The Language of the Nest

June 12, 2026

Dad was weird.

I want to say that clearly, and early, because if you spent more than five minutes with him, you already know it - and if you didn’t, you’re about to. And I mean weird in the way that only the rarest people manage to be: completely, stubbornly, joyfully himself. Dad didn’t drift toward the world’s conventions and then fall a little short. He built his own world, named the things in it, and invited the people he connected with inside.

He called it the Language of the Nest.

Born April 17, 1934 - his parents’ wedding anniversary, which, if you knew him, feels exactly right; arriving on a day already dedicated to the idea of two people choosing each other. He also arrived four years before the invention of the chocolate chip cookie, which meant he spent his first four years on this earth deprived of what would become one of his great loves. He called them cooked-ees, and there’s no doubt in my mind he worked his hardest to make up for lost time.

Dad grew up in Syracuse with his older brother Richard, worked in his father’s furniture store when he was young, and studied art history at Syracuse University before joining the Navy - serving aboard the USS Lookout, a Radar Picket Ship that patrolled the eastern coast of the US looking for enemy vessels. His Navy chapter concluded with a hospital stay for mononucleosis and hepatitis - because if you’re going to do something, you might as well do two things at once.

After the Navy, he found his way to a radio station - where he spun classical music and opened every broadcast with the sound of birds chirping. He ended up in advertising. Then, eventually, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - working as an employment counselor, helping people find jobs. Of all the things he did in his life, that one makes the most sense to me in retrospect. Here was a person, who not only could talk to anyone (and tried to talk to everyone), had an almost unnerving ability to make people feel like they mattered - and he spent his days pointing them towards their next step. He was good at that. Better than he probably knew.

In 1963, he went to Washington. Stood in a crowd of 250,000 people and listened to a speech the rest of the world would spend decades quoting. That was just - him. He showed up for things. Not just for the private world he’d built, but for the larger one too.

He became an ordained minister and Justice of the Peace.

In Massachusetts, the price of a civil ceremony - he’d always spell it out, c-i-v-i-l, because people had a habit of hearing simple - was set by law. And a civil ceremony is, by design, exactly that: simple. You fill in the couple’s names, you read what’s on the page, you pronounce them married, and everyone goes home.

Not dad.

He’d spend hours on even the most basic ceremony. Revising, rethinking, shaping the words until they were right. Not right for him - right for them, whoever they were. Nearly eight hundred ceremonies in his lifetime. You might say he was the world’s most prolific polygamist.

What that number actually means is this: he believed, every single time, that the moment two people choose each other is not a form to fill out. It deserves language worthy of the choice. He never stopped believing that, not once in nearly eight hundred ceremonies. He was, in his own language, helping people get nested.

For the first forty-something years of his life, Dad didn’t have much luck with love. At some point it occurred to him that he could simply pay someone to help - which is either practical, ahead of its time, or both. He signed up with a dating service and was assigned a matchmaker.

After a while, and very little progress, he pulled out the oldest trick in the book.

He asked the matchmaker out.

The line, as I remember him telling it: “You’ve set me up on all these dates - when the person I’d like to go on a date with is you.”

That’s how he found his nestmate. That’s how he met my mother. And that, kids, is also the story of how my mother got fired from her job as a matchmaker - for dating a client.

Dad was a pilot. He raced cars. He loved cars - the way some people love old friends.

It started with his brother Richard, who gave him his first car: a Model A Ford. That early gift planted something that never left him. After a significant love affair with Corvairs, he bought a 1915 Ford Model T - which he called DWC - Dear Wee Car. Later came another Model A - a callback to his first one - that he bought in rough condition and had fully restored. He was a member of several antique car enthusiast groups and loved nothing more than taking them out on the road.

One Christmas, Dad and I drove the Model T in our town’s parade. We were late - anyone who ever went anywhere with him could have predicted that - and we rolled up to the front of the line, talked our way into a spot, and were told to make our way to the back. Before we could, the car wouldn’t start.

For those who don’t know: antique cars with gravity-based fuel lines sometimes hold just enough gas in the line to go a short distance. We sat there at the front of the parade, troubleshooting in front of a crowd, for a solid five minutes before I said: “Dad - what if the gas is off?”

