Forever 46

If he were still alive, my brother would turn 50 tomorrow.  

My only brother, Scott, loved his birthday falling on Memorial Day weekend as it gave a good excuse for the season’s first big barbecue.  A gifted chef, he was hell on the grill, knowing just when to baste, when to swipe with his secret sauce.  But he was equally good in the kitchen: green beans he’d canned in Mason jars, salsa put up from last year’s tomatoes and peppers, baked beans doctored with brown sugar and bacon, and his favorite corn: Peaches-n-Cream. 

There would also be his red plastic cup filled with bourbon, but busy ripping on ribs, no one begrudged him a drink or two—or three or four. 

 After eating, the next course was fireworks.  Even after shooting a bottle rocket into his eye when he was ten, he didn’t fear the big ones.  He loved being the center of attention as we gathered in lawn chairs to watch him run from the lit fuse before the boom and glitter of stars. 

Then three years ago, just weeks before his birthday, he died in a fiery explosion when he slammed his truck into a tree.

As his drinking got worse, we all feared the day, worrying, as the loved ones of a drunk will do, the word of a crash.  When my sister called to tell me, my first question was whether anyone else had been hurt.  But, no, a single-car collision with a poplar tree on a straight-away less than a mile from his house.  Ironically, he was not drunk when it happened.

He was, however, in terrible health—high blood pressure, heart problems; he’d recently been struggling with abrupt lapses in consciousness.  No one knows what happened.  The trauma was so severe that an autopsy was inconclusive.

Desperate to know something, anything, I walked the route from the place he left the road to the tree; even when he swiped a speed-limit sign that knocked off his side mirror, he didn’t swerve.  I pray there was no pain.

Then he was gone, and I thought of all the things I’d taught him that were gone, too. 

I taught him to cook collard greens.  I taught him to play backgammon.  I taught him to wait for the ashes to turn gray before putting the meat on the grill.  I taught him to play golf.   And I taught him to drink.

He was 18, 19, 20, 21; I was ten years older, and I should have known better.  But I’m no stranger to the bottle’s lure myself.  I was the party sister—or more like the brother he didn’t have.  I’d pop the tops on brews for both of us as we sat around the cabin playing guitar and laughing about our missed shots on the golf course.  I’d pour Jack Daniels over Coke, handing him one after another.  I taught him how to act straight when drunk.  I taught him how to ruin his life.

In the year before his death, I begged him to get help.  “It’s not fun anymore,” he’d say, and I knew exactly what he meant.  But we both kept drinking.

Maybe it’s sad, even pathetic, but I would love one more round of golf, one more game of backgammon, one more plate of ribs, one more beer with my brother. 

If I could change the end, among other things, I would keep him from his car that day.  But I wouldn't change the summers we spent together.  After all, I knew him so much better than most.  I know he cried while watching Independence Day; I know he climbed on top of a golf cart to put a wren back in its nest.  I know the crippling self-loathing behind his jokes.  I know his shame at being an alcoholic. 

But I should have been a better role model; I know that, too.

So what to do this Memorial Day weekend since I won’t be going to a birthday party at my brother’s house?  Maybe I’ll make a little barbecue of my own.  Maybe I’ll dust off the six-string and chord through a few familiar songs.  Maybe I’ll take a celebratory shot from the untouched Jagermeister bottle he left in my freezer four summers ago that I can’t seem to throw away.  Or maybe I’ll drink too much bourbon and cry.    

Summer Travel with an Old Dog

Although the calendar says it's officially a month away, here in the South, we know May is already summer.  The humidity is up, and the thermometer is hovering near 90-degrees on sultry afternoons. So it's time to leave Florida behind and head to my cabin in Warne, North Carolina, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's a place where day breaks slowly, the mist rising through mid-morning, giving way to warm afternoons, then nights that call for a quilt on the bed.

I prepare by packing a box of good books--there's no TV there--and bringing my most comfy jeans for berry picking.  After that, I'm ready to load the dogs in the car and head north.

For one of my dogs, Big, this may be his last summer on Pine Log Road.  He's old, nearly blind, and his legs aren't up to steep, or even shallow, climbs.

The trick is getting him there one more time.  As his name suggests, he's a large fellow, and his quivery hips make leaping in the car impossible.  But like me, Big loves the way the cabin air smells of deer dancing in the woods and newly-mown hay.  It's up to me to figure out how to give him another mountain summer.

So I've developed this list of travel tips:

1.  Make room for his loading ramp.  After every inch of space is taken, you'll still need to find a place for this invaluable bit of dog dignity that folds to the size of a thick card table.  Keep in mind, you'll need easy access to it along the way.

2.  Place his bed beside the air-conditioning vent.  It's a long dusty ride that winds through Alabama before hitting the stop-and-go traffic of Hotlanta.  Even if you need a sweater, he likes the blower on high.

3.  Compromise on music.  While he'd prefer the just-short-of-shrill sounds of Celine Dion or Barbara Streisand, who make his ears twitch with delight, he can also sleep soundly to Norah Jones or Patsy Cline.

4.   If you have to stop, plan to do so twice.  While all you need is a quick fillup, he will need someplace soft and green, a place to puddle into as he struggles to figure out what's happening.

5.  Be patient, trying not to lament lost minutes.  Likely, he will stroll through specimens left by other travelers before finding the right spot to go.  Perhaps he knows he'll never sniff this part of the world again.

