes, and I laugh at his—and although not their direct lineal ancestor, he is a grandparent to my children.

He’s also a Red Sox fan, but who’s perfect?

As kids, all of us nieces and nephews understood intellectually that Zio was cool. He was definitionally a member of our parents’ generation, yet he also displayed impeccable style and somehow managed to operate outside the constraints of bourgeois America living. He was always breezing in from flights to San Francisco or Miami or New York. And he had found a way out of the 9-to-5 office worker trap. Of my several uncles who wore mustaches, his made the most sense on his face. He walked—and still does walk—like a bad-ass. It’s a kind of straight-backed shuffle, and it’s confident. When I got older, I would spend a lot of my high-school years trying to perfect that walk.

When we were kids, though, Zio was single and in his 30s. Given our stages in life, we didn’t have a ton to talk about. I remember one time he brought me a business card once with Steve Grogan’s autograph on it. That was pretty cool—that he had worked a flight with the Patriots’ starting QB on it. But it’s not like it was Brian Sipe’s autograph, or Bernie Kosar’s or Adam Ant’s. I didn’t know what to do with it.

Time passed, though, and there came an afternoon in the late 1980s when I was hanging with my uncle in Florida, and he played the B-52s for me. I remember this very clearly. We were out on the pool patio outside my grandparents’ condo, and he produced a cassette tape, loaded it into my Walkman, and cued up “Planet Claire” (Apple Music, Spotify). And in that moment, as those retro sci-fi radio effects and the Peter Gunn-style guitars fired off in my headphones, I first felt it in my bones:

Zio is the best.

My best friend Brad had come along with the family on vacation. Not surprisingly, he said to me later that night: Your uncle is REALLY cool. And my answer was … RIGHT?!?

If you take godfather outside of the liturgical frame and recast it in more general terms, a fair definition of the role might be a man who presides over the spiritual growth and development of another, younger person. And if that’s the case, then yeah: Rus Abruzzi has served faithfully and effectively as my godfather for 50 years and counting. Zio is the person in my life who—FIATs aside—derives the least amount of pleasure from material goods. Yet at the same time he is as joyful a person as I have ever known. He finds joy in family, service to others, and the pursuit of singular experiences through travel and the arts. Accessing these aspects and practices of living and deriving fulfillment from them is, at least to my mind,¹ what spirituality means, or should mean. Well, all that plus the display of grace, which is Zio’s signature trait.

My grandparents most certainly instilled that grace in him. But Zio also chose a livelihood—flying 40+ years for Allegheny Airlines, then US Airways, then American Airlines—that called for him consistently to receive and rely upon the hospitality of others. Accordingly, he has had more opportunity than most to practice grace. By the time he retired in 2020, Zio was flying regularly to Europe, often in a priority role as an Italian speaker on transatlantic flights into Rome and sometimes Milan, but also into Paris, London, Glasgow, Munich, Stockholm, Athens, and other destinations. Wherever he has gone—and wherever he goes—Zio grasps eagerly at new experiences and opportunities for cross-cultural connection and exchange. He greets and treats strangers, hosts, family, and friends with an open mind and open heart: i.e., he models and embodies grace.

This is not to say that Zio can’t also be snarky as hell, when the situation calls for it. If, for example, you’re walking amid the awesome ruins of the Acropolis in Athens—a near-perfect setting for accessing your spiritual side—but wherever you turn, you’re confronted with American college girls striking provocative poses for their Instagram feeds …

Swing your hip out a little more, Brittany says to Lindsey. And do that pouty thing with your lips.

… then you’ll want to have Zio with you. With a single eye roll, with one cutting aside, he will set these deteriorating conditions to right. Or at least provide enough of a safety valve to stop you from elbowing Lindsey over a precipitous 500-foot drop to the Plaka below.

Zio can bring THE HEAT, my kids have observed, more than once. And my answer each time was … RIGHT?!?

Many of my best long conversations have been with my uncle. Racked out in the twin beds of the green bedroom of the aforementioned Florida condo, talking into the wee hours of the morning. Riding in his Jeep down the Cape to his place in Provincetown on a Friday night, so engrossed in discussion as to barely register the five-mile backup ahead of the Sagamore Bridge. Walking with him through the National Portrait Gallery in London, or taking dinner at the aptly-named and otherwise empty Abruzzi Embassy restaurant in Manhattan, during the Blizzard of ’96. Or more recently, on long walks down Commercial Street and back, after Kate has noticed I’ve been a bit stir-crazy here on Pearl Street and suggested I drive down to P-Town for some restorative time with my uncle.

From these conversations I have derived all sorts of benefits. Often the learnings are deeply consequential; he’ll invite me to view the world from a new perspective, or to consider an altogether different mindset about life and how to live it. Just as often Zio might turn me on to matters more mundane, but still important—a band I’ve not heard before, a TV series I haven’t seen, an Italian writer I should read, or a new and interesting shop on Commercial Street. I like to think I give as good as I get in these exchanges, but really, I’m just trying to keep up.

When you’ve been close to someone for most of your life, but only half of his, the full picture of that other half-life fills in casually, out of order, and at odd intervals. And of course it’s never complete. So whenever I’m able to book a good chunk of time with my uncle, I’m likely to extract at least one new and legend-enhancing nugget of Z-lore to add to my catalog of What Makes This Man Amazing to Me. Examples include:

• He went to Studio 54, back in the day.

• He’s a huge John le Carré fan.

• He shares a birthday with David Bowie (because of course he does).

• He got heavy into Kraftwerk back in the mid-1970s, when “Autobahn” (Apple Music, Spotify) came out.

• He once worked a charter flight with Lou Reed and Patti Smith on it (!!!!).

