Monthly Archives: December 2015

Remembering Erich

My younger brother, my only sibling, died a little more than a year ago. This will be our second Christmas without him. My brother was a loner and unpredictable so Christmas without him, even when he was alive, was not rare, but this year feels different. When you love someone, even if you don’t always enjoy their company when they are around, knowing they are safe somewhere in the world is a comfort. My brother’s existence seemed less and less safe as the years went by, certainly in the last few years when he had physically moved a thousand miles away and was living in his van, but he kept in touch with my mother by phone, often daily. I didn’t always believe or trust in the news he shared with her about his life. My brother’s narratives often strayed from reality, and I never knew how much he believed of his own tales. Toward the end of his life I would have liked more than anything to know how much he believed himself of what he spun for the rest of us. But that was the one thing you could never really know with him.

My brother was an alcoholic.

He was the smartest person I ever knew, smart enough to observe and draw conclusions about life that most people happily miss. He was smart enough to see that his intelligence, his dyslexia, his six foot seven inch, one hundred ninety pound frame, his poet’s heart and painter’s eye made him an odd stranger in this world. We were eighteen months apart in age, and the children of addicts. That it was my job to pilot my little brother to safe waters seemed clear to me at an early age, but I lost that sense of mission when I started school. While school was a place of safety and belonging for me, it was only ever a danger to my brother. So it became every man for himself in my little family, and that single, unspoken truth wounded him immeasurably. It also, as wounds often do, defined him.

When you love an addict, you always imagine there is a way of helping just within reach, something that you, and maybe only you, can do, or say, or maybe a way of being that will change things. That somehow it lies within your power to make the light snap on. There isn’t of course, but the fact that you believe there is makes you and your addict perfectly suited to one another. My brother found and made his own family as an adult, cobbled together from childhood friends, and like-minded dreamers. He sometimes loved well, and was loved by others along the way, but his wound would not be healed. He died alone. A resilient few people tried hard to keep that from happening, but looking back, I think that is how he had planned it.

Christmas, however, offers an alternate ending to my brother’s story.

Christmas was not his holiday. Too much family. Too much forced cheeriness. Too many ways to disappoint and be disappointed. Christmas is about beginnings, about the hope that comes with beginnings. Christmas, as a holiday on its own, does not have much to recommend itself to broken people, people with wounds, people who have seen more endings than beginnings. But Christmas, as a holiday, doesn’t stand alone. It is encompassed within the story of a larger life, the life of a man who, like my brother was defined by his wounds, left alone by his friends, and homeless. Christmas, as a story, is circumscribed by the story of Good Friday and Easter. The baby grows. The man loves others more than himself. The world sees no use for him. He dies alone.

And then, in the most unimaginable twist, he conquers death, takes back his broken body and walks among us. Christmas introduces us to the One who can truly say, “No one dies alone.”

I think, in the days and hours after we left his side, the days and hours he lay in hospice dying, my brother had a divine appointment with a fellow wanderer. How he responded in those last moments is, for a time, a mystery, but because it is Christmas I can hope.

Flushing Barbie

I just heard an advertisement on the radio for the new Barbie Dreamhouse, which now has toilets that actually flush… Is this necessary? Have Barbies physically evolved that much since my daughter was a little girl? And to what end? I understand baby dolls that express real life sounds and even fluids. I had a Tiny Tears doll. Then there was Betsy Wetsy, and I’m sure her descendents have gone on to perform even greater feats of infant distress. But Barbie and Ken are fully formed adults.

There is no end to the questions that come to mind.

