By Brian Panowich

The past two years did a number on me.

I mean a full-on Las Vegas size chorus line to my brain and trust me when I say that is no easy task. I’ve always thought of myself as a freight train under pressure. I take the bad and the worse and spin them into gold. I’ve always been like that. But I just wasn’t prepared for the one-two punch of 2020 and 2021. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m older and softer these days or just that some things are not meant to be handled on your own. Maybe a combination of both. I’m also thinking that if the last two years left me a whirling wreck, then maybe it did the same to some of you. So, I’m slowly coming out of my hazy loss-of-time to write this column in the hopes that my personal experience will let somebody out there know, at the very least, that you are not alone.

When the pandemic started, I was all the things that everyone else was — worried, scared, skeptical, even hopeful, and I would sit around the kitchen table with my kids and discuss the rising numbers, and listen to the endless reports being funneled at me through my TV and computer. I learned how to home-school my kids. I wore pajamas a lot. All the while, my last thought of every evening was “this too shall pass.”

But it didn’t.

Then the fighting started. And it was everywhere. The civil unrest. The division. The pure unfiltered anger that snuck into my family’s life from every crevice. I tried to keep my head up. I tried to stay focused. I even wrote a few positive columns for this magazine to do the little bit I could to try and quell the noise. But nothing worked. The dinner table slowly devolved into the couch or the bedroom until most of my meals were eaten while I stood over the sink and wondered what day it was. The ‘vacation’ aspect of quarantine wore off pretty quickly and the isolation became intolerable. The pajamas stayed on. The mail piled up on the counter, unopened.

I stopped answering the door. I stopped answering the phone. I spent days and days more interested in the paint color on the wall in the garage than in my children’s schooling. The world outside was completely falling apart and I began quicky to not want any part of it. I signed off all my social media accounts. I felt like the internet was crushing the wind out of me. This was not okay. I was not okay.

By mid 2021, I had all but given up on working out. Prior to the pandemic, I ran five miles a day, and less than a year later I was carrying around fifty extra pounds. I didn’t want to look at myself, so I stopped doing that, too. I was so successful at blocking out the outside world and everyone in it, that I started to block me out, too.

We had a new president. It didn’t matter. The mandates were being lifted. It didn’t matter. The sun seemed like it was starting to shine. Nothing mattered. In the span of two short years, I had completely gotten lost — in my own living room.

I did read a lot of books, though. Too many to count here, but I will say that when I began to read new novels from my publisher that mentioned a world post-Covid in them, it shook me. My peers and compadres had used the isolation to create new art and tell new stories while I turned into a ghost. That’s when I figured out that I absolutely wasn’t just going to bounce back on my own. I needed help.

So I blew the dust off my computer, did a quick search, and picked out a name. I found a therapist that did telecommunication, and I made an appointment. When the day came for me to sign on and talk to them, it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. Inviting a complete stranger into my life to listen to my problems? After I’d spent so much time pushing everyone and everything else out? It felt ludicrous. But I did it. And I felt better. I was far from fixed, but it was a starting point.

The next day I did something I hadn’t done in months. I made my bed. Someone told me once that if you start your day by accomplishing something, even something small like making your bed, that it can point you in the right direction. And so I started to make my bed every day. And wash my face. And make breakfast. And I followed through on my weekly appointments with my therapist.

I’m beginning to feel like me again. But a different kind of me. A me that can admit that I’m not made of steel. I can experience trauma. And believe me when I say that isolation IS trauma. But I survived it. And so can anyone else. Depression is no joke. Anxiety is as deadly as smoking. But it doesn’t take being a superhero to beat it. It just takes the monumental effort to answer the phone. And if a therapist isn’t someone you think you can trust, then how about a guy who just wrote about being at his most vulnerable in a magazine for his whole hometown to read. Just call Augusta magazine and ask my publisher for my number.

I’ll pick up. I know how important it is.

Appears in the May 2022 issue of Augusta Magazine.

By Brian Panowich

My brother and I don’t get along.

