Stuart Plunkett

Anthony Laskovski is “Tony” to many of us, “Ant” to his family, and “vujko” to his niece and nephew (the Macedonian word for “uncle” where all of the letters are silent except for the “v,” pronounced “voochay”). Tony was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, in 1984. And like all Australians, Tony spent the first few months of his life in his mother’s pouch.

He emerged to find himself part of a tightknit community of Macedonians who first immigrated to Newcastle in the 1950s. Newcastle is the largest coal exporting harbor in the world and has numerous steel mills, and jobs, as a result. Steel companies filled those jobs by recruiting workers from other countries. Though the jobs were hardly glamorous, through hard work and perseverance, fathers and grandfathers could eventually earn enough to bring their families with them to Australia. The entrepreneurialism and work ethic of these folks led many in the community, Tony’s parents included, to go on to great success in other fields. By 1984, Newcastle had become far more than an industrial city. And how could it be otherwise given its spectacular setting on the Pacific Ocean with beaches, parks, and promenades with open-air coffee houses and cafes. Tony grew up in this setting, steeped in the history and values of his community. It is for these reasons that, although he would eventually move to the other side of the world, the truth is he never really left.

Tony earned a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and worked at the local power company before founding a technology start-up company. Growing the company was a struggle, but his and his partner’s hard work ultimately led them to an investor who brought them to Silicon Valley, opening up all sorts of opportunities that boosted Tony’s career and earned him his current role at NVIDIA—sort of the 2000’s version of the success his father had from driving a factory truck to owning commercial and residential properties.

Tony is deeply proud of his Macedonian heritage. In July, he took me to Macedonia with his family. We had a birthday lunch for his sister with extended family in Bitola, the town adjacent to the two villages where his parents are from. During the lunch and other visits to Bitola, Tony ran into relatives he wasn’t expecting to see, as well as other Macedonians living in Newcastle on their summer vacations. One afternoon Tony drove us to the village where his father lived. We parked near a house to take a look at a fountain that his grandfather had once refurbished, now overrun with cherry trees. We ate a few of the cherries. The owner of the house where we parked came out and recognized Tony as a Laskovski because he looks so much like his father. On one of our final evenings, we ate at a restaurant serving traditional Macedonian food. Tony’s father paid the musicians to play for us. As they surrounded the table, Tony’s mother teared up. Tony was beside himself to see his parents so happy.

At some point in Tony’s childhood, he met a dog, and a cat, and obviously a koala and a kangaroo. The records are unclear on when these meetings occurred, but historians unanimously agree that these events had a profound impact on Tony. He is an animal lover like few others, disturbingly so. I recall a trip to Sydney where Tony saw a puppy with its owner. After asking permission and not listening for the answer, he started playing with the puppy, which had razor sharp puppy claws. Undeterred, Tony kept playing until his hands and wrists were shredded and bleeding. The owner was horrified but Tony explained calmly and irrationally that it had been worth it. Tony recently summoned a pack of stray dogs in a park—dogs that make a living off of exploiting the Tony’s of the world. Not surprisingly, they all came at once and we had to strategically get back to the car and find some food before they decided we were the food. After that, I crossed “safari” off our bucket list.

One of our early dates was a weekend trip to Tahoe, just as Harvey was recovering from major surgery on his knee. Tony instantly became Harvey’s second father. He was cheating though, because his dog Maxie was still in Australia. Tony talked a lot about Maxie—the car ride home with his parents from the facility where they rescued Maxie as a senior, and what Maxie meant to Tony during some difficult times. Animal lovers are automatically good people, but with Tony animals are a way of connecting with others. Leave your dog with Tony for just a minute, you’ll end up with amazing pictures and videos set to music. A friend’s dog died this year and she still talks about the picture Tony took that the family cherishes. When he heard the dog had died, he baked snickerdoodles for them.

