Tag Archives: siblings

The Aftermath–Little Triggers

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I’m sitting at my dining room table in the dark with my laptop and half of a bottle of Maker’s Mark.  C and I bought it to celebrate New Year’s Eve with our own party of two on the balcony of our hotel overlooking the Savannah River.  We drank half of the bottle then, in our pajamas, smoking cigarettes and remarking how relieved we were that it had occurred to us that our room came with a balcony and we didn’t need to squeeze ourselves into the New-Year’s crowds waiting for hours on the Savannah riverfront or up on a rooftop bar that charged a fortune for the privilege of being there.  24 hours we’d been at that place, wondering where we could position ourselves to glimpse the fireworks without having to actually socialize with other people. 

That’s the kind of people we are.  Smart.  But not so smart.  So we parked ourselves on the narrow balcony with some prosecco and some Maker’s Mark and watched lame fireworks on this New Year’s Eve.  Our neighbor who blows up the neighborhood every fourth-of-July puts on a better show, sadly, than the city of Savannah did this year. This is a city that prides itself on two holidays–St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve–but it “dropped the ball” on this occasion. 

Hey, I’m not complaining.  We didn’t plan to go to Savannah to celebrate New Year’s Eve.  We had planned to go there just because we’d never been and—months ago—it seemed like a good time to go, considering that we’d probably spend Christmas with Dad and new a few buffer days in-between before hitting the road again, and just before C and I had to go back to work.  Those were the plans just a few months ago.  Once again, our world changed brutally and abruptly.

So we went to Savannah after my dad died.  It was a lovely distraction, but I knew it for that–I always knew, at every juncture that I should probably be grieving.  We drank all day on December 30th, starting with a welcome glass of champagne at check-in for being special traveling members of the hotel chain, ending in the hotel bar, ordering purple cocktails that I cannot name at last-call.  I could barely walk during our ghost tour earlier that evening, over cobblestones and down into cramped basements.  I don’t remember what the tour guide told us, but I remember feeling like we were characters in a big charade, nineteenth-century folks ooooing and ahhhhhing over the freaks in the circus tent. But without the freaks or anything so interesting.  After the ghost tour, we made our late dinner reservation at a place that I should have been truly present to experience.  I can’t really remember the food—just some fuzzy images and C’s reminders the next day of how fucking brilliant those wings were, the wings that earned the restaurant a Michelin star. Each day in Savannah began later, with clouded heads and clouded emotions and more adventures with unsustainable habits.

Savannah is a beautiful city, though.  I think it’s the most beautiful city I have ever seen.  Still, every once in a while, something would trigger me, and I’d start crying, seemingly at random.  Wild new thoughts would hit me at inopportune times.  The biggest bash in the head was the realization that I don’t have a place to go home to anymore.  I have my brother, but we’re not so close despite these months of bringing us somewhat closer.  I can’t just announce that I’m going to come up and stay with him.  It puts me in position I have never been in before—I can’t go home without an invitation.  My brother and I, we still have some communicating to do, or—rather—to practice.  He asked me on Friday, two days after Dad died, when I was planning on coming back.  The only answer that came to me was maybe in a couple of weeks, because I thought I might be able to deal with it in a couple of weeks. 

In truth, I am putting off going back up there because I can’t face going into Dad’s apartment.  It’s too soon, and I just can’t turn around and go back like that.  I’ll have a breakdown on the threshold of the place.  It dawned on me though, that my brother might think I don’t want to come up and claim what I want of Dad’s things.  He’s so efficient, already taking trips to the Goodwill and divvying up the stuff.  Wants me to tell him what I want.  I don’t know what I want.  Maybe I want that marble ashtray that he used for his cigars, or maybe I want his cane with the handle that unfolds into a little seat, so he could take a load off when the walking got too much.  Maybe I should just go up there and do what I need to do.  But just thinking about the five hours in the car each way… damn, I’ll cry myself off the road. 

