This is one of those posts I wrote knowing I couldn’t dare rewrite it or reread it, not even for grammar. It had to just spill out, probably absent context and subtlety. I hate pulling my punches.
Sometimes I can’t be a speaker for the dead. People and families sometimes need to hold their secrets close, even after the cause of needing to do so has withered. This is never more true when self-harm or addiction are among the demons in people’s lives. I’ve lived through countless versions of this story.
Someone I was very close to when I was very young passed away. I had fallen completely out of contact with him. As he grew up, it’s probably a good thing. His life was a mess by any standard.
For those who have been connected to either addiction or criminality by way of another person, you understand the implicit risk of trying to stay close. Bystanders, even innocent ones, always end up paying the price. It’s confusing for the person with the addiction. They don’t understand how they attract bad things. You cannot stand by the fire without being scorched by it.
Coincidentally, the last time I saw him was truly a wild coincidence. It’s been over 30 years. He lived in another part of the state and I lived in Springdale. Several coincidences aligned. Not only was I driving down the street I normally wouldn’t at that time, but I also happened to turn my head and look down the length of a long parking lot adjacent to a rehab center. I recognized his mom first, followed by him. At the time, their awkwardness and discomfort didn’t really register for me. I gave them my contact information and told them I lived less than a quarter of a mile away and to reach out if they needed anything. Looking back, I realize that I was in the presence of ghosts already.
This rehab stint was one of many in his life. The odds of me driving by and looking that direction to see him are almost impossible. I do wonder what might have become of it if he or his mother had reached out to me.
My earliest memory in life, one that my mom attempted to angrily tell me was impossible for me to remember, was one of his mother and my dad. Over the years, I reconstructed all of their lives combining research and resented questions. My memory held against my mom’s denial.
He had a violent and addicted life, one completely different than the one I shared with him when we were both very young. But lord, do I have stories. He was destined to be a hellraiser. I have a lot of memories that make me laugh when I think about him.
It’s strange when you mourn the version of a person who hadn’t existed in decades.
The truth is I didn’t know him at all anymore. He became a stranger to me almost 50 years ago. He became a name, a memory, and a connection to a life that I was dragged away from unwillingly.
Not that it’s important to this story, but I had to move to Northwest Arkansas because of my dad. It took me almost 50 years to find out the deep, dark secret that forced him to leave a place he swore he never would.
My dad and the man from my childhood who passed were connected in another tragic way, one I’ve written about in other stories but don’t want to connect here. It’s one of my foundation stories, one that screams that truth is definitely stranger than fiction.
I didn’t hear about his death until about 3 weeks after it happened. He died alone unless you count the substance he couldn’t escape from. He faced yet another return to prison. Whether the two events are connected is conjecture. But I do know that after a certain age, you are either forced to change or the universe takes over and cripples you. Often, you’ve burned so many bridges and people that your circle has become a flat line. Inevitably, you become one too.
Though I am sometimes heartless in ways some people don’t know about or understand, I do mourn him. Much in the same way I mourn my brother who shared names with him. They also shared middle names with an extra letter thrown in just because we were Southern.
The person who told me of his passing also mentioned once again how grateful she was to have pulled out of the life that took him. Coincidentally, he died at about the same age that the person informing me of his death reached when she finally stepped away from that life.
I guess I mourn what could have been and what should have been.
By way of confession, I was among those who knew the inevitability of his end.
I’ll still have my childhood memories and stories where he was prominently featured.
The other part of his life?
That biography belongs to a stranger I did not know.
Today is an anniversary for my previous life, the one that feels like nostalgic gauze across my memory. Thirty years intervening.
The first picture is a missed opportunity. I wandered down 112 earlier, enjoying the stillness and watching for meteors. For no reason, I turned on Janice and followed the curve around, enjoying the blackness of the unimproved street. I found the owl sitting on this tree. I took a perfect picture of the ground because my timer was on. Fumbling, I turned it off and pointed the phone up. The owl was gone without me having heard its wings. Which meant it most likely dived down silently to the ground nearby. I waited for it to hoot. It didn’t. As I neared the next corner, it announced its presence behind me.
The other picture captures the moon, framed by one of my light bottles.
The third picture holds the moon and a massive contrail that had been dissipating for several minutes. I stood in the deep quiet and watched it for several more minutes as it passed in front of the moon, knowing it would create a colorful halo as the millions of little ice crystals received the light.
Thirty-five years have passed since September 28th, 1991.
One of us was a world-class pilot, and the other was a rudderless young man with no clear direction. The pilot’s incredible ability couldn’t overcome the habit he practiced. That’s how I ended up looking into the September sky and seeing his parachute floating down, a grey-silver jacket inside it.
I met him only in death.
That day rarely touches me deeply. Not beyond the cerebral and superficial. This September infected me with a desire simply to get past it.
When it does touch me, it is a chill on the back of my neck.
You can do everything right and still fail. You can also do the most minor thing, a thing you’ve done countless times, until the universe notices and adjusts your arc in life without any consolation or care. If you do two things wrong, the odds don’t double. They become infinite.
