This picture was taken 29 years ago, 10,592 days. Almost half a life ago, a fulcrum that seems impossible at this point. It was supposed to happen on Halloween that year, but logistics conspired to make that difficult.
Most of us like to imagine going back and being able to look forward, seeing the relentless incremental changes that we choose or are foisted on us. The acceleration of change that’s almost invisible while we’re experiecing it. Can you imagine reliving the moments as instantaneous bullets of laughter, agony, and experience? Most of us would choose it, even if it’s a roller coaster that leaves us lying on the pavement, asking ourselves why we got back on the ride, knowing how it would end.
Every cell of our bodies has changed, but the memories remain – if we’re lucky. I took a moment to fling open the door early this morning, remembering, and then bolted it shut afterward.
Years ago, I doggedly started down the path of biographical discovery. Some of my family hated the idea. Although I suspected I knew why, years of intermittent discovery and revelation allowed me to piece together facts. Not innuendo or conjecture, nor the vague yet prideful assertions of some of my family.
It is true that behind reluctance, there is always truth. As an adult, I understand it. Who wants their dirty laundry floating around? On the other hand, open discussion of it with one’s children can be a learning experience – not to mention that acknowledging mistakes can be liberating.
I probably should have taken more care with this post. Finding another piece of the puzzle yesterday fascinated me, as the dots connected effortlessly.
Using both DNA and slipshod yet determined obstinacy, I peeled back layers. Not to malign or accuse people, especially if they were already gone. They could have just told me, or answered my questions, giving me a complex and informed view of the people who came before me. They largely chose misdirection and sometimes passive-aggressive hostility.
“Your family has a lot of damn secrets, X,” is something I’ve often heard. But what family doesn’t? A word of advice to those who choose secrecy? Be careful. There’s an idiot out there determined to find out. Curiosity has driven many people to morph from interested to detective.
One of my earliest memories is of standing in the back seat of a black or dark sedan. We were driving on a sun-filled day, heading to the water. My dad was driving. In the passenger seat was someone who should not have been. Years ago, my mom insisted that I couldn’t have remembered it. Then, she insisted it never happened. “Which is it? It didn’t happen or I couldn’t have remembered it.” Stunned recognition on her part that logically, she wasn’t making sense.
Over the years, I figured out we were driving to Clarendon to go to the water. As for the woman in the passenger seat, I’ll call her Susan. I grew up calling her Aunt Susan, even though she wasn’t my aunt. Aunt Susan was married to my mom’s half-sister’s sons.
son
In March of 1970, my dad was involved in a drunk-driving accident that killed Aunt Susan’s husband. Dad escaped accountability through what can only be described as “good old boy” connections.
He’d already been to prison in Indiana in the 60s. He swore he’d never leave Monroe County again. He moved to Indiana out of necessity after being a little wild for Monroe County. (Which is saying a lot.) He had cousins there, none of whom I grew up to know. That story was another one that required doggedness on my part to get to the bottom of. Just a few months ago, I finally got a little bit of my dad’s prison records. A couple of years before that, I went through thousands of pages of online news articles until I found news articles related to his crimes. The only reason I did it was because another member of my dad’s family indirectly acknowledged to me that they existed. That’s all it took to set me in motion. If she wouldn’t give them to me, I’d find them.
After Aunt Susan became a widow because of my dad, they started seeing each other. It was during that period that I had the memory of driving down a sunny road with them both. It would have taken place between late March of 1970 and before October of the following year.
I don’t know how it came up, but I had questions. Aunt Marylou knew everything. Whether she would repeat it or not was the question. After I started doing ancestry, I had a list of nine thousand questions. She answered many of them, including ones about Grandpa and Mom’s potential half-sister, who came about because of one of my Grandpa’s indiscretions.
One of my questions was about my memory of the summer day in the car with dad and Aunt Susan. “Oh, that was after your mom filed for divorce from your dad.” I was shocked. They obviously had not been divorced, at least not yet. She then went on to hit the high points of a little bit of the less-savory family lore that I was chasing.
Mom was livid. “None of that is true. None of it. It didn’t happen.”
I added the search for proof to my list years ago.
Later, a lot of it made sense. Mom invariably couldn’t resist ranting about past grievances. I do remember Mom drunkenly ranting about Aunt Susan. For reasons I didn’t understand, she didn’t want me to go to my Grandpa’s funeral. Some of that had to do with Aunt Susan. I’ll never know why now.