I can’t be with people, but I can’t be alone, if that makes any sense.  So I wrote an email to my brother because I can express myself better in writing than in any other way.  I told him how I felt, and I told him to call me, and he did. It’s hard to START a communicating with a sibling with whom you have never really had a close relationship.  Miscommunication can happen in crisis, even among people who are close.  I thought I was walking on eggshells, but he told me it’s all good. He said my uncle, my dad’s littlest brother, probably couldn’t come up for the same reason. He got me.

We let politics get in the way for a long time. My big brother is so much kinder than I gave him credit for, so much more intuitive, so much smarter, so very ethical and thoughtful. I understand now why his wife acts like she does–defensive, territorial, protective–around me. I have been the snarky lefty, and my brothers have been the imaginary enemy for a long time now. I’ve been the fly in the ointment and the abrasive other side of shit. It’s been a battle, when it should have been a bonding. We shouldn’t HAVE TO BOND while someone we love is dying, but in these waters, death and tragedy are the only way we’re going to connect and maybe even get us to another level. 

My big brother likes to be organized–he got that shit from our mother–he likes everything in its place and things to be where they need to be. He sends me pictures of Dad’s stuff, and I pick out the piece or pieces that I can’t live without from among the piles, and he sets them aside for me. I don’t know where his mind is, but I know he’s hurting. He’s the oldest son, the man in charge, and perchance he didn’t ask for that title, but that’s what he got. He was the first. When he was born, my mom was nineteen, and my dad twenty-one, and I’m not even sure my dad was present for the birth of his first child. He and my other brother who I can’t bring myself to talk about got the young–the very young–parents. I got the ones in their thirties. 

But I believe I started this reverie with a bottle of Maker’s Mark, or half.  It’s still there.  I got it out my bag when I decided sleep wasn’t coming and brought it to the dining room table as an option.  But I don’t want it.  I really don’t want it.  I’m staring at it now with more curiosity than actual desire to consume.  I’m so tired of booze.  

The Facebook Dilemma

40s are the new 40s, Aging Parents, Election 2016, Relationships, Social Media, , , , , , , , , ,

5df6bdfae83c2009884fea46f785bd4f“…la lala lala lala… Should I stay, or should I go now?   La lala lala lala…

If I go there will be trouble (la lala lala la), and if I stay it will be double. La lala lala lala…”

I’m talking about FACEBOOK, that social media site that’s causing intellectual cancer in the 40-and-over community. “It’s for old people,” say the five children I vacationed with over inauguration weekend. And it’s officially ruined the dignity of us old folks by revealing our thought processes. My dilemma today is figuring out which generation I belong to—do I belong to the really old one who abuses social media or to the moderately old one who wonders if she abuses social media?

I heard a stat recently that 50% of Facebook users get all their news from Facebook. Should I be surprised, shocked that the generation that bemoans online culture is as corrupted as our youth?

Not really, cuz here’s what I’ve learned in recent months about the older generation (including myself)—it’s the same as any other. Each generation is populated with its critical thinkers and its mouth-breathers, its diplomats and its reactionaries, its educated and its uneducated. The old farts who bloviate about the indignities of Madonna and memorize political memes simply fancy themselves to be on a higher level than the kids around them, because they’ve “lived,” because they’ve “seen” things, because they “read.” Well, I’ll tell you what—you can spend six or seven decades alive on this earth without acquiring any new wisdom if that’s how you choose to live it. I’m quite certain that many of my own family members have “lived” in this manner—unyielding, loyal to fossilized ideas and suspicious of the ideas of people standing in front of them. They make fun of me for changing up my viewpoint from time-to-time, see that as a weakness. I haven’t considered my ability to think and change to be a flaw since I first read Emerson:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” 

My father makes the same comments about spending and liberals and welfare that he made in the Reagan days.  My mother refuses to acknowledge new ideas as such, and falls back on simply shutting out thought altogether. And my brother, well, we’ve discussed my brother. They all have their own Facebook communities.  What’s interesting about these three and their Facebook companions is that they claim to be the leading critics of the media that feeds them. My father will only change his mind if the idea is sanctioned by his media source (Fox). The man who lived through the Cold War is now ready to jump into bed with Putin. Maybe my mother learned about Anne Frank in school, but that doesn’t stop her from advocating that we label the Muslims living and working among us. Their media is as poisonous as they claim others to be.