Which isn’t exactly what I want to write about this Christmas, but it does seem to be an excess of the kind that I’m afraid I’m growing more and more inured to. This one just happened to wake me up because I’m out of the slipstream of little girl role-play. In plenty of ways I am as swept up and jaded as all the other citizens of Babylon. Case in point, I determinedly soldiered through my queasiness and discomfort in watching the first season of “Breaking Bad” until I was completely addicted to it and watched every single season with relish. I did understand (and even rooted for) the need for the ultimate demise of Walter White, but I have to confess a soft spot for Jesse Pinkman. When I saw a Jesse Pinkman action figure for sale in B & N a couple of years ago, I desperately tried to think of someone I could appropriately gift it to for Christmas. Just to reiterate— this is a moronic, conscience deadened, drug addicted, drug dealing, mass murderer of innocent people whose television character I wanted to own in doll form and give to somebody I love. I didn’t buy it, but to this day I kind of wish I had. This state of mind didn’t just happen to me overnight. I worked at it.

When I was first married, I cross-stitched a quote from a singer that I liked and hung it framed on the kitchen wall of our townhouse. It read, “Let us live more simply, that others might simply live.” It was my mantra for the kind of life I wanted to make with my new partner, the kind of life I wanted to teach to my children. When we moved across the street to the townhouse with the extra bedroom I hung it in that kitchen, and once again when we bought our old house it hung on the kitchen wall. In our first townhouse, I baked all our own bread, and processed our own baby food. In our second townhouse, the sign hung between the new cordless phone my husband gave me for Christmas, and the baby monitor. When we bought our historic Victorian house, we installed a whole house intercom system, planning for the day when our older children would have bedrooms all the way up on the third floor. As you can guess, the main panel was in the kitchen, where I still spent most of my time (although not making bread) (and not baby food either) and I had to move the sign slightly to make a space by the multi-switch light plate and in between the cordless phone and the two baby monitors. When our oldest children were school aged, we got a second phone line installed for the kids and so got a multi-lined phone to go in the kitchen. My kitchen wall looked like NASA’s command center, and at this point my little cross-stitched saying, wedged in among all the technology, seemed more like a joke than a heartfelt sentiment. One little decision at a time we were outgrowing simplicity. You could say we had worked at it.

That was years ago. Since then we’ve acquired smart phones, laptops, Kindles, iPads, Apple TVs. My kitchen wall is no longer cluttered, as all the technology I need resides in my lap or the palm of my hand. That’s what simplicity means to me now– not lack of technology– just smarter, smaller, more densely functional. None of it is bad, but it’s something we have chosen. What we didn’t know we were choosing was the extent that it would own our time and attention, since both time saving and time wasting are now available in excess.

The other day my husband and I went shopping for a new car for me. Cars have really advanced since the last time I got one, almost thirteen years ago. I thought I had a few minimal needs for my next car, but as we sat with the sales lady and she explained the various packages that can be installed, we kept checking them for inclusion. Comfort is good, safety is essential, music, check, accident prevention–hello, have you driven with me lately? We didn’t feel pressured or guilted into our choices (and we took our traditional twenty-four hour cooling off period before deciding) but there was just so much more technology available than we’d realized. My next car will be so tricked out that if an asteroid falls through the open panoramic sunroof and hits me on the head, it will still be able to stop, back up safely, and parallel park. This is one sort of progress. Yet a deep, equally true part of me that longs for a life where all I need is a horse and a bicycle wonders how I got here.

So how do I reconcile myself with myself? I appreciate the artistic instinct to push the boundaries of what is possible. In art, literature, entertainment, I applaud the genius of the writer who can invent and sell a truly despicable character as an antihero. It doesn’t necessarily represent a forsaking of values or a blurring of the lines between right and wrong, like some might argue. It can be an effective way of confronting people with their own relativistic value systems, of holding the mirror uncomfortably close and shining a light on their certainties. What I produce as an artist or designer does not dictate what you consume as a consumer, and you cannot compel me to read or watch or buy something just because it’s available. The availability of just about everything the imagination can produce is the hallmark of my future. Where it leads me depends on how hard I work at being lead there. But let me be honest; the availability seduces me. So I should probably not be so surprised that Barbie can now flush her own toilet. Maybe I should be surprised that I’m still surprised. And happy that I’m still disgusted.