To be clear: Zio’s record isn’t without its blemishes. In the moment, he chose Studio 54 over CBGB, and as a result he is unable to report any firsthand observations from that essential scene. He could have sampled both disco and punk, but he didn’t.

But this tracks. Our musical tastes overlap, but they’re by no means congruent. We both love Blondie, for example, but he seems to be into groovier tracks like “Rapture” (Apple Music, Spotify), whereas I’m more of a frenetic, “Kung Fu Girls” (Apple Music, Spotify) kind of guy.² Over the years we’ve gone to Sting, James, and Pet Shop Boys shows together—and we had tickets to see Kraftwerk here in Boston in 2020, before COVID-19 washed out the show. On the other hand, Zio also likes dance music much more than I do, and he tends to favor a more R&B-inflected kind of rock. Where I will fly to London to see Michael Rother play Neu! tracks, he’ll fly to Sicily for Simply Red. Same principle—same drop-everything pursuit of a spiritual experience through live music—just very different music at the end of the itinerary.

Speaking of itineraries, we’ve traveled a ton together, over the years. Zio has accompanied the four of us on trips to New York City and down the California coast. With passports in hand, we’ve gone with him to Iceland and England, to Italy, and to Athens and Crete. Probably my favorite trip with Zio was a very short one we took—all of two days, and just the two of us—to London in November 2011, for the discrete purpose of seeing James play the Royal Albert Hall. One of the perks of working for the airline is you can travel at a steeply discounted rate, on a space-available basis. And the airlines entitle their employees to designate two additional travelers who can fly on standby passes. For more than a decade now, Zio has included me on his Dependents list. In that capacity, and assuming there is an unsold seat open on the flight to receive me, I can fly for free, or close enough, to wherever American Airlines goes. So what would otherwise be a frivolous two-day trip to London for a concert suddenly becomes a viable option for a weekend.

Zio arranged to work the flights out and back for this trip, so he was laid over in London right alongside me. We flew out overnight, and I was bumped up to Envoy Class. On arrival, I took the express train from Heathrow into Central London, then the Tube to Kensington. I had booked a room in the same hotel as Zio’s flight crew, but my room wasn’t ready when I arrived, so I went for a run in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. In the meantime, James had posted in their Twitter feed that additional tickets had been released at the Albert Hall and could be purchased at the venue. I walked over and exchanged the seats I had for a considerably improved view. Come dinnertime, Zio and I went walking in South Kensington, found a suitable Chinese restaurant, and ate an entire roast duck.

(Yet another contribution Zio has made to my spiritual development: introducing me to roast duck.)

From dinner we went to see one of the most extraordinary shows I have ever seen—my all-time favorite live act, James, supported by a full orchestra and choir—at RAH. Then back to Heathrow for the flight back to Boston the next day. Self-indulgent and downright silly, this trip. But also perfect, and made possible and perfect, by my uncle.

A favorite pastime of ours—that is, unless he’s just putting a brave face on, as often as we get up to it—is to sit in front of the TV and take turns cuing up music videos over YouTube. Brad picks “Come On Eileen” (YouTube), Zio picks the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” (YouTube). Brad picks the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield: “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” (YouTube). Zio picks “I Heard a Rumour” (YouTube) by Bananarama. And on and on we go.

Right now, on this snowy night in New England, as I sit here almost but not quite fully recovered from the flu, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than order in a Peking duck, roll pancakes, and play the Alternating VJs YouTube game with my uncle. Here’s hoping we can get back to this sometime soon.

This week’s song is “The Whole of the Moon” (Apple Music, Spotify), off the Waterboys’ 1985 release This Is the Sea. Zio picked me up a vintage copy of this record for my 50th birthday, back in September. Hard to believe that before this fall I was never into the Waterboys. I mean, I was aware of them. I had seen their albums populating Zio’s CD racks, and I knew that at some point Karl Wallinger spun off from the band to form World Party, whose “Put the Message in the Box” (Apple Music, Spotify) has been a fave of mine for decades. But it took Zio’s intercession to get me to appreciate just how terrific the Waterboys were.

I had to play This Is the Sea once—once—to come around fully. No gimmicks here, just rich, complex songwriting from Mike Scott and a massive multi-instrumental sound. (Saxophones that actually enrich the mix (Apple Music, Spotify)—and in the 1980s, too!) There’s U2-level ambition here from right around the time of The Unforgettable Fire, and I’m left wondering how the Waterboys didn’t attain similar heights. Maybe there was only room for one band on that perch? Even so, it seems like an injustice that the Waterboys didn’t break big, but then again, I wasn’t paying attention to them, so I was part of the problem.

“The Whole of the Moon” was the first single off the record, and in that respect an obvious choice here. But I chose it not because it was the “hit” (relatively speaking), or because Mandy Moore (!) would later cover it, but instead for these lines, which describe the best kind of uncle—and if you’re lucky, your godfather:

I was grounded while you filled the skies. I was dumbfounded by truths; you cut through lies. I saw the crescent. You saw the whole of the moon.

I spoke about wings. You just flew. I wondered, I guessed, and I tried. You just knew. I saw the crescent. You saw the whole of the moon.

To be fair to me, I don’t think I’m stuck on the crescent, necessarily. That sounds like a Mike Scott problem. On a clear day, with my full faculties, I feel like I can make out the contours of a half-moon, or even the Waxing Gibbous. But Zio does see the whole of the moon and has for years. And if I have any greater, truer perspective on the heavens at this stage in my life, it’s due in no small part to his example, and the godparenting he may not realize he’s been providing, all this time.

1. He is also a regular churchgoer. Not my thing, necessarily, but I appreciate that Zio’s faith and church community provide real and meaningful spiritual nourishment for him, just as they do for my parents.

2. We’re both able to admire the genius of a track like “Rip Her to Shreds” (Apple Music, Spotify).