And you don’t have to lose your pet to get cookies from Tony, because he loves cooking for himself and others—traits and skills he acquired from his mother and sister. The wisest and most manipulative among us have learned that if you just mention something you’d like to try in front of Tony, he’ll make it for you. If you’re not around when he makes it, you’ll probably find it in a box on your front porch. Tony is one of those people who can go into a kitchen stocked only with baking soda and dish soap and somehow put together a memorable meal.

When Tony was a young boy, he would walk into a room filled with people, put his arms in the air, and say “hello everyone!” This lack of inhibition definitely came from his father. Tony’s years in Newcastle were filled with family events, birthdays, weddings, and any number of celebrations involving lots of food, Macedonian music, and dancing. But while Tony is more than happy to show off his dancing prowess in any setting, I would not describe him as someone who still enters a room demanding attention with his hands in the air. At some point in his 20s, Tony began to live two separate lives as he came to terms with being gay. Tony was not ashamed or confused about who he was; rather, he was afraid of losing the most important part of his life—his family. He misjudged and underestimated them, as so many of us do. But even once resolved, the trauma of those dark times has a blunting effect that takes time to fully heal.

I haven’t seen Tony cry many times over the years, which I take as a personal failure, but I remember two times in particular. The first time was at the end of a year when Tony had struggled with whether to come out to his family. The fear and stress had gotten the best of him, and the man who takes on everyone else’s burdens had finally had too much. He collapsed onto the bed sobbing; he knew it was time. Within two years, Tony’s family and friends came from all over the world to watch him get married in Tahoe. And that was the second time i remember him crying. On that little wedding stage when it was his turn to speak, he began to sob, but this time with joy—the joy and optimism that comes with knowing you can live your life as yourself, loving everyone you want to love without fear. I see in Tony the happiness, still blossoming, of realizing that we are now all part of the same family. I remember hugging Tony as he sobbed and glancing over at the grand piano floating on a bed of white carnations and thinking that, in terms of coming out of the closet, there was certainly nothing left to do.

Oh, and that thing where you put your arms in the air, more of that.

The sky above Fort Smith, Arkansas in the 1940s and 50s was unpolluted by city lights, perfect for viewing constellations, meteor showers and eclipses, and on the clearest of nights, the outstretched arms of the Milky Way itself. This may have been why my father’s imagination steered toward the heavens from an early age. He is an avid reader, an insatiable reader on all topics, but I remember in particular Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” on our bookshelf and on PBS. My dad loved to talk about space, and I was fascinated. He talked about how looking at stars was like looking into the past because of the relatively lazy pace of light. On our numerous car trips from Kansas City to Fort Smith, if I wasn’t in the front seat I’d lean in from the backseat to ask questions about the moon, blackholes, and the galaxy. He always had the answers. To this day I think about how at any moment a supernova that happened millions of years ago could illuminate our planet for days, pissing off nocturnal animals across the globe. He is also fascinated by natural disasters, but none of the promised events ever materialized. I never saw a tornado, despite being ushered to our basement during many warnings. Since moving to California I was promised that part of a Hawaiian island would sheer off sending a tidal wave that would cover San Francisco. Still, nothing.

My dad was not always focused on educating us on science. I think the principal reason he had kids was to mess with them. Capturing kids’ imagination is a big part of my father’s existence, a product of his creativity and sense of humor, as well as his toolkit for distraction. We were convinced he could create thunder by pulling on his ear, when in fact he was timing his ear pulls based on the appearance of lightning and the distance of the storm. On road trips to Arkansas we would wait anxiously to see where the giant chicken had crashed in the mountains, leaving only its feathers as evidence. Inevitably we would go around the corner quickly and he would ask if we had seen the feathers. He loved creative punishments. He would make us march in unison around the house, or put chairs back to back and make two of us sit in silence. In the car, if we acted up, we would have to put our head between our legs and be quiet; that was called going into “the cooler.” Once I remember him inventing some concoction at home that would cause our tongues to turn purple if we were lying. Someone was certainly lying.