6.  If he drinks every drop of water in the make-shift bowl, find the jug and pour him another.  Remember, a cool drink on a hot day is one of life's simple pleasures.

7.  Realize his rheumy eyes will not see that you've set up the ramp on the other side of the car. When possible, try to park so he can come and go from the same door.  If that's not possible, most stubborn refusals can be swayed with Pupperoni.

8.  When you finally arrive, give him time.  Even though he may mosey down the ramp, pausing as if posing for pictures by the papparazi, wait for him to take in the air.  Be his guide dog as he negotiates the steps leading to the cabin door.  Once inside, feed him the good stuff, the stuff from a can.  After all, while all you did was drive eight hours, he's had a really hard day.

Idle Work

I stroll through my tangled garden, lingering over the coned bud of a soon-to-be zinnia, stopping to marvel at the bloom of a New Dawn rose, and encouraging the basil volunteers that returned from last winter's seed.  I brush pollen from a plastic Adirondack and sit, waiting for the fat cardinal and his mate to come share another meal at my feeder.  Unlike me, a mockingbird is hard at work, practicing his latest list of calls.  I sip my second cup of coffee, noticing the higher-than-it-should-be grass of the backyard.  Then the guilt sets in.

I live with a woman who begins each day working backwards from bedtime, filling in her day in fifteen-minute blocks: visit sick friend, buy fish, call the bank about that service charge; there's
something for each space.  Sometimes she looks up from her list-making and asks, "What are you doing today?"

"Um, I'm not sure yet."

After all, the semester just ended Monday, and this is my first week of summer vacation.  I've spent the last nine months walking the middle ground between lecturing and conjoling students who sometimes don't share my enthusiasm for English Composition.  Not to mention all the weekends spent grading, grading, and grading some more, working through stacks of essays, ranging from plagiarized interpretations of Emily Dickinson to the evils of global warming.

But that grass is getting high; the car could stand a wash and wax; my clothes closet is a mish-mash of winter's wool sweaters and summer aloha shirts.  In short, I should get busy.

After all, I'm the daughter of two workaholics.  Each was the oldest child of a large, bitterly poor, family; they were taught how to work rather than taught how to read, an unimportant skill to sharecroppers in East Tennessee of the 1930s.  At fifteen, my mother nabbed a paying job at the local movie theater; my dad worked for a son-less doctor, baling hay and cutting tobacco.  At seventeen, he enlisted in the army for an easier life, taking my mother with him.  Sent to Korea, he led brigade after brigade into battle while my mother picked up work at a local diner, serving breakfast and lunch, searching under plates for a couple of quarters.

When he returned, he supervised the warehouses at New Cumberland Army Depot by day and worked as a bartender at the Officer's Club at night.  My mom worked the service counter at a rent-a-car agency at the airport fulltime and waited tables on the side.  They were great providers if not the best parents.  My sister and I seldom saw them, and we learned early how to survive on TV Dinners and our own self-discipline.

Late in life, crippled from rhuematoid arthritis, my dad told me, "The only thing I miss is working."
True to his words, he spent his last incoherent hours lying in the hospital babbling about "the inventory" and how we needed to "get going."

Oten my idleness seems disrespectful to my dad's legacy. But I don't want to lie on my deathbed with life passing as one big blur of work.

Instead, I want to remember the nervous hop of a bluejay across my weedy lawn, the smell of the confederate jasmine that's overtaking a tree out back.  In the winter of life, I want to still find joy in the way flowers return uninvited each spring.  I want to remember the way my son looks when he plays the piano or runs soaking wet from the waves.  If this is what it means to be idle, I'm willing to work for it.

Forgetting Mother's Day

Even before she forgot who I was, Mother's Day always presented a challenge.  I would comb through card after card: To the Best Mom Ever; To the One Who Was Always There; To the Mom Who Sacrificed for My Happiness--uh, no.  

When I was twelve, my mother left me and my siblings for a man she'd met at the bar she used to go to after her night shift as a waitress.  He sang in a country-and-western band: The Gadabouts.  He made her feel loved in a way that neither we nor my father could.

When my dad discovered their affair, he offered a chance to work things out, but she chose her new lover, her new life.  She left all of us: me, my older sister, Debbie, a little sister who was five, and my brother, who was only two-years old.

We were a ragtag bunch.  Debbie, who was sixteen, took on the role of raising the little ones.  My dad did what he could, but even though the army had prepared him to lead during a crisis, my mother's departure waylaid him like war had not.

I spent a lot of time avoiding home, trying to work my way through puberty and adolescence. Trying, at least during those early years, to keep a relationship with my mom.  I sent birthday and Christmas cards.  Later, when I was more grown up, I'd send a Honey-Baked Ham for the holidays, and she always wrote beautiful thank-you notes in response.

But Mother's Day was tricky.

She was not a good mother.  Her fleeting contributions would never be captured by Hallmark.

And yet, there were many years in her middle age when she waited on those cards I'd send, the funny ones, saying how I was the best kid she could expect.  It hurt her feelings that my younger siblings never sent an acknowledgement.  But then they'd never known her when she could, and did, throw great birthday parties while Debbie and I were growing up.  She was a generous person who'd been raised in poverty, so she always said yes to a cheap Chinese toy or a Snickers bar at the grocery store.

Luckily, my mother now has severe dementia.  From what I hear, she doesn't remember having a family.  So I don't send cards anymore.

But, come Sunday, I will still think about the way she laughed, about the soup she fixed that year I had the measles.  I will still remember.