And that’s a shame really, because other than my father — or maybe Batman — my big brother may be the closest thing to a hero I’ve ever had. Sure, he may have been one of the biggest antagonists I had growing up and he picked on me constantly and without mercy, but I can promise you that no one else ever did. Not in front of him, anyway. He always went out of his way to make it abundantly clear to every nimrod bully on the school bus that his nerdy comic-book-loving dork of a little brother was off-limits to ridicule. He just wasn’t having it. Mainly because that was his job and his job alone. It was a duality in him that I both cherished and hated at the same time. He had the ability to make me feel like the most important person on earth and then — sometimes even in the same moment — render me small and invisible. That’s a lot of power I assigned to my older brother. A lot of power I don’t think he’s ever realized he had, or still does.

I remember one Christmas when I was a teenager, my brother bought me my first boom box. It was expensive and unexpected. I was shocked. And I loved it. I also remember when he flung it down the stairs, shattering it to pieces, six months later after I played “my music” too loudly in the room we shared at the time. Now, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t always awful. I mean, despite our heaping share of sibling rivalry, we also accumulated an equal amount of time bailing one another out of bad spots as we grew from boys to men. But despite all our combined efforts, for some reason, here we are going on fifty years later, and we have yet to get it right.

I think about that disconnect all the time and there are a lot of factors that led to our family dysfunction. We both spent much of our childhood vying for our father’s attention in the most opposite of ways. It bothered me to no end how my brother shared a “firstborn” kinship with my dad that I could never really be a part of, and I can guarantee that it made him crazy to see “the baby” of the family getting away with murder. I also suppose the four-year age difference didn’t help. It pretty much made sure we kept a different set of friends, girlfriends, schools and interests. None of those things helped the Panowich brothers come together in some sort of environmental harmony. So, as we both grew to conquer our separate lives, and demons, so did the rift between us.

Our great divide widened even more as we chose our career paths. My brother opted to go into the military and spend most of his adult years overseas. I banded together with my Augusta buddies to go travel the endless highways of America, chasing the dream of becoming the next Bruce Springsteen. These choices added the kind of distance to the equation that sometimes felt insurmountable to ever overcome. When he was home on leave to see my parents, I was off somewhere in the unknown trying to create a name for myself. On the occasion when I could come back home for the holidays, he was in a desert on the other side of the globe fighting for his country. He began to lean a little toward the red. I started to lean toward the blue. Very separate and very daunting lives to say the least. How could we be more different?

But were we? Were we both not focused on legacy?

Consider this, our father spent one half of his life dedicated to making music and art — like me — and the other half he spent in the Army providing for his family — like my brother. We both became two branches born of the same redwood tree. I find that fascinating. We also ended up having big robust families with four children each. Eight amazing kids who are all incredibly close to one another that both me and my brother did our best — while in separate camps — to make happen.

So here we are. Fast forward to the past two years: 2020 and its ugly and maybe even more brutal twin, 2021. The great years of introspection. My brother is a Purple Heart recipient, retired and living in the Tennessee mountains and I’m a celebrated novelist still here in the Empire State of the South. We both accomplished great things. Yet neither of us is sitting around the fire trading stories and lies like the blood kin we are, the way my mother and father always hoped we would. It’s nothing short of a travesty considering we grew up traveling and isolated from the outside world depending only on each other to make it through.

So, this brings me to the point of this column. I know I’m not the only one out here who is headed into another holiday season shouldering the burden of family dysfunction. Our dynamic isn’t exclusive to us. Some of you out there reading this have grievances with parents, or sisters, or aunts or uncles, or even spouses, that are going to keep you from truly putting the past two nightmarish years behind you. If any of this applies to you, I’m asking you to try something.

Pick up the phone. Get over it. See what happens. And to show you that my money is where my mouth is, I’m using this space on the last page of this premier Augusta Magazine to say this:

“Hey, John, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing — Merry Christmas, brother and I love you.”

Appears in the October 2021 issue of Augusta Magazine.

By Brian Panowich

It’s April in Augusta and everyone who lives here knows what that means—the majestic gates of Augusta National open and our city welcomes people from all over the world to the Masters. It’s a big deal. And all of us locals are pretty proud of it. That being said, on a more personal level, this month also marks my one-year anniversary writing for Augusta magazine. April also marks the U.S. release of my second novel, Like Lions.

So it’s a pretty amazing month and I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate those two landmark events other than to give my hometown readers of Augusta magazine an exclusive advance sneak peek at the new book.

Enjoy.

Excerpt from the forthcoming Like Lions.

