I talked to my brother, Mike, on the phone last night for the first time in several months. The only reason for the gap in communication is (and always has been) our opposite working schedules, general busy-ness, and the time difference between here and South Carolina. It's only an hour, but I usually don't think of calling him until 8 at night, at which time I would be risking waking up his kids at what is probably their bedtime. And I just don't want to be that person in my brother's household, the one who causes the phone to ring JUST as Kelsey's about to finally doze off to the land of Nod. Not to mention the simpler and more truthful fact that we both just plain suck at maintaining regular communication.
Last night, the thought of waking up the kids didn't occur to me, or if it did, I let it go. Although I've talked to Kelly, Mike's wife, over the holidays, it's been a while now since I heard my brother's voice. What always strikes me when we talk is that He Is My Brother. It may sound weird to some people, but it's kind of a revolutionary idea to me that I have brothers, and I should probably clarify that statement before my Actual Brothers read this and get offended.
For those of you who don't know, I have three siblings (technically, half-siblings) who live on opposite sides of the country: a sister in NJ, one brother in Maui, and one brother in SC. My youngest (and only full-blooded) sibling, Jenny, lives in IL, not too far from here. With me being in Wisconsin, the five of us form a pentagon of Thorvalsons spread pretty thinly over the country. With the exception of the northwest and northeast, there's nowhere in this country I could go without being within a day's drive to one of my siblings. Putting it that way really makes me kick myself for not making them a bigger priority to visit when I travel.
Getting back to the earlier statement... My older siblings moved from Illinois to Charleston, SC, when I was only 5 years old. The oldest one, Mike, stuck around for another year and lived with us until I was six, his intention being to finish high school with his friends. It didn't last long, and one of my earliest childhood memories is of me sitting at the top of the stairs that lead down to my mom's office, crying and screaming at her that I didn't want Mike to leave. I remember feeling that I would never see my siblings again. The west side of Rockford was, to my six-year-old mind, "a long way's away." South Carolina seemed like Mars. I didn't know where it was. Mike was the last connection I had to any of my older siblings, and he was leaving. I don't remember the day he left. I probably blocked it out.
Over the years to come, my dad would pay airfare for my siblings to come back for holidays and summer visits, however, most of these visits included just one or two of them. Dave and Kirstin, or just Mike. My memories of most of these visits are pretty vague, punctuated by Kirstin's developing love life and my brothers' haircuts: Dave's mohawk, created on a trip to my grandparents' temporary home in Fort Wayne, IN; and Mike's dreadlocks, not-so-gracefully adorning the head of this person, this stranger, whom I hadn't seen in six years. All I knew of my older siblings could be summed up pretty briefly: I thought they were all So. Incredibly. Cool. Especially Mike.
As a teenager and young adult, I made it a huge priority to go down to Charleston as often as possible to visit. Dave was in Maui by then, and Kirstin and I were sort of doing this little sisterly dance around each other, trying to figure each other out and each thinking the other one was certifiably insane (we were both right). So I latched on to Mike, the one whom I had the clearest memories of, and the one I most related to. He was into skateboarding, drank a lot, had tattoos, and knew all the words to my favorite punk rock songs. All of my friends were punks, most of them much older than myself, and having this sort of Punk Rock Certificate in the form of my big brother gained me acceptance, even though none of them had ever actually met my brother. I could have made him up. I felt as though it didn't matter if I never learned how to skate, if I never saw Black Flag perform, because My Brother Did, and somehow his inherent coolness had dribbled down to me somewhere in our shared genetics, as though having him as a big brother was documented proof that I had an Inalienable Right, if not Responsiblity, to Be Punk Rock. I pushed our unintentional and natural state of siblinghood to its outermost limits, desperately pretending that we knew each other far better than we did and that the fact that I called him Brother meant I had some sort of inside scoop not only on the punk/skater scene, but more importantly on him as a person. Now, of course, I realize this was simply me trying to feel closer to someone of whom I had next to no knowledge whatsoever, trying to justify a huge amount of sisterly adoration for someone who was, in essence, a stranger to my life.
