A few weeks ago I had the great good fortune to be out in the Colorado mountains hiking with my wife and labs. We love hiking, especially with the dogs and they love it as well, even our gray-muzzled, eleven year old who turns puppy again when he hits the trails. It was a gorgeous early fall day, warm and clear, the skies so blue and perfect they almost hurt to look at them. The spruce and fir and pine were outlined against the blue sky and ocher peaks like something from a sales catalogue luring people to Colorado. We saw mule deer and later a massive elk strutting by, sweet as you please, as if it knew hunting season was still a ways off.
A day to savor, a memory in the making.
Our labs, as they sometimes do, literally pulled me up some of the steeper slopes. It was a new trail, labeled on All Trails as an easy hike, but before I reached the summit, I had to stop several times and catch my breath. My chest oddly seemed to burn more than usual for a hike of this difficulty. It was our second day in Colorado and at 9000 feet I told myself that I hadn’t acclimated yet. Give myself time. Don’t worry. Still the ache in my chest did worry me, and my wife, a doctor, suggested I make an appointment to have my heart checked when I got back to Connecticut. Though I’m a gym rat and in pretty good shape for an old fart, my family has a history of coronary heart disease. One of my older brothers, Lyman, had died just four years earlier from a heart attach. So I made an appointment for when I got back, and I felt the sort of safety which we do when we take steps that give a false sense of our being in control of our fate.
My next older brother, Craig, and I didn’t get along. We never did, even as kids. He was seven years older and we always seemed to fight. For a long time the fights were mostly one sided. I could be a little shit with a big mouth and he could be a bully who made me pay for it. Whenever we talked invariably it led to shouting. Early in our relationship he seemed to hold most of the cards. He taught me about capitalism. We were very poor growing up, and it was largely from him I learned the severe lesson of the value of hard work, of things having a price to them. If I wanted to use something that he had—a baseball glove, a coat, a car, money—I always had to work for him to pay him back plus interest. I recall one time when I was fourteen he came home in the middle of a frigid winter night and shook me awake. He’d been “parking” with his girlfriend out in a snowy field and his car got stuck. He started up the tractor and made me come with him. I stood on the tractor’s drawbar holding his shoulders in the subzero temperature as we drove the several miles to his car. We towed the car to solid ground and then I drove it home while he drove the tractor. I owed him some money at the time, and for my service he knocked off five bucks. Owing money seemed to be at the core of our relationship, the language we used with each other.
We grew in different ways, holding and nurturing different values. Through hard work he became a successful lawyer and a millionaire real estate mogul; I became an academic and a writer. He felt comfortable in far right-wing conservatism; I, at least in part to spite him, held progressive values that I could wave in his face, even if I didn’t always believe in them. He voted for Trump as he often liked to tell me; I for Clinton and Biden and Harris. Even as adults we could never talk, though somewhere in both of us, I think, we still held onto the slender hope that one day that would change, that one or the other would finally see the light, give in, and we’d have that conversation we’d never been able to have. In fact, he seemed much more hopeful of that conversation happening than I, as he was the one over the last dozen years who did all the calling. He’d say, “So what’s up, buddy boy?” And I’d think of our long past filled with anger and division, and I would tense up and our conversation was like one you might have with an IRS agent We still had next to nothing in common.
Except for one thing: that White heart of ours, that troublesome pump of bile and spite.
Before I left for Colorado, I got a text from my brother asking me to look up his daughter who lives in Denver. I didn’t answer him. I barely knew my niece, and while I had nothing against her, I felt he was using his daughter as a bridge between us. I didn’t want to be manipulated. So I didn’t reply. The night I was packing to head back to Connecticut, I got a phone call from that same niece, which struck me as odd as we’d only spoken a few times. Perhaps my brother had put her up to it and that old defensiveness crept into my heart. But that wasn’t the reason she’d called. My brother, her father, she told me in tears, had just died of a heart attack. He had been alone when it happened. I offered a kind of wooden sympathy to my niece, then hung up. I sat there wondering what my brother’s last thoughts were. I wonder if he, too, realized we would never have that final conversation.
Today is his birthday.
Recent Comments