I can’t stress enough how gifted this pilot was. His family in Illinois was legendary for their flight simulators. Some reports indicate he ran out of fuel; I’m not certain whether that was true. Whether he jumped or fell out of his plane, he didn’t have part of his parachute attached. I’m certain he did it a million times. Those two things had the final say in his life. How the plane and pilot landed on the ground basically in the same spot still bewilders me. The capricious luck that kept either of them from killing me is never lost on me.
Some of you rightfully caution me about climbing trees, especially in the dark, or about meandering while the world sleeps. There’s no such thing as safety. It’s exactly like when I went skydiving; there is a slight risk, of course. It is the appearance of relative danger that makes it enjoyable. It’s surrender as you fall out or jump.
It is VERY rare for me now, but sometimes, I find myself hesitating at doors. Thirty-five years ago, I jumped up and ran out of my bedroom to investigate. I opened the door to mayhem. I get tenuous glimpses of it in dreams that immediately fade. Not too long ago, I heard a commotion and ran out of my apartment and into another one to see someone needing CPR. Pun aside, I went into autopilot.
I had two tremendous lessons like this.
Both deaths happened in September.
Both of them died unexpectedly in their early 30s.
Both of them were within feet of each other, separated by decades.
Most of the time, they are simple memories from a lifetime ago. Other times, I look up into the blue of the September sky and wonder about probabilities. If it can happen once, it can happen twice. And also, that no matter how big or small the world seems, it is happening to someone right now.
Both of them are gone now. But for that moment at the Omaha Zoo, the ridiculous side was out. She struggled with the long walk. We didn’t know why at the time.
The other picture was after a great meal. She and Steve clearly gave their opinions of my constant picture taking.
Strange, because other than memories, that’s what I have.
Hundreds of pictures. I was lucky enough to have in-laws who saw the value of letting me scan a couple thousand pictures of her and her family. It was difficult to even try to sort them and decide which ones to share.
I had to include one of her with at least one animal. I have a trove of them. If she had her way, I would have been living in a menagerie. As evidenced by the picture, even fake animals.
Time.
It is the unrelenting bastard that guards the door.
Time.
.
I don’t post pictures of her very often. I demarcated my life into before and after. Life became a demonstration of quantum theory; her absence erased what could have and should have been.
.
I could only separate my life into before and after because somebody accepted my wounds afterward.
Despite all my lessons of appreciation, I fumbled that opportunity. I can’t blame it on the universe or an unseen illness.
My brother Mike sometimes lives in my head for reasons that would irritate the piss out of him. When I listen to AM talk radio, it is his voice I hear, superimposed on whichever oversimplifying demagogue is talking. I used to call him Mike O’Reilly. “I don’t know” was not a phrase you would ever hear from him. “Is there a better way” is a dangerous question for those who are possessed by certainty.
My brother was an authoritarian at heart. There’s no question of this. The tendency escalated as he grow older. Authoritarianism brings dominance and violence.
He loved begging the question. All of this swirls in my head because of what’s going on with all the dubious ICE activity.
“You can’t lawfully stop someone or detain them just because you want to.” My brother’s answer to that was that I was naive. That police everywhere can and do exactly that. Some do. Which of course, is true. He conveniently ignored the word “lawfully” in my observation, just as all the Trump-supporting constitutional simpletons are currently doing.
Almost all of ICE’s abuse would evaporate instantly if they followed the Constitution. But they don’t – and the more people argue that what they’re doing is legally justified is pushing us collectively down a dark road.
Anyone denying the political motivation of choosing Minnesota over Texas is breathing the fumes from their gas tank. I don’t mind a little idiocy because it keeps people like Tom Cotton entertained. The problem is that abuse has tendrils that reach unexpected places. That which we permit anywhere will eventually reach us.
Does anyone believe that if every person not lawfully here left the country today that the huge military apparatus ICE has become would disappear? That their budget would be given back and used appropriately? In the same way that police or prison budgets almost never decrease, ICE isn’t going anywhere because this administration is using it in a way that it wasn’t intended to be used.
If your argument is enforcement, we have the technology and the ability to “solve” that problem for 1/1000th the cost. Without the violence, mayhem, and turmoil. It is so obviously motivated by the desire to engender those consequences.
PS I am in awe of the mental gymnastics some people are employing to justify encroaching on our constitutional rights. Once abridged, they rarely return. You may support those who are currently encroaching them, but you’ll be wondering what happened once the dust settles. We will all be 3/5ths when it’s over.
Several of my social media friends have been posting 1984 quotes.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
I have two of Orwell’s most famous books in Spanish. I’ve been reading “1984,” constantly finding parallels. I included “Animal Farm” in the picture because it is a companion warning to what’s going on around us.
Listening to the loons of this administration attempting to reframe what they’re doing takes me back to my childhood. Surrounded by violence and racism. Even though my dad was violent, the family members who justified their horrendous worldviews loom larger as villains. I think of them as I listen and watch. They were scared of losing control of a world that wasn’t just theirs to begin with. They could not admit that they might have been the bad guys.
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.