So I drove down there a few times, flew most times, but I did go. And I got to know my brother. I learned he was an alcoholic. I learned he was TRULY my brother, and that manifested itself in his starkly apparent protectiveness whenever one of his friends would hit on me. I learned he loved his son. I learned he was intensely spiritual, questioned the Christian schools of thought, and loved more than anything to just be alive, sensing everything at once. I learned he backed up his friends, even when they had let him down, and that his friends consisted of a wide range and variety of human beings - black, white, skater, rastafarian, Christian, atheist, lost, and found - and I realized for the first time what a prolific and special thing it was (and is) to have such an open, loving heart in what can be such a staunchly conservative and racist environment. I saw him kiss a black man in the middle of a downtown bar one night, and it was the most heroic and beautiful moment, watching this drunk 12-year-old boy locked in a thirty-something white man's body, expressing this pure, naive love to his friend, who was black, in the middle of a bar on a street in Charleston, where it is decidedly unusual to see white and black hanging out together, much less displaying affections that could be construed as homosexual. Having black friends in the north means you're acting politically correctly; they've become a commodity among liberals: "I'm open minded! See? That black guy over there - I know him! Hey, James! Come over here!" Unfortunately, there's a lot of that up here: See White Bob. See Black James. See White Bob and Black James drink beer. It's a very showy sort of comeraderie, and more than a little insincere. In Charleston, I learned that at least in that moment, what my brother was doing couldn't afford to be insincere. To act that way in public, particularly in a bar where people are getting drunk, and where racism is still relatively prevalent, is to risk getting your face kicked in. You'd better really, truthfully, be friends with that black guy over there, 'cause you're gonna need his help when Redneck Joe comes a-swingin' for that kiss you just planted on black male lips. It's a double offense: open racial mingling with homosexual undertones. I learned that Downtown Charleston By Day is 180 degrees from Downtown Charleston At Night, and that, thankfully (and I'm sure intentionally, on Mike's part), we were in one of the few bars downtown where the mingling was sincere. Punks sat with hippies, rastas played pool with punks, and my brother kissed his friend in true appreciation of friendship. To my northern eyes, it wasn't politically correct. It was a True Political Statement in that it wasn't intended to be political. It was an innocent gesture of love. My brother, the instigator for social change (scarier yet: My brother, the Hippie!).
I learned that despite his faults and weaknesses, which I was only beginning to be shown, I was proud of him. He was doing his duty as a human being: being himself, growing, falling down, and getting back up again. I've known a lot of drunks, junkies, and crackheads in my time, although because they were close friends and/or relatives of mine, it never occurred to me to label them as such. Regardless, suffice it to say that while I'm aware that others have experienced far worse degrees of addiction and afflictions in their lives, it does my friends and relatives no respect or justice at all to diminish thier experiences by saying "it could have been worse," or, "he wasn't as bad as so-and-so." Yes, it could have been worse. That doesn't mean that what they have experienced thus far hasn't been horrific. To compare calamities of such a complicated nature is downright sinful. Some of those people died.
My point is this: my brother wasn't one of them. And every time I hear his voice, every time he scolds his son or kisses his baby daughter or marvels at his wife, every time he confesses - and it truly is a confession - his wonder and respect of a man he questioned so much for so long that when he calls Him Lord you'd better believe he fucking means it, I am thankful for his continued existence. I firmly believe that love - any kind of love - is never completely solid, you can't be sure that it's real, until and unless it's been tested. You never know how much you love someone until they piss you off. That's a real test. And my brother has spent a lifetime testing and re-evaluating his opinion of Jesus and his faith in general. Therefore I respect him more than any other Christian I know. Never have I seen a human being go to such a dark place for so many years and come out of it not just alive, not just breathing, but thriving. Through all of these years, through everything I've seen him go through, one thing about my brother has never changed: his strength and utter refusal either to die or to live dispassionately. And that energy in him has been there from Day One, long before he could give credit to a deity for his strength. It has nothing to do with Jesus; it's simply who Mike is. It is the reason he's still on this earth, and the reason I could never look away. He has kept, and when it diminishes, continues to restore my faith in humanity. Make that whole sentence a Capital-Lettered One, because I say that with absolute honesty, without a single grain of salt.