We opened the engine compartment. Turned the knob. The car started.

That’s the story of how we led the Christmas parade.

We didn’t always see eye to eye - and for a long time, it sat with me as a one-way problem. But somewhere along the way, he started listening. By the end, I knew he was proud - of my degrees, of my work (he loved telling people where I worked), of the person I’d become. He didn’t always say it to me directly. He didn’t have to.

Now. If you knew my father for any length of time - any length of time at all - you know what comes next.

Dogs.

Well - almost. First, a detour he would have appreciated.

Dad could talk. I mean that with tremendous affection and also complete accuracy. His brother Richard - who loved him, and knew him better than almost anyone - called him “Long Story Short,” because he’d often try to summarize his stories with “long story short” multiple times in the same conversation, and the long was really long, and the short was long. If you got him on a topic he cared about, you simply had to decide whether you were in for the duration or willing to yank yourself free. I got very good at being his emcee - the person who plays the music when an Oscars speech goes on too long.

And yes - I am aware of the irony of giving a long eulogy about a man who couldn’t give a short story. He would’ve loved it.

And now, dogs:

His opening line, upon meeting virtually anyone, was: “Do you belong to a dog’s being?” If the answer was yes, you weren’t going anywhere for a while. “What kind of dog do you belong to?” He insisted - and I mean this was a philosophical position he held with genuine conviction - that humans belong to dogs, not the other way around. West Highland White Terriers were his favorite. Wee dogges, he called them. Nothing made him happier than a cold wet goomy - a nose - in his ear.

He had an entire taxonomy for dogs. Puppies were cwb - cute wee beings. A dog’s tail was a pelshometer¹. An extremely cute dog was the quintessence of cwbescence².

He had an entire word - thwibble - for the specific motion of moving your thumb and index finger back and forth on a dog’s nose. There is no other word in the English language for this. He made one.

Which finally brings us to language.

He called birds lbs³, spelled “l-b-s” - which, you might notice, is also the abbreviation for pounds. When making weight measurements he pronounced them the same - they were homophones. Hungry birds waiting at the feeder were eepalees, because they would “eep,” as if calling out to be fed. Birds that had eaten were peckalees. He noticed that distinction and named it.

Some of his words were constructed with their own internal logic - many of them simply normal words or phrases backwards. Ti si gniniar⁴ is it is raining, backwards. Not overly whimsical. Just precise, in his own mind.

Coffee was drug. A beard was a face nest. A mustache, a nose nest. The computer - named for the sound the keys made - was plockety. A spider was a wriggly jiggly. Thank you was TYB - thank your being⁵ (which, of course, is the being that belongs to you) - which is a different kind of gratitude entirely.

Mother was Peep.

Wednesday was Wed-nest-day.

If your name happened to end in a vowel, he wanted to know what happened to the previous letters. Jennifer became Jen-nest-fer.

It was the way his mind worked: sideways, with more attention to the world than the world usually deserves.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about since he died:

The word nest meant home. It meant bed. It meant rest. It meant to marry - to join two lives into one place. A nest is what you build when you’ve decided to stay. When you’ve found the people worth staying for.

He spent his life helping people build nests. Matching the unemployed with work. Marrying couples who’d found each other. Naming the small creatures and small moments that most people walk past without looking. And for nearly fifty years, he kept a nest of his own, with Mom. He had an almost stubborn insistence on paying attention - on noticing the eepalees from the peckalees, on having a word ready for the exact motion of a thumb on a dog’s nose.

He never quite fit the world as given. That was, I think, his gift - and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand it as such. He was difficult in the ways that complicated people are difficult. He was also irreplaceable in the ways that only irreplaceable people are.

There is a version of grief that is just absence - the chair that is empty, the phone that doesn’t ring. But there is another kind, and I think it’s the kind worth sitting with: the grief of knowing you were in the presence of someone original. Someone who looked at a dog’s nose and thought, we need a word for that. Someone who looked at two people in love and spent hours finding the right words for them too.

He built his own language because he saw a world that deserved more names than it had.

Go home tonight⁶ - try noticing something you’ve never named and name it. Tell someone you love them in whatever words you can find - even made-up ones.

That’s what he would have wanted.

TYB.

For Dad.