My brother Mike remembered much more of it than I did. He even recalled the night that Aunt Susan’s husband died as a result of the DWI incident with dad. His memory gave me the time frame we lived in the house right off of AR-39, something which had eluded me for years. That’s the same house we lived in when I almost killed myself pulling the trigger on one of dad’s hunting rifles. He’d left it on the bed unattended. (I’ve written about that incident before.) As a convicted felon, he wasn’t supposed to own guns, which is, of course, why he had dozens of them. Those laws were ignored back then, and especially in rural Arkansas.
My brother Mike also confirmed that my memories about living briefly in Wheatley were true. Of the scant memories I had of it, I remember having a picture of Jiminy Cricket on the bedroom wall, and of being deathly sick on Christmas when I was extremely young. That memory places us in Wheatley in December 1969. I would have been 2 and 3/4 years old. I FEEL like I have a bag of memories locked away. I can feel them floating around in my head.
Somewhere in the above time frame, we lived in another house in Brinkley. Mom went to bingo with her friend. Upon our return, the house had caught fire, allegedly due to an oven. I have strange, detached memories of that place too.
Mom lived in multiple houses that caught fire. My brother and I once calculated that we could remember living in at least a couple of dozen places by the time we graduated.
Off and on, I’ve been meticulously searching records online, often one dense page at a time, even in unindexed records.
It wasn’t until Saturday morning that I found the proof. Just one more click, and there it was. Proof that Mom had found out about another one of dad’s affairs, this time with one of the last people she could have expected. She filed for divorce in May and then dismissed it in October of the following year. I note with irony that the “number of children affected” is left blank.
Whether I should or not, I have to connect the dots. I now know the specific time frame that I lived with my grandma and grandpa. When I fell out of bed made of two chairs and stopped breathing. When some of my earliest and best memories were made. It took me years to learn that it was normal for people who felt traumatized to lose swaths of their memory. People sometimes mistake my dogged intensity for research as good memory. That’s totally inaccurate. Even with the memories I’m sure of, I tread cautiously.
I remember shortly after mom and dad got back together. Even though it’s largely irrelevant, we lived somewhere along Main near Spruce Street. I remember coming inside to see dad on the couch with his gallon jug of water. I remember him being grouchy from a hard day’s work. Of being scared to death of him. I did not understand that partial memory until this morning. I had been forced back into the house after being with Grandma and Grandpa, during which Mom reluctantly described it as a separation. She never admitted to me or anyone in front of me that she had filed for divorce. I’ve lost all memory of the massive, violent fights they had before and after.
The other big wow of all this is that my secret sister was born in May of 1972. Subtracting nine months from that means that the document I discovered also indicates that dad had another affair shortly before mom dropped the divorce. So when I had to go home to a place on Main Street in Brinkley, dad was having another child, whether he knew it or not.
As for dad, Aunt Susan wasn’t the last affair he had with someone he shouldn’t have. When we got burned out of City View in Springdale, we went to live with the widow of one dad’s cousins. He had an affair with her, too.
Shortly after my secret sister’s birth, we packed up and moved to Northwest Arkansas. I didn’t find out about ‘why’ we moved until the day I met my secret sister, almost five decades later.
We moved back to Brinkley for about a year while I attended 3rd grade. I don’t know why dad felt like his secret was safe regarding his daughter we didn’t know about. Dad operated a gas station across from the Lutheran church in Rich, off Highway 49. He tried making a go of it again in 1993, up until his death. He remarried mom exactly 29 years after he married her the first time. I constantly think about the year we lived in Brinkley, and about the fact that I had another sister just out of reach. Or about how differently our lives would have been had mom proceeded with the divorce.
The more I learn, the more I know how many secrets the Terry side of the family kept. It seems impossible that mom didn’t know more of them, but as my sister agreed, when mom was angry, she couldn’t resist screaming about whatever she could. None of us remember her ever mentioning our secret sister.
As for this original divorce filing, mom never admitted it.
One of the things I have to credit my brother Mike with is that he loved reading. Unlike me, his comprehension was instantaneous. I learned to read the “wrong” way. We both used books to escape, each of us initially preferring different kinds of books. By junior high, a miracle happened. Whatever had blocked me vanished. If Mike were still alive, I would continue to tease him for beating him in the city-wide spelling bee. His ability was natural, whereas mine was repetition and relentlessness. Spelling is the domain of the madman because its rules are conjured from a random assortment of sadistic guidelines that change on demand. If you’ve been married, I’m sure you can understand.