Smart and driven, and with my mom at Mills College in Oakland, my father made his way to Stanford University where he graduated with a degree in political science. The Vietnam War had begun and it was apparent that my dad was at risk of being drafted. He joined the Kansas National Guard in hopes of avoiding the draft, but President Johnson eventually activated the Guard and my father went to Vietnam. I don’t know the details of his time there, but I know it wasn’t pleasant. My brother had already been born; when my Dad returned the family moved to Kansas City where I was born and my sister shortly thereafter.

My father got his license to fly single-engine airplanes. I remember the years he kept an Aeronca, a cloth-covered two-seater, at the local airport just a few blocks from our house. He would take us up one at a time to get a bird’s eye view of the neighborhood. On longer trips, we flew into the clouds where my Dad seemed most at home, enthralling us with games like “knocking off the knob,” which meant flying through a puffy outgrowth of a cloud. This, for a kid, was hypnotic. If my father wasn’t flying us around, he might be entertaining us by taking us sledding after a snowfall or hitting pop-flies into the air for us to try and catch. When he wasn’t entertaining us, he was watching golf on TV—and not at gunpoint.

After my first year of college in Chicago, I called my Dad to tell him I was gay. I remember his response verbatim—employing humor as a way of saying I love and accept you no matter who you are, just one pillar of an ethos passed onto him by my grandparents. He said “you can be gay if you stop smoking.” This was a reference to the Benson & Hedges Ultralight 100 Menthols that I had dabbled in to look cool; based on photographic evidence, it did not work. So I agreed and went with gay. A few years later after finishing college I spent a summer badgering my preferred law school to let me in off the waitlist. When they finally did the night before orientation, my Dad drove me to Chicago overnight and helped me move into my 300 square foot studio across from the school. Later in law school, my Dad would have a major stroke. I returned to Kansas City and saw my Dad in the hospital, not in good shape. After many weeks, his wife and my step-mother, Randi, at his side, he was very near the end before the doctors figured out that he had suffered adrenal gland failure. With that solved, he made it.

The stroke changed the course of my Dad’s life, oddly for the better. Physically, his movement was limited on one side but there was little he couldn’t do. The stroke made him more affable, which was the last thing he needed. My dad could make friends with a light post. He can talk to anyone, and does. He has the steady gaze of his mother, and her dark friendly eyes. He loves animals the way he loves kids. Dogs, cats, and wild animals. Squirrels and chipmunks follow him into the house for food, somehow realizing that the innate cruelty of humans is nowhere present in my father. He is a legend in the hummingbird community. But I posit that the stroke changed my Dad’s view of the world—changed the measuring stick he uses to assess his own worth and success. It did not change his eating habits, however. For breakfast he continued to order a slice of pie with a side of bacon—but only because restaurants don’t sell cotton candy. Without going into any detail, I’ll just say that most of my father’s doctors have nice watches and second homes.

I remember a picture in my grandparents’ house – four separate portraits of each of the boys printed together in the same frame. A couple of months ago, my father’s oldest brother Sherry died, this following the death of one of his younger brothers, Steve, to COVID in 2020. The fourth brother, Mark, died when my dad was in college. He had fallen off a horse and hit his head, a family tragedy that never fully healed. When his last brother died this year, Randi told me to wait a few days before I called. I understood why. I thought about the years of growth and change and family in that two-bedroom house, a mansion of memories hard to process so many decades later. And I can see my father as a young boy grabbing his telescope and walking outside to get some time to himself, hours passing like seconds before my grandmother comes out to find him looking into the sky.

Should I be so lucky, one day Tony and I will drive far away from the evening lights of San Francisco, crossing our fingers for a cloudless night so that I might show my son everything my father showed me.

As a kid, I never understood Mother’s Day. My birthday on the other hand, now that was a holiday I could really get behind! What was the point in having a special day for mothers when we made every day so special? My brother and sister and I bestowed on our mother opportunities of a lifetime. Only in a busy restaurant would she have had more opportunities to master her culinary skills. And our endless fighting provided our mother the chance to delve into the exciting world of conflict resolution. When we needed to go somewhere, we didn’t selfishly hop on our bikes—we let our mother drive us, giving her a chance to get out of the house and save all those tedious chores for later. And after all this, I’m supposed to produce a potted plant or colorful scarf to say “thank you”?

