Visitation

I see the month of February is practically over, which is shocking to me since I feel like 2012 hasn’t really started yet. And yet it has. My self-improvement project continues, as I suspect it will for a long while.

I have not heard a peep out of my brother in Los Angeles. Even though I shortened it considerably, perhaps he is still reading the letter I mailed to him three days before his birthday. There is a lot in that letter to digest.

I did, on the other hand, have a really nice visit from my father. Our father, I suppose I should say in the spirit of brotherly unity, which is emerging as a theme, although that phrase – our father – does sound mighty Catholic. It was the end of January and my fever was evidently at full throttle because I woke up one night in the midst of the flu’s second assault to find my father, who has been dead for more than three years now, perched on my dresser wearing what appeared to be a wizard-ish outfit. I was shocked to see him, naturally, although he looked great. He reminded me, in a fatherly sort of way, that not only was his birthday coming up but so too was one of my nephew’s.

So the next afternoon I sent an e-mail to my brother (the father of my nephew). I haven’t spoken with this particular brother in nearly a year, so I felt a little intro was in order: Sorry I have not been in touch … And then I explained that I was quite ill but wanted to wish my nephew a happy fifth birthday. And my brother’s reply came back in less than 20 minutes and with such joviality that it occurred to me that perhaps lots of people just don’t communicate very much. I haven’t been in touch with this particular brother because I think he’s an asshole, and I assumed that his lack of communication meant the feeling was mutual. For so many years now I thought my brother was using his two children as an excuse to avoid conversations with me, but perhaps I have been wrong. Maybe he really is overwhelmed.

My sister – our sister – and her two daughters and her husband are coming out west this summer. This trip of hers is one of the things that got me amped up on the need to go see a therapist because earlier this year, when she mentioned that she was going to bring her family out this way, my immediate thought was that if we had a halfway normal family, my two brothers in California and I would all get together at some point with my sister and her family. We could maybe rent some rooms somewhere on the Oregon coast. Or maybe somewhere in Northern California. But, since we’re not really on speaking terms at the moment … you know. If that’s not a sure sign of a low-class family I don’t know what is.

Anyhow, on Valentine’s Day of all days I had a real estate agent come over to the house and have a look. Then we went down the road for coffee to “talk it over” and she told me, when I asked her point blank, that yes, she does believe that my house could be sold, and probably fairly easily and no, she does not believe I am trapped in this structure until the day I die or the day it burns to the ground, whichever comes first. When I asked her the question I used those scenarios, more or less, because, I’ve realized since, they’re exactly the scenarios I’ve been carrying around with me for a few years now. I slept so soundly that night I cannot quite describe it. So soundly, in fact, that the following morning I decided that I probably shouldn’t start the selling process without having a very clear idea of where I’m going next. Which of course I do not have. Not even remotely.

Finally (for now at least) I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about God. I’m not really sure what I believe or don’t believe, and I’m not really sure that what I believe or not matters much. I do have a friend who I met through AA, and she and I do get to talking about God from time to time, and we’ve both run into the issue as if it were a wall, a very solid, concrete wall. The alcoholics talk a lot about God and the importance of God and getting right with God as part of the “recovery” process. And for now, for today and for at least a few more days, I think what I need to do and what many of us need to do is the exact opposite: Before we turn this that and the other over to God, we need to get on good, comfortable speaking terms with the demons.

And I thought I had problems

On Friday afternoon I went down to the neighborhood theater and watched a movie about Marilyn Monroe. I wasn’t blown away by the movie itself, which is one of many nominated for an Academy Award, but it did get me thinking about fame and fortune. I love money, unapologetically for the most part, but when it comes to fame, I think people who aspire to celebrity are well on their way to complete madness.

This includes presidential hopefuls, people who want to run large corporations, actresses, and little girls from semi-rough neighborhoods in New Jersey whose voices somehow serve as the cornerstone of dreams that are shared by millions.

What I heard on Saturday afternoon wasn’t initially clear to me. I thought the guy on radio was dedicating her most famous song to someone else. A couple of songs later a minister came on the radio program I was listening to and was asked to explain how this death would impact the black community as a whole. Oh, I thought. She died. Wow.

It would have been hard to live through the 1980s and early 1990s without knowing the songs. I never owned any of her music but I heard plenty of it. Some of it I really liked; most of it I did not. I never saw either of her big movies, both of which looked awful enough in previews. I don’t really follow celebrity gossip much, but I had heard the stories about the marriage to a guy whose name was apparently synonymous with thuggery but whom I’d never heard of otherwise. I heard about the drugs and I saw a picture of her on stage in which she looked not unlike an elderly chicken.

I saw, of course, the interview, and yesterday, on Monday (I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this) I spent many hours watching other interviews and reading articles and watching clips from the news programs. Like a student completely unprepared for the exam but dead set on getting an A, I absorbed at a fevered pace. I have many questions and comments, but I’ll close with the one that keeps raising its hand in a demand for attention: Why is everyone so anxious to blame the ex-husband?

Greetings from Issue City

In addition to going to Missouri and dealing with being sick not once but twice, there was something else that kept me busy-ish during the month of January.

I got caught up with some family correspondence. I’ve been neglecting it for a long while now. I’ve been avoiding it as well. Those are two very separate things, I’m learning – avoiding something and neglecting it.

This is the beginning of a long and probably tedious story, but it is one that has to start somewhere and that somewhere, I’m sorry to say, is right here and right now. It began a few days after Christmas with the arrival of a card with a Los Angeles postmark. It was some High Catholic foolishness and on it was scrawled an inane message from my brother down there – the one I haven’t spoken to since two days before Michael Jackson died, and that was in June 2009. I tore it to pieces, which I tossed directly into the trash. Normally I’d recycle something like that, but I’d rather contribute to a landfill than put that kind of toxicity into the earth we all have to share.

Everything this particular brother of mine does infuriates me, but here are a couple of specifics.

The lesser of the two is that this card he sent to me and to others in our family is from a collection that our father kept. They were designed by a friend of his from high school who went on to become a monk who specialized in calligraphy. The problem here is that had anyone else in the family taken these cards from the house and mailed them around as holiday greetings, it would have been turned into a federal case. By my brother in Los Angeles. But because he is special, because he is the chosen one among us, it’s perfectly fine.

Just like it was perfectly fine for him to sit in his apartment and tell me he’s not sure how he feels about another of our brothers taking family photos out of the house. It takes a certain sort of person to say something like that while seated in a living room adorned with family photos, a rug we all hooked together in the early 1970s, several Christmas ornaments my mother collected over the years, our parents’ wedding china. My brother is that sort of person. He is exactly that sort of person.

Worse, though, is that my brother’s casual little holiday greeting implies, I think, that if we haven’t spoken for two and a half years now, that must be because of something trivial and ridiculous that’s entirely on my side of the fence.

I fretted and fumed for a few days. I came down with a cold, one year ended and another began, and I quit smoking. And I started writing a letter. My first attempt was 22 pages long and included footnotes. Attempt number two was shorter – 14 pages or so – and did not include footnotes. The version that was mailed to my brother and that he hopefully received on his birthday – which this year was on Friday the 13^th – was eight pages. I haven’t heard a word back, of course, nor do I expect to. But writing and sending that letter did set a thing or two in motion and has transformed this place of mine here into what a therapy-addicted friend of mine used to refer to as Issue City, and it’s a town, if you will, where I plan to be for a while.