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 13th – 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.