Annette memorized every board in the floor. It had taken her months to get the pattern right. She knew which slats creaked and moaned when she stepped on them, so she was careful to keep her bare feet only on the few that were nailed down tight. Those particular strips of seasoned oak had become her partners in crime. She’d let them become her friends. She trusted them not to betray her. She couldn’t say the same about anyone or anything else. Still, she was cautious, because this was her first attempt to navigate the route in the dark. She counted to ten every time she eased her weight down on each of them, and stepped in a slow-motion zigzag pattern down the main hall of the house.

She passed the room shared by her two oldest boys. Maybe after tonight, the constant bickering between the two of them about who deserved the top bunk would finally stop. That thought was a small attempt at making herself feel better about what she was about to do. She leaned on the solid wood of the doorjamb—another tested accomplice in her crime— and allowed her son’s nasal breathing to break her heart just enough to steal her own breath, but not enough for her to make any sounds of her own or shed any tears. Her tears had dried up a long time ago. She placed two fingers on her lips and then gently placed the goodbye kiss on the door.

She looked down and sought out the next board in the pattern and then the next. She moved as slow and fluid as molasses. Several minutes later, she arrived at the last door on her left. She paused, quiet as a thief, feeling as though she deserved the title. She gently tucked the dollar store gym shoes she’d been holding tight into her armpit. She’d fished them out of a dumpster down in Waymore a few weeks ago on one of her un-chaperoned trips to the valley and hidden them under the bridal chest in her closet. They were men’s shoes and two sizes too big, but they would keep her feet safe from any thorns or bramble on the forest floor outside. She let her hand rest on the tarnished brass of the bedroom’s doorknob. Still moving at a snail’s pace, she took nearly a full minute to turn the knob enough for the metal tooth of the lock to clear the latch. She had oiled the hinges early yesterday morning, so the door moved without so much as a whisper. That door had also become part of her crime; she took her time inching it open. The baby was sleeping. Annette crossed the moonlit room, still careful of each practiced footfall, and watched her youngest son’s chest rise and fall in his crib. The sight of him was enough for her to find out she did still have the ability to cry. As she stood above the crib, her tears began to swell behind the dark pockets of skin that circled her eyes. She was sure they would come.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She was thinking too much. She needed to move. Moonlight shone through some curtains she’d made from an old bed sheet, and the blue light turned the baby’s rusty-red hair into shiny copper wire. She leaned in and used the back of her hand to smooth the thin strands over his fragile skull, and then quickly scooped him up in her arms and pulled him into her chest. Her movement was awkward and fast and she almost dropped one of the shoes she’d been carrying. In that moment, her heart pounded so hard it rippled through her every muscle. She stood with her eyes closed and squeezed down on the shoe between her elbow and her hip. She stayed frozen like that until she felt herself breathe again. She repositioned the shoe under her arm and held the baby tight to her as he stirred awake.

“Shhh,” she whispered with a voice barely audible. “I’ve got you.”

Comforted by the warmth and safety of his mother, the baby fell back into dream without so much as a coo. This was the only thing left to chance. It was the only thing she couldn’t plan for. Her infant son’s reaction to her could have ended it all right there, but her son, her perfect baby boy, would not be her downfall tonight. Two of her sons had already been lost to her, stolen from her. She’d watched over the years, helpless, as this place had laid claim to them. She thought that maybe when the boys got a little age on them, they would show some spark of her in them, but there was nothing. Nothing was growing inside their hearts but the same pitch-black void that had already taken her husband, his father, and so many of his family before him.

But not you. Annette, thought and cupped the infant’s fuzzy copper head.

I can still save you. We can save each other.

This column originally ran in the April 2019 issue of Augusta Magazine.

Appears in the October 2021 issue of Augusta Magazine.

By Brian Panowich

“Your Uncle Walter died today. Just two weeks shy of his 99th birthday. He led a full life. No funeral.”

That was the entirety of the text message I received from my mother in June to let me know about the death of my uncle. Ninety-nine years of surviving on planet Earth condensed down into a perfect blue bubble, prepackaged and ready to be tapped, copied, and passed on, to everyone on your current friend list. If you think about it, it’s not unlike the telegraph messages sent back in the old days of the frontier west.

“Uncle Walter has died…stop. Two weeks shy of his birthday…stop. He led a full life…stop. No funeral…stop.”

We have almost come full circle in the communication arena. And it’s heartbreaking.

