The Cardinal’s Promise

My birthday is July 4th. Independence Day.

In school, the kids would say Rob thinks the fireworks are for him. And I’d say no I don’t.

I did.

But the older I get, the more I think about what independence actually means. Not the holiday. The word.

I was born Claudio Balderas in Mexico City. I left when I was four on a plane with my mother, who told me we were visiting my grandfather. I didn’t know we weren’t coming back. I didn’t know the word immigration. I just knew the seatbelt was too big and the engines were loud and my mom was holding my hand.

We landed in New Jersey in winter. I lost my language almost overnight. I ordered a taco at a Chinese restaurant. I pointed at a ferry and said put de car on de boat. I was four years old, trying to narrate a new world with the only words I had.

Two years later, a man named Lou Brizzi adopted me. Gave me his name. Gave me a country.

Lou already had three kids and a full life. But he looked at a situation that wasn’t his responsibility and made it his. And because the family just got bigger, he bought a donut shop at a flea market in Union, New Jersey — a place called Boardwalk Lew’s. The name came with the shop. Lou just kept it.

Open Friday nights, all day Saturday, all day Sunday. Mini donuts and Icees. The diabetes special, we called it. Lou worked the hospital during the week and made donuts on weekends because that’s what you do when your family gets bigger. You don’t complain. You open a shop.

Years later, I’d end up selling Ozempic for Novo Nordisk. Life has a sense of humor.

But here’s what I think about on the Fourth of July now.

I think about a boy on a plane who didn’t know he was leaving home for the last time. I think about a mother who didn’t shrink. I think about a man who adopted two boys from another country and then bought a donut shop to make sure they had enough.

I think about addiction. The years I lost. The years my family lost. The night my brother Chris gave me an ultimatum that saved my life. The morning I woke up sober for the first time and didn’t know yet that it would stick.

I think about Hope. Her name. Her steadiness. The way recovery gave me the capacity to love someone well.

I think about Lou dying on Christmas. The cardinal appearing fifteen days later. Seventeen years sober. The county championship at seventeen. The number that keeps showing up.

And I think about the rooms I walk into now. Hospice rooms. Rooms where someone is dying and someone else is afraid. I pull up a chair. I stay. I don’t rush.

Everything in my life trained me for those rooms. Mexico City trained me to read a room before I enter it. The wrestling mat trained me to get back up. Addiction trained me to surrender. Recovery trained me to listen. Lou trained me to show up. Chris trained me to tell the truth. Hope trained me to be still.

Independence Day.

I was born in Mexico City. I became Rob Brizzi in New Jersey. I nearly died in West Palm Beach. I was rebuilt in the Florida Panhandle. I found love in Pensacola. I found my calling in hospice. I lost my father on Christmas. I saw a cardinal in January.

And every Fourth of July, the sky explodes, and the kids were right.

The fireworks are for me.

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