Thirty things about Anthony, on what would have been his 30th and golden birthday on September 30, 2021:
- He was born a week late, but only hours after his dad arrived from Japan after his flight was delayed several days by Typhoon Mireille. (Also, his dad’s birthday is October 1.)
- He loved animals, including snakes. He once stashed a live garter snake in his sock drawer, thinking he could keep it there. (Mom found it there, still alive, while putting away laundry.)
- He performed emergency surgery on Evan’s beloved stuffed Baxter puppy, whose front seam was split. He left a tidy row of little gold safety pins stitched down Baxter’s tummy.
- When he was 3, he said the F word in front of Grandma, when they were walking hand in hand outside. “Wook at those fkn ants!” He didn’t know it was a bad word. We had just spent the previous year living among Marines at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. However, 1) we had never heard him use this word until then, and 2) he HAD been attacked by a swarm of fire ants in NC and taken to the ER, so maybe he knew exactly what he was saying when he saw more ants in Iowa. (Grandma claims not to remember this startling moment.)
- We also had to take him to the Camp Lejeune ER once when he got a popcorn kernel stuck up his nose.
- He was serious and thoughtful and tender-hearted. He gave fierce, scrawny-armed hugs.
- He suffered from croup as a baby. When his dad was stationed overseas, and Anthony & his mom lived in Hull with his grandparents, Grandpa sometimes sat with Anthony during the night in a steam-filled bathroom with the shower running hot.
- He played electric guitar, mostly self-taught. He also played piano and the baritone horn. He also played chess, which he learned from Grandpa.
- He used Limewire to download songs (and viruses) to make mixed CDs for classmates and then used the money to buy presents for family members.
- He was goofy and hilarious and could make the most awful faces.
At a sports show in Sioux City, he convinced Evan (age 7) to get his shaved head autographed in sharpie by an entire snowmobiling team. (Mom and Dad weren’t there to stop them.)
- As a toddler, he could recognize and name classical music such as the William Tell Overture. As he got older, he could pick out different harmonies and instrument lines in all kinds of music. He didn’t just hum or sing the melody like most people would… he would start humming the tenor harmony of a song or the trumpet part in a symphony.
- He loved to skateboard and do ollies and kick flips and all of those other skater tricks.
- He had a curious, scientific mind, which led to things like using big stones to grind corn outside to make cornbread from scratch; or propping big nails up against car tires in the garage to see what happened. It took several cans of Fix-a-Flat and several flat tires before his dad figured out what was happening. When R. finally took the tire to the shop, they told him it had 23 nails in it.
- As a toddler, he put raisins in Grandpa & Grandma’s tape deck in their stereo system, and nobody could figure out why it wasn’t working.
- He was a Green Bay Packers fan.
- He loved building – Legos, Tinker Toys, K’Nex, toothpick bridges, toy soldier dioramas.
- He was reading the Harry Potter series but never got to finish it.
-
When he was little, he loved to read Where’s Waldo and I Spy books with Grandma.
- He was athletic, but he retired early from baseball after getting hit with one too many pitches in Little League.
- He loved to play pranks, including leaving a big fake spider in the shower when Uncle K was babysitting him and Evan. K is deathly afraid of spiders and at that moment thought about asking his young nephews to take care of the one in shower but took a deep, fortifying breath, squared his shoulders, and clobbered it multiple times with a steel toe boot, then disposed of it with a wad of paper towels. Only later, with the boys howling in the background, did he recall that the spider had bounced kinda funny when he was pounding on it.
- He carved a heartagram in the plaster wall in his bedroom in Sutherland.
- The kid loved broccoli. When we went to the Golden Corral buffet in NC when he was a toddler, he was content with an entire plate full of steamed broccoli.
- He also loved crab legs. And plums. And rhubarb stalks dipped in sugar. And mulberries, apples, and pears from the trees he climbed behind the house. And fruit in general. And vegetables. And popcorn. And fondue pot dinners.
- He did not like chocolate. The only candy bar he liked was Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Cream.
- He was so smart. SO SMART.
- He had a lopsided grin and freckles across his nose just like his mom used to.
- At a pretty young age, one of his career aspirations was to be a herpetologist.
- He was a writer, an artist, a musician, a computer geek, a skater, a comedian, a scientist, a filmmaker, an entrepreneur, a builder, a dreamer.
- He was a big brother who understandably wanted his own room, but once he had his own room, he allowed his little brother to sleep in it next to him every night for a year. Evan could finally have that coveted top bunk in HIS own room, but he chose to sleep on the recliner in Anthony’s room. We will never know how long that would have continued.
Additional items added to the list after 2021:
-
When Evan (in 1st grade) tried to give his mom a little lima bean plant he had grown in school for Mother’s Day, Anthony rescued it and said, “You can’t give that to Mom. She’ll kill it!” [2022]
-
In his young life, he traveled to Canada, Washington, Florida, Alabama, California, Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, North Carolina, the Black Hills (SD), Ohio, Green Bay, Wisconsin (home of his beloved Packers), and many states in between (New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Louisiana) [2023]
Many of these stories & memories can also be found with more detail on the “Remembered By” pages in the site menu.