Of Bookies and Grader Boobs

My eldest brother and I were lost to one another for almost 40 years. I had concluded that he was dead and stopped searching for him in mid-2007.

Just before Thanksgiving that year, I decided to get back in touch with my Mother and her preferred litter of kids. Rather than struggling to connect with my half-sister and half-brother -- with whom I had probably spent a total of two weeks -- I planned to get gifts for my nieces and nephews, and through the great goodness and graces of children, insert myself into the clan as Super-Tante.

This necessitated finding stuff out about the four kids in question -- like, umm, their names and ages, likes, dislikes, needs, and wants. It was working out well, since the emails and phone calls back and forth were not as clumsy and nervous as they'd have been otherwise. Give the adults an agenda -- don't offer up too much unattached information, too much free air, space, time.

And then there was the day I thought I would never again be able to catch my breath.

My half-sister is a lovely woman, and quite possibly the most outgoing person of my acquaintance. Tossed into the seven or so sentences making up her note to me was "Oh, I have [your eldest brother's] snail mail and email address if you want them..."

I couldn't breathe.

I touched the computer screen as if it were the face of my most beloved.

Then I grew cold, could not get warm. I wanted to cry, and couldn't.

She is lovely and animated -- but she can also be a little "off" sometimes. I know her better now, know her extreme goodness and the wildness of her heart. She simply did not know, did not understand. Her family never lost its nucleus.

It probably won't occur to you -- but what gave me back my breath, what warmed me, was a burning thought: But Mother... surely you would not have done this to me?

Oh, if you could see the smirk on my face. Mother is a snake in the grass, capable of more meanness than I can even imagine. But she is old now, and sad, and as she wrote to me: "I can no longer do penance over and over..."

Which was news to me, of course, having never heard her even come close to saying she was sorry for anything. But she is old now, and sad. I must make that my mantra, and understand it as true. The man for whom she left me and my brothers -- oh, and the original Father-Unit -- was, it must be said, a remarkable, wonderful person. I have said, ever since I matured enough to understand all that happened, and is still happening, that were my fondest wish to come true, my parents would be constituted from the step-parents who blessed us with their love, caring, and guidance. But Mother is old now, her Wonder Husband dead, and she is sad.

I wrote my... sister (it does not roll off the tongue, nor type easily) back within the half-hour. I was inchoate, insensate. In that selfsame interval, she apparently shared with the Mother-Unit what she had done and been rudely chastised. She was trapped in "I-didn't-know-it-was-a-secret" Land.

There was now no denying me and I demanded, using language that was direct and clear, what we came to call his "contact information."

He ran away from "home" at the age of 15 -- definitively, that is. He ran many times. The last time, we surmised that he went to San Francisco. Not long afterward, we moved from California to the Philippine Islands. My father told us that he was fine, was staying with our grandparents, and would join us in three months -- when, in truth, he had not looked for his son, had no real notion where he was, and did not care. Did Dad really think that my remaining brother and I would forget about him in three months -- he who was dear to us?

I took the contact information and copied it everywhere. Every type of address book I own. On the refrigerator. In my checkbook. The Emergency Card no one ever looks at that comes with wallets. In the computer, on the Palm.

Calling him seemed wrong. I wanted him to have the chance to not respond, to refuse. In all these years, he could easily have found me, us. Somehow, though, I knew what he must have thought. My brother Grader Boob (he's an English prof) and I were surely part of that family that abandoned him...

I emailed him, trying not to fall into all the tangles.

And so began one of the greatest conversations of my life. Some days, most days, when I am in pain, fatigued, depressed -- and cannot see beyond these small adjectives -- I think of him, write him, and am reintroduced to joy.

He is a bookie in Vegas. He is a poet and wondrous writer. He paints houses in Tahoe. He is a photographer and naturalist, leading clients into the wonders of the Grand Canyon during the half-year he works as a guide. He became a naturalist, I believe, due to all he learned during the years he was homeless and lived in concert with trash cans and nature. He was shot once and almost died. He has a daughter but is out of touch. Her mother made porn films and now lives in Thailand. He is kind, witty, and always battling against his reserves of depression and fear. I love him so.

I have taken to surreptitiously posting his photography here ("Surreptitiously"? Ha!) whenever I need it. It has become a need.

I detest the telephone and have never enjoyed long chats -- except with people I know very well and with whom I share a history of sufficient detail to fill a phone conversation. So we have spoken only once and that shames me. Maybe today? Maybe tomorrow?

For some reason, he is on my mind today and I find myself wondering if there is anything at all that I will ever be able to do for him, give him.

Grader Boob decided long ago that he did not want to be a part of any of these pseudo-families, that were his brother ever to surface, alive, he did not want to participate, thank you very much. Nor does he speak to the Mother-Unit. He visits yearly with Dad and his wife. I like to think that we are very close but may be deluding myself.

Since rediscovering my older brother, Mother has fallen and broken a hip, had some serious heart problems, and apparently is desperately trying to waste away. She won't go that way, though. No. Not her.

Yesterday, the bookie poet posted the following quote from H.D. Thoreau's journal on one of his blogs:

January 6, 1857/

A man asked me the other night whether such and such persons were not as happy as anybody, being conscious, as I perceived, of such unhappiness himself and not aspiring to much more than an animal content.


“Why!” said I, speaking to his condition, “the stones are happy. Concord River is happy, and I am happy too. When I took up a fragment of a walnut-shell this morning, I saw by its very grain and composition, the form and color, etc., that it was made for happiness. The most brutish and inanimate objects that are made suggest an everlasting and thorough satisfaction; they are the homes of content. Wood, earth, mould, etc., exist for joy. Do you think that Concord River would have continued to flow these millions of years by Clamshell Hill and round Hunt’s Island, if it had not been happy,-—if it had been miserable in its channel, tired of existence, and cursing its maker and the hour that it sprang?”

This was the photo he chose as illustration to this entry, "The Stones are Happy."