My uncle wasn’t blood kin. He was married to my father’s older sister, a wonderful woman who is one of my favorite people and an early inspiration to become a writer. My father had other siblings, and I’m sure I had other uncles, but none that I can remember or any that warranted the title. My Uncle Walter was a Long Island New Yorker who could be heard over everyone else in a crowded room and laughed just as loud — but only if whatever tickled him was legitimately funny. He didn’t fake it.

Unlike my grandfather, who was never seen wearing anything other than work pants and flannel, Uncle Walter always wore a tie to dinner and slicked his pomade to impress. Now, maybe I only think of him that way from my childhood because my core family was military and I only saw him on holidays, but something tells me otherwise. He carried mischief in his eyes, and I’d always understood, even as a child, why my aunt adored him. We all did. He shared an almost outlaw-like kinship with my father, and I remember always hoping to one day be in that club. I’m sure at the time that I was mostly just a chubby, annoying kid to him, but unlike a lot of my other family, he never made me feel that way.

He was the adult in the room that wasn’t concerned about the children climbing on the plastic-covered furniture or who had fallen asleep from a wine buzz before dinner on a pile of coats in the guest room. He was aloof that way. And I can still see the silhouette of him pulling out a smoke on the back porch, perfectly at ease with himself. And for a little kid like me, who never felt comfortable around anyone, he was as solid as they came.

I’d like to tell you that during my uncle’s tenure as a human being, that he lived an adventurous life. That he engineered freight trains and traveled the world, or that he hunted big game on safari or something equally as huge, but the truth is, I don’t know. Like I said, my family was always in transit. We never really knew the luxury of extended family. We only had brief encounters that never lasted long enough — like trying to capture smoke. I will say that he was always kind to me and never in a rush to be done with my company.

Sometime while I was a know-it-all teenager, my aunt and uncle had relocated to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The last time I was there, my father had to drive from New York to Georgia to get his idiot son of the latest mess he’d made of his life, and we stopped there on our way back north. I remember their home was like nothing I’d seen before and that sky way up there seemed massive. I hadn’t seen my uncle in a while, and he wasn’t quite the confidant huckster I remembered as a kid. He’d gone completely silver grey and seemed fragile, but not fragile like fine china. He was more like a glacier losing huge sheets of ice into the sea. He’d become stoic but still carried himself with that same ease of self that I used to admire. He also mostly resigned himself to his workshop adjacent to the main house where my father and my aunt spoke with hushed voices about what to do with me.

Walter tinkered with whatever he happened to be tinkering with that afternoon and I remember rolling my eyes when he waved me over to help. I handed him tools and nodded about things I knew nothing about until nightfall. And wow, the stars up there were magnificent. We stood out there looking up at those stars for a long time until he finally spoke to me. He pointed up at the thin sliver of moon and said it was a “nickel moon.” I shrugged. He said, “A nickel, just shy of a quarter.” I laughed at the joke, and he put a hand on my shoulder and told me it was going to be okay.

And he was right. It was.

It’s funny how I don’t remember what kind of contraption we’d been working on that day, but I remember the smell of the oil under my fingernails and that old man’s joke. I don’t remember what kind of nonsense had even led me there, but I remember the weight of my uncle’s hand and the ever-present mischief in his crooked smile. Maybe he remembered something about himself looking at me. I’d like to think so.

I’ll be fifty this year and more times than I’d like to admit, that notion has made me feel old, but today I realized that my uncle lived two of my lifetimes before he finally said goodbye to this place.

In the mountains. Under those stars. Next to the love of his life. We should all be so lucky.

And how’s this for a bonus?

It’s 1:01 a.m. in Augusta as I write this, and I just stepped out onto my own porch for a smoke. And I’ll be damned if that nickel moon isn’t up there just a grinnin’.

Here’s to you, Uncle Walter. I reckon I’ll see you when I’m done with my next fifty years.

Brian

06/14/2021

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Dusk photo by NO NAME from Pexels

Appears in the June/July 2021 issue of Augusta Magazine.

By Brian Panowich

I’m no Shakespeare. Not even close.