My mother’s name is Sarah Plunkett. She was born Sarah Welch Yantis in 1943, when Abraham Lincoln was President. She grew up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, with her parents and three siblings. When she graduated from high school, after the Civil War, she left Fort Smith on a wagon train to attend Mills College in Oakland—beating me to the Bay Area by a few years. She graduated with a degree in chemistry, which had just been invented as a science. After graduating, she threw her bags into a horseless carriage and moved to Kansas City where she raised three kids and lives to this day.

“Mother” is just one thing my mother is. I was 11 years old when she started bringing body parts home . . . ears, noses, and eyes, sketched in graphite on paper. These eventually formed faces, and graphite became oil paints, portraits became still-life’s, and then the drawings and paintings of her kids became but a preamble to the many paintings she sold in galleries. She’s an artist. She’s also a friend, to many. She has life-long friends from childhood, high school, and college. She has countless friends from her long life in Kansas City, including a group of women who have played bridge together for decades. She plays cards expertly. She plays mahjong. My mother came from a privileged environment, but her feet have always been planted on common ground. She has had the luxury of doing charitable work over the years, and in those endeavors she did the hard work, sitting with impoverished families facing heartbreaking difficulties and helping them figure out food and finances. She has traveled the world. She has also had more than her share of loss, losing her mother far too soon to lung cancer, losing her father to alcoholism years before he actually passed, losing an uncle and brother to AIDS. And maybe no less significantly, she lost many beloved dogs over the years, some of which she cared for when her kids had something better to do, not appreciating that she would take on the caretaking and the heartbreak on their behalf. But she’s a survivor, facing down her own significant medical issues.

When I was 17 years old, my mother drove me from Kansas City to Chicago to move into my college dorm. I don’t know if she knew it at the time, but I wouldn’t return to live in Kansas City again. I knew I was different and needed to figure that out. That night in a hotel near the campus I heard my mother crying, and I chalked it up to a disagreement at the front desk over the room. I now understand that taking your child to college is fraught, so I think less about the drive to Chicago and more about her drive home. Of the three of us, I was the one most attached. I looked to her for everything, to figure out what I could do when I was bored, to take on my emotions when they became too much, which was not uncommon. I watched her cook in the kitchen. When family was on the way to town for holidays, I wanted to stay home from school to help clean the house. After dinner, I wanted to play games with her at our hexagonal game table with rolling leather chairs. She taught me to play cards, Gin Rummy mostly, and backgammon, and Mastermind. She always won, but made me feel like the winner. In high school, she drove me on countless early weekend mornings—me in a shirt she had ironed and a suit and tie—to meet the bus taking us to the next debate tournament, the beginnings of my career as an unbearable litigator.

And then I left home for college, unaware, ungrateful, unapologetic, still a kid, still attached, determined not to be. The subsequent decades are dotted with many visits back and forth, for graduations, holidays, funerals, weddings, and other of life’s events. I once threatened not to come home for Christmas unless I received written assurances that no one would vote for Bush. In recent years, the extremism of Republicans have landed us on the same page, and my mother and I now find pleasure in our shared outrage. This week I texted her about Roe v. Wade; she texted back the next morning, and I also noted that she liked my Facebook post on this topic. In contrast, my mother’s Facebook page is a tribute to the happy and simpler things one can see on life’s journey.

The journeys I remember most vividly as a child were the many family road trips from Kansas City to Arkansas to visit grandparents. These trips were fun for us kids, bickering and making trouble in the backseat. I realize now it was probably a virtual hell-on-earth for our parents. But they never let that show. And, inevitably, the chaotic car would go silent as day turned to night, the stars switching on across the Midwestern sky.

When I was seven, my parents bought a car that had electric windows. This provided them a new trick to keep us quiet. My mother would lower and raise her hands as if summoning an invisible force to open and close the passenger window. We couldn’t figure out how this was possible, gliding down Highway 71 toward the rolling mountains of the Ozark’s, us the unwitting fools lulled into silence. And she, the magician.