All of this comes to mind because of the recent denigration of education. Over half of the American population reads below a sixth grade reading level. Another 1/5 are functionally illiterate. These statistics are going to get worse.
My brother and I would have both learned to read whether we had attended school or not. We loved the imaginary worlds we found. Whether it was Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Louis L’Amour, for Stephen King.
As cynical as my brother could sometimes be, it was earned. He sometimes reminded me that we weren’t competing with half of the population because reading at a level that allowed us to dive into other worlds wasn’t something most of the people around us could do for pleasure. And writing anything substantive? “For get about it,” Mike would have said, quoting his doppelganger Tony Soprano.
If I had disagreed, I would have done so from a distance. I laugh about it now, like I do so many other things. Like when I told him that the “Lord Of The Rings” was like reading a 500-page obituary. I read all the Tolkien books because Mike loved them. I don’t even remember what he had me read next, but I do remember loving it enough to read it twice. Mike could read a book and effortlessly recount not only what happened, but what it might mean. That part took me a long time to learn.
As the years race ahead and leave my brother further behind, I catch myself wishing I could recommend a book to him. Especially the ones that might irritate him.
I love when forgotten memories get unlocked by music. Monday afternoon I was scrolling and Sammy Arriaga’s version of Freddy Fender’s “Before The Next Teardrop Falls” came on.
I remembered a specific summer afternoon over the years. But for some reason, this time an enormous amount of details came back. It felt like a door had been unlocked and let me remember things that were locked away. It was July of 1990, back when I was as naive about so many things and an expert at things most people didn’t experience.
I hadn’t thought about that summer afternoon in years. Even though it was my first year at Cargill, I was trying to do something for Uncle Buck who had helped me yet again. Many people don’t know that it was because of him that I was able to do things that I otherwise might not have. Several times in junior high, he stepped in and helped me when my parents drank all their money away. I have to include Aunt Ardith in my thanks.
I mowed Uncle Buck’s yard for him. Because Aunt Ardith went to play bingo, Uncle Buck invited me to join him as he poured himself a “snortee.” Jimmy would have been at his job at Mary Maestri’s, working in the separate building on the large property at the corner of what is now highway 112 and 412. Like almost everything else, it’s an entirely different world out there now.
For once, I accepted a small glass of whiskey with two cubes of ice. Uncle Buck laughed like he did, pointing out that people who preferred to drink their whiskey straight were either sophisticated or about to start a fight.
When I was younger, Uncle Buck tried to encourage me to learn to play bass guitar. He liked to tease me about being in band and choosing the French horn. But he was glad that I was into music. Once I graduated, I turned down both a music scholarship and an offer to be in the United States Army Orchestra. Uncle Buck wasn’t someone who repeated himself often, but there were a few times he told me to find a way to get back into music.
Uncle Buck got out one of his records. He chose Freddy Fender’s “Before The Next Teardrop Falls.” He showed me the album cover and laughed at Fender’s enormous head of hair. By that age, I had already adopted my short haircut.
Probably because no one else was at the house, Uncle Buck told me to listen to the song with fresh ears. He said that it was one of the best examples of a perfect country song. Just a stripped down love song that wasn’t cluttered by technique.
I don’t know what Uncle Buck was thinking about when the song played the first time. It’s strange to me to think that he was around 57 years old that afternoon, just a little younger than I am now. Whatever look he had on his face, it was 100% nostalgic.
When he played it the second time, he explained it to me as a musician. While I don’t remember specifically everything he said, he told me that it was the perfect tempo to sing or dance to. That it was standard time, mostly major chords, and that it was the perfect example of a verse-chorus song. Uncle Buck was impressed with the fact that Freddy Fender made a hit out of it both in country and pop. Uncle Buck was also impressed that the song included a steel guitar and an accordion.
As the song played a second time, I almost fell out of my chair when Uncle Buck softly followed the lyrics as Freddy Fender switched to Spanish. Uncle Buck loved teasing me about speaking Spanish, but this time, after the song ended, I asked him about it. He told me that because he learned all music by ear, it was just a question of repetition.
We listened to a couple of other songs before Uncle Buck put on Charlie Pride’s “Kiss An Angel Good Morning ”
I don’t remember exactly how he put it, but he pointed out that it was almost perfect too, because it was the type of song bad singers could do reasonably well.
I wish I could remember what song he played next. That part is lost to me. He got up to pour himself another drink. He stood in front of his well-equipped stereo system, thinking. As an electronics tech for Montgomery Ward, he had nice stereo equipment. Whatever song it was, by the time it ended, he had downed his drink.