So my thought right now is that I just want to leave one corrupt media source–Facebook–, to avoid the temptation to get my hands dirtier and my dignity crushed. I could leave this weeping, ranting, raging, cyber fray and learn instead to talk to my family. I have never asked the right questions, never asked my mother, for instance, why—before the Republican Party took up the pro-life platform—she once angrily ranted about “those pro-lifers,” but now she has become one. I never asked her what annoyed her then about the movement that doesn’t annoy her now.

I have plenty of friends in my exact age bracket who ignore social media, who are suspicious of it and always will remain so. I respect them. I might not know what they are doing every minute of their days, but before Facebook and MySpace, nobody knew that anyway.

So do I leave it? In doing so, I’ll lose my only contact with people I like, I’ll lose eight years of uploaded photos. I’ll lose those “hey, here’s what you were doing three years ago today” posts. But I might learn how to be a better thinker, better communicator. Should I stay or should I go?

Can’t Say it Doesn’t Matter

Election 2016, Reflections, Relationships, ,

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The recent election created some small ripples in my ordinarily placid family dealings. I targeted certain family members, like my mom, and I tried to sway their votes. This caused one of my brothers to threaten to “unfriendly” me (although he never did) and my retired uncle to begin actually using Facebook . My branch of the family tree isn’t much on confrontation (or communication), though we’re pretty good at freezing out.

I have no intention of freezing out any of my family members, even the ones who’ve subjected me to their own cold shoulders over the years, even the ones who never visit (that would be all of them), even the ones who talk shit behind my back, the ones capable of turning on me for little or no reason. Won’t do it. They’re mine. I see little sparks of me in every single one of them.

Perhaps that’s why I spent an hour today trying to decide what to wear to lunch with my brother. I tried on two dresses, two pairs of leggings, three jackets, and four hats.

My brother drives a large white pickup truck with a pair of yellow testicles hanging from the trailer hitch and an airbrushed picture of Mt. Rushmore—behind a Thomas Jefferson quote and the Tea Party’s URL—on the tailgate. He likes to wear extra large cotton shirts because they’re roomy. He embroiders custom slogans on the pockets of tees with an industrial-sized embroidering machine that he gave to his wife as a “gift.” He’s inspired by Fox News.

I will never get into his truck. I question his fashion sense. I listen to NPR, and sometimes I pity my brother’s wife for the weird “gifts” that she’s received from him over the years, like the aforementioned embroidering machine, or the sports car that doesn’t run.

My brother can also build or fix anything. He can build a new computer if he doesn’t like the way his functions. He can drag a dead jalopy out of a junkyard and not only make it run again, but make it run better (which, incidentally, makes me wonder why his wife’s sports car is still in the garage). He can construct his own energy-efficient heating system in his house or fix a jet engine.

I can do none of these things.

I imagine my brother and I appear opposites to anyone who doesn’t know us. My mother thinks we’re too much alike. My emotions concerning him have vacillated from anger to envy to disgust to admiration to a staunch conviction that I will never, ever be like him. I’ve accused him of being smart, stupid, wise, deluded, selfish, selfless, even mildly autistic. Sometimes, when he talks, I feel an overwhelming urge to leave the room.

In true my-brother form, he casually mentioned he’d be in my metro area for a week. It came out when I asked him why he wanted to know about certain bars around there. My brother lives at least nine hours away. He visited me once, for my wedding, in the sixteen years I’ve lived here.   We made plans to do a late lunch.

And so I spent an hour today trying to decide what to wear to lunch with my brother who would undoubtedly show up in a baseball cap and an extra-large Carhartt. I tried on two dresses, two pairs of leggings, three jackets, and four hats. I worried about where to take him, what to show him besides my urban fashion sense. I might detest him sometimes, I might love him sometimes, but I can’t say he doesn’t matter.