This spring, my brother Dave, his wife Aleka, and their two sons - Aidan and Alika - will be moving back to the mainland, back to Charleston, in the hopes of eventually buying a house and of Dave going to work with Mike as a carpenter. Mike just got his contractor's license, and Dave may be going into the business with him. It is the stuff a father's - our father's - dreams are made of.
Kirstin is in New Jersey with her husband, Vaughan, and their daughter, Ayla. Kirstin is doing better than she ever has, living the life she's always hoped for: she's finally a mother. I'm tempted to insert here, "....so now we can all stop hearing about it!", but I'll refrain. ;) The last time Kirstin came home was four years ago, when our dad died. She came alone, and I never got to meet my new brother-in-law.
Mike is busy working, getting flooded with customers whom I'm sure he's brought with him from his previous job. He goes to church every Sunday, and what I love about his life as... well, as a born-again Christian, is that he doesn't fit the stereotype. I know that on his journey, as he learns about the life of Christ, about the history of the church, about the true meaning of Christianity, he is looking at all of it with eyes that have seen a lot of darkness. It takes guts for him to look at himself honestly, through the filter of his life, as a person, as a father, as a husband, and as a man. And he never makes me feel inferior or somehow "wrong" simply because we haven't come to the same conclusions. Because we haven't drawn conclusions yet. I think we're both still in progress. I respect his journey, and he respects mine. I haven't forgotten this is the same person who, seven years ago, sat with a friend and with me in a field on John's Island, next to a skate bowl, amidst a garbage heap of empty beer cans and cigarette butts, taking delight in the mere existence of a tree, that that tree had been there longer than he'd been alive, that all of his experiences combined as a human being couldn't come close to the life of that single tree; the same person who, in the same conversation, in the same sentence , labelled himself an agnostic and confessed an admiration of Mohammad, of the Buddha, and of Christ. If nothing else, if not a deity, Jesus was after all a carpenter.
Jenny is the only one who stayed in Rockford, and it's no mistake that she is the only one who could have stayed there. Our mother might be living in a one-bedroom apartment with no lawn whatsoever if it weren't for Jen and her husband, Paul, helping out with all the yardwork and pool maintenance my father left behind. I called Jen a few days ago to schedule a Sisters' Night Out, a phenomenon I don't think we've ever explored, so that I may come to better know the one sibling I did grow up with, the one I sometimes feel I know the least.
This summer, we will all be on the same continent again for the first time in several years. Mom is getting anxious for a reunion, with all five siblings, all six grandchildren, and all our old family friends and neighbors. I cannot wait to lose another pool game against my brothers, against Kirstin, who - despite being a mom, a Southern Belle, a GW supporter, and a military wife - can still, I'm sure, kick my ASS; to gather together, not for someone who's passed away, but for all of us who are still alive; to witness the awkward attempts at communication between my sisters, the delicate bond between two people who have finally agreed to disagree and have even begun to grow beyond that; to share in my mother's tears as she wells up for all the love in that house, for how much we wish Dad was there to embarrass us all with his dirty jokes and constant teasing, at the same time knowing that somehow, from somewhere we have never been, he sees us and is laughing; to bear witness to my brother Dave, the quiet one who is always listening, reminding us and surprising us with a one-liner that says it all: He Who Doth Not Speak Hears Everything, and Wilt Use It Against Thee With Love If Thou Forgetteth in His Silence That He Is There; to meet my brother-in-law; to see all of our children scoping each other out, recognizing themselves in each other, scrutinizing each other's demeanors and accents and clothing before playing together, screaming and running in circles, fighting over who gets the blue noodle floaty toy in the pool, or sharing a slice of watermelon, like kids, like the cousins they are. And best of all, to look in the faces of my siblings, mirrors to each other, and to hear again the sounds of late-night laughter echoing in the remodeled walls of what was - and in many ways still is - Our Father's House.
I have no way to end this entry except to say that it always will be an unfinished story, and, like my brother, like all of us, In Progress.
Posted by stephanie at January 11, 2005 03:54 PM