If I had it to do all over again, I would find ways to sit with Uncle Buck and have him talk about music. When he was younger, he had the chance to play with some amazing musicians in Memphis. Even though he played in a couple of bands that did well, he chose a good job with benefits over the musician lifestyle when he moved to Springdale. Because I’m older now and can relate to the fact that he was about the age I am now, I understand the nostalgia he probably felt that afternoon.
This is personal. I’m not overthinking these words. I just want to get them out.
I’ve written about some of this before. My dad was in prison in Indiana. I heard so many different stories when I was younger. The Terry family was cemented into compulsory silence about this and many other things. (Such as the fact that I had another sister until a few years ago.) To find any truthful reference to ‘why’ my Dad was in prison, I had to do it the hard way: I searched THOUSANDS of pages of newspapers across Indiana. I’ll never forget that feeling of finding specific information. I had a cousin who probably knew most of it correctly. But she opted to adhere to the family code of silence. That’s why I had to do it the hard way. When she didn’t provide the information, I told her that I was patient and that I would find it.
I don’t disclose these things to shame members of my family. Apart from the fact that you can’t shame someone who is no longer alive, facts don’t bring shame. They bring revelation. I’ve proven time and time again that anyone who stays at it will uncover most truths. That’s how I used DNA and a decade to find my sister. It’s also how I kept at it to substantiate the details of some of my dad’s life.
I received the Indiana Reformatory index card out of the blue today. The prison stopped maintaining most old mugshots. But in those few lines of information, there are massive implications.
I was born in March 1967. My dad was imprisoned on February 1st, 1967. He was in prison for two years, ten months, and six days. That’s a lot longer than anyone ever mentioned to me when I pressed them for information. Dad was living in Indiana before his arrest, which is the first documented proof that my parents were not living together. Dad joked that he had been in Alaska. He didn’t make the joke often because being in prison wasn’t something he talked about unless he was drunkenly telling people.
Less than four months after being released from the Indiana prison, my dad was involved in the death of a maternal cousin during a DWI incident. My Dad didn’t suffer any charges for this. Regardless of how people feel about me saying so, connections kept him out of trouble. Monroe County, Arkansas, was a different place then. The Terry family didn’t hesitate to use those connections to quash any concerns. Had my Dad been held accountable, it might have caused him to return to an Indiana prison. His parole wasn’t discharged until almost eight months after the DWI death.
When I’m thinking about my life or talking about it, I mention that I lived with my maternal grandparents while Dad was in prison. I wonder what life might have been like had he not returned. Whether his presence would have been substituted for another man of similar temperament. It’s all speculation. I wouldn’t have my other sister had Dad not returned, or if he had been put back into the system.
After the DWI death of my maternal cousin, Dad jumped into a highly questionable affair. It took me years to piece together that one of my earliest memories of standing up in the back seat was one in which I accompanied my Dad to Clarendon beach with his affair partner. Mom said that I couldn’t possibly remember it. Normally, I’d agree. Growing up that way tends to erase a lot of memory. But that memory stuck with me.
After that affair debacle, Dad engaged in another affair, one that led to the birth of my sister. I didn’t realize until I met her that her birth explained my family’s sudden departure from Dad’s beloved Monroe County to Northwest Arkansas. Away from my grandparents and some of my maternal family, who would have altered the trajectory that Dad’s behavior brought upon us.
I’m sharing this because I feel vindicated for finding more pieces as time passes. I’m not revealing anything that should not have been disclosed to all of us. The foolishness and false family honor of those who demanded secrecy still bother me. Then again, I’ve come to learn that this tendency governed their lives. Several of them were completely different people than their demeanor indicated.
Periodically, I have to remind everyone that I am an expert curser. I know my angelic appearance apparently indicates that I’m not. Don’t let my amateur bowler looks fool you.
I grew up with world-class cursers. If Merriam-Webster had published a compendium of cursing, both of my parents would have been mentioned in the preface.
Dad loved paying anyone young enough and stupid enough to approach another family member and quote whatever curse word he was currently tickled with. I’ve mentioned before what his favorite was. If you’ve watched the TV show Deadwood, Mr Wu spoke almost exclusively using this word.
(If you haven’t watched Deadwood, you’re missing out on the juxtaposition of Shakespearean turn of phrase and sailor-worthy cursing.)