I’m no Pablo Neruda or Emily Brontë, or even Nicholas Sparks for that matter. I’m not even Andrew Lincoln’s beloved character, Mark, from the iconic film Love Actually, with his scene-stealing posterboard signs professing his unrequited love for Keira Knightley’s character, Juliet. In fact, the entire amount of knowledge that I’ve accumulated about love over the past 40-something years of my existence would fill a teacup on a good day, if I’m lucky. Love can be tricky and un-understandable for some people — most people, I might guess. Which means the month of February and the 14-day countdown to a holiday that some people say was invented by the greeting card industry makes us feel anxious and neurotic.

Yes — Valentine’s Day.

We all get thrown into the deep end at an early age, too. Remember exchanging little paper valentines in elementary school, hoping to get that one special token of affection from your first crush? Or the flower-grams you could buy for a dollar and send to your girlfriend’s homeroom in high school? Man, that was nerve-wracking. The next thing you know, school’s out, you’re in your first serious relationship, and the idea of dropping the ball on your first Valentine’s Day feels like the ultimate deal-breaker, only to get harder and harder to top as the years go by. And then the cavalcade of jewelry store advertisements starts, and all the Whitman’s Samplers begin to fly off the shelves of every store in town, while you find yourself humming “Every kiss begins with Kay” in your sleep. The feeling of getting it right can be straight-up debilitating.

Luckily, you have me.

Now, I know I started this column off by saying I’m no expert on love and I’m not. So, it goes without saying that taking “Dear Abby” instruction from me about your relationship would be ill-advised. But while I may not be a guru on the concept of love itself, I am a major hopeless romantic (with a minor in grand gestures). So, gentleman, and maybe some of you ladies out there, who are beginning to suffer from the V-Day shakes, don’t panic. You just stumbled on the most important page in this magazine to get you through it.

I’ll begin by saying, yes, some people like the standard bouquet of roses and the heart-shaped box of chocolates, or a piece of jewerly. If that is working for you, then by all means, stick to it. But I’m here to tell you that you can do so much better with a little effort, a lot of listening and maybe a hot glue gun.

First, don’t buy a card. Don’t let someone at Hallmark speak for you so that all you have to do is sign your name with a flourish. Make one instead. I know — you don’t have the heart of a poet and the store-bought cards say what you want to say so much better than you can. That’s where you’re wrong. Trust me: The worse you are with wordplay, the better it will be. In fact, go back to your elementary school days, channel your inner child and write it all out with crayon. Use every color in the box. Doodle all over it. Draw stick figures holding hands or a blue whale with stick-on googly eyes. The sky is the limit. Glue on some plastic jewels or foil hearts and stars. It will be the one card your loved one remembers forever and will hang on the refrigerator door all year long. No card from Target is going to do that. Also, who says you need to wait until the 14th? Make a few more leading up to the big day and tape them, one day at a time, to the mirror in the bathroom, or to the windshield of the car. Let them know you are on point the whole week before. That’s how it’s done.

Now, what about dinner? Sure, that fancy gastropub with the menu that doesn’t list its prices is impressive but take your partner there a few days before the holiday, when the whole joint belongs to you — just because. But on the big day, cook dinner yourself. Right — I know — you can’t cook. Again, this works in your favor. Grab Vera Stewart’s cookbook off the shelf, pick something really complicated, roll up your sleeves and go at it. The bigger the mess, the more it will mean. And who knows, you might just surprise yourself. Just make sure your sweetheart knows you plan to clean the kitchen yourself, and be ready with the take out. Cuddled up on the couch with some Chinese food after an epic fail at a homemade dinner, this meal will be the one you’ll talk about forever. It also makes for a shorter trip to the bedroom than a car ride home from across town. You’re welcome.

Also, don’t skimp on the wine. Never skimp on the wine.

And now the gift. This one depends on all the “listening” I mentioned earlier and should be custom-tailored to your mate. One example I love to tell people about is the year a friend of mine bought his wife a book. Not a book that he had any interest in, but one he knew she would like, and he read the first chapter to her. They took turns reading one chapter a night to each other, and it lasted well past the month of February. It’s now a tradition in their house, and it keeps them talking to each about something other than work or kids or bills every night all year long. That beautiful line of communication in itself is the perfect gift.

And there you have it. Take Valentine’s Day by the horns and make it yours. Be the romantic your mate always wanted you to be. Be one of a kind. You got this. 

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Photo by Rinck Content Studio on Unsplash

Appears in the February/March 2021 issue of Augusta Magazine.