My mom could and would curse at the most inappropriate times and sometimes at maximum volume. Attempting to get her to stop was the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a forest fire in hopes that it would go out. Even though I shouldn’t recall some of it so glowingly, a lot of my good memories of her were referring to people as a son of a bitch at the drop of a hat. You could almost feel the demons being summoned when she pulled out the MOFOof.
Studies have shown that people who curse tend to be happier than those who don’t. The corollary to this is that most non-cursers tend to be unhappier precisely because of all the cursers around them.
I pity anyone who gave up cursing for Lent. If cursing were represented in real life as they are in comics, the air around me would be filled with “@#!@#$” while I watch or read the news.
P.S. I created the video using AI. Had it REALLY been my mom, no one would dare be closer enough to her if she were rant-cursing. I’m convinced her aura was powerful enough to negate a modern MRI. Now that she’s memories, I love remembering how epic her rants could be. She was a Pat Conroy in the world or creative cursing.
“Every book is a mystery novel if you tear out the last 15 pages before reading it.”
My dad loved doing this to people. Imagine reading 245 pages only to discover that the last chapter is gone. Mom wanted to murder him more than once. Uncle Buck laughed about it after the fact. Mr. Dunivan, dad’s boss and cousin by marriage? He was the perfect victim for Dad. I don’t remember all the details, but Dad put a dirty magazine right on the dashboard of Mr. Dunivan’s car more than once. Or on his office desk. Mr. Dunivan’s mom initially had a conniption fit about it, but after discovering that Dad pulled the prank, she laughed like she was dying. Due to that prank, I realized you could LEAVE any magazine or book you wanted in a doctor’s office, friend’s house, etc. This realization made for some inexpensive fun for me as I got older.
Years ago, I used to keep my mom supplied with books, music, and movies. Even though I did it by accident, the final few minutes of the film Seven were missing from the end of one of the VCR tapes I’d sent her. Initially, she was convinced I did it on purpose – and pissed. Given its “head in the box” gut-wrenching ending, it was quite the coincidence that Seven was the particular movie in question. I re-taped it and sent it to her. It was a joy to mess with her sometimes. Putting the craziest random movies on tapes, inserting a death metal song into a collection of class country songs, or adding screams at maximum volume when she least expected it.
When MP3s became popular, it was easier than ever to prank people with wild, unexpected audio files in the middle of their gifted CDs. One of my victims rolled into the Silver Dollar City parking lot, blaring one of my mix CDs. I had inserted the Cheech Marin dialogue from “From Dusk ’til Dawn.” (The one where he is selling something I can’t mention here.)
I sometimes reminisce about pranks that I witnessed. I hated so much about my Dad, but I loved the fact that he could audaciously pull off some of the most outrageous pranks, ones that you couldn’t be certain might result in a heart attack, mandatory anger management enrollment, or (hopefully) small explosions.
One way I know I’m not my usual self is that I lose interest in spontaneous shenanigans. It’s a tell-tale sign for me.
The prank is on us, though.
You got up this morning, assuming you’d pass through the day to its completion.
To know the ending of these cold hours in front of us.
It’s not true, though.
Some of us have our final pages ripped out. We just don’t know it yet.
Love, X . PS The picture is one of my parents after they remarried. Dad died nine months after they remarried. Shockingly, Mom was not the cause of his demise. .
This post is partially personal and also a metaphor. Or analogy. Although I know the difference, I don’t care about grammatical accuracy. If this post is all over the place, you can thank me later for taking you around the world with my shotgun storytelling.
In 2005, I visited my brother north of Chicago. He brought out a giant bag of tortilla chips, one suited for his appetite. Then, he brought out high-quality horseradish and made a two-ingredient dip. Although I’m laughing when I write this, my brother Mike might have held me down with one of his giant paws of a hand and inserted a horseradish-laden tortilla chip into my mouth had I persisted in refusing to try it. I grabbed a chip and loaded it. My brother’s eyes widened, and he laughed like a hyena because he knew I would eat the whole bite. Though it burned, it was delicious!
“See, you dumb bastard? I told you you would like it. This ain’t the horseradish Aunt Ardith kept hidden in a side shelf.”
Although my brother was one of those people who thought he was always right, I had to give him credit for insisting I at least try horseradish. The worst that could have happened is that I still would have hated it.
All these years later, I think about that. He did the same thing with guacamole after I refused to have some freshly made guacamole at what used to be my favorite Mexican restaurant in Springdale. Guacamole was the equivalent of turkish delight from C.S. Lewis’ Narnia tales.
I am now a world class aficionado of pico de gallo. For too many years, I assumed I wouldn’t like it because my mom made me automatically distrust onions. Onions were the second component of her one-two punch of seasoning, which consisted of onions and cigarette ash. It was a story of culinary violence in the South, never knowing if the potato salad or mashed potatoes would have fantasy-level chunks of onions.
The above anecdotes hint at much of our problem. Because I was naive and poor, I was rarely exposed to a wide swath of food, much less quality. My cousin Jimmy’s house was the crucible of exposure to many foods. Because of my dad, Bobby Dean, almost literally making me eat food at gunpoint, some of my first exposures to some things were less than ideal. That’s putting it mildly. Some of the food at my house was the equivalent of the discarded version of what you would find behind a dollar store grocery aisle. That explained my aversion to morel mushrooms.
And also horseradish.
I don’t remember how old I was when I first tried horseradish. I remember the time that soured me on it. It turned out to be old and nasty by any standard. So, it’s no wonder my first exposure was the equivalent of eating a goose-poop-filled donut. I was lucky to have Aunt Ardith and Uncle Buck. Without them, my life would have been much worse in several ways. Visiting my cousin Jimmy always guaranteed that I’d be well-fed and get to try a variety of things. I like to joke about the horseradish because it was one of the few times that Aunt Ardith convinced me to try something exotic (to me). She had the best intentions, unlike my dad. If he got a hint of an idea that I didn’t like something, you can be sure that I’d be eating a bucket of it. Aunt Ardith and Uncle Buck did their best to tell Dad to jump off a cliff when he behaved that way around them.
We have parallel aversions to many things resulting from our initial exposure. Look at most relationships, and you can see that it’s true. You had your heart broken. You repay your future self by carrying the mistake and believing that all relationships will turn sour. Or you think most people grew up without the love and caring everyone needs. You carry your words into the future, and all the potential people you meet indirectly pay for the wound. You either avoid deep relationships or insist the system is rigged and broken. The concept of relationships isn’t the problem; it’s us. You’re letting your version of horseradish tarnish your future with other people.
Life is horseradish and guacamole.
Be open to new things.
Be aware that you may have blinded yourself or made truth from experiences that should not be extrapolated into cynicism or isolation.
Although it is true that people rarely fundamentally change, it is possible both in outlook and preference.
Changing is, in part, acknowledging that the things, habits, and ideas that once defined you no longer do.
Only healthy people change their minds and their lives.
PS During this crazy election, I’ve had a few laughs because of my brother. He’s been gone for four years. In his later life, one of his proclivities was to be a blowhard, much in the ilk of Bill O’Reilly. My job was to be the liberal and sentimental brother that drove him crazy. And as I was fond of telling him, the person left standing gets the last word. Since I bought gallon by the ink, he didn’t have the temperament to keep up with me. If he were still alive, he’d be pissed off at me constantly. But I miss it. Not the anger of the last few years; that period owes its shadows to alcohol and unresolved trauma. I miss the undeniable intelligence of my brother, even when he used it to wither my well-intentioned arguments. I absorb a lot of the election craziness and play a dialog in my head, one in which my brother is the one repeating conspiracy theories and horrible rhetoric. My brother taught me that if you can’t argue the facts, you pound the table. If that fails, flip the table.
PSS I chose a different picture for this post instead of one of my brother. Both pictures are of joy and of family time. Even though there was a backdrop of unease during both visits, each of the pictures reveals both youth and connection. In one, my niece Brittany charges toward me as I stand by a pond outside a cabin on King’s River. I got deathly ill from food poisoning on that visit, and Mike’s police K-9 got violently snakebit while we were all swimming in the river. Behind Brittany, as she runs, my deceased wife watches happily. The other picture from another visit is of my nephew Quinlan kicking my ass as the three of us wrestle like savages. I’d forgotten that their dog was watching from the doorway. The third picture is of me and my brother. Mike had his wife bought me a plane to ticket to visit them in Illinois. I love the picture despite the goofy look on my face. It documents my brother’s vibrancy in the “before” part of his life. Mike bought me tickets for two such trips, and his doing so proved that he loved me and also missed me. It was before the branching of his life; the picture captures what could have been the case for the rest of his life had he made that choice. My niece is a mother now, and when I think about the fleeting speed of life, I get a glimpse of the idea that nothing stands alone in our lives and that each moment unfolds from the previous one. We don’t see its unfolding or interconnectedness until later.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 