End of Year Thoughts? The 2020 Blues
Been trying to put my 2020-21 thoughts in order...
Christmas late-late night, 5:43 am. No electricity. Welcome to post-American life. Appropriate, huh?
Power went out in a late night storm. Told Pat I’d stay up to see the lights come back on. Which was supposed to be around 4 am. I gave up and went to bed, woke up alone, found her here, and now she’s just gone back to bed. Taking turns abandoning one another. What it feels like, here before dawn.
I didn’t feel like Merry Christmas anyway. I’m in the post-partum depression that goes with every book. Pat knows how to deal with it. She acts like I’m nothing special, just another bad husband who starts arguments and yells himself to broken sleep.
She’s the long-suffering hero of this tale, not me. I’m the one who’s had all the privileges. The one whose life has been arranged to generate writing for ones not yet born. That produces, what’s the term (?), collateral damage? Can’t find my glasses. Coincidence?
My wife I love. We found each other 40 years ago. But I left her, our love unconsummated. Found her again, a lifetime later, after I had pursued my destiny to effect real-world accomplishment at the cost of personal ruin. Yeah. I succeeded. Against all odds. And it killed me. She had waited all that time to be there to pick up the pieces. She, alone in this world, knew exactly who and what I was. Why I tell you on a dark Christmas morning that I am the most blesséd of men.
Can’t find my glasses. Where was I? Oh. Still in the dark, pushing 68 years on earth. Where was I? I have a sister who loves me. I love her. We don’t talk, haven’t, for years. I have no family connections. She does, I think, unless she doesn’t.
You see, if we’re looking for victims, she might be the one. My big sister. Who hasn’t figured out that the proof of my love is that I leave her out of my writing? Not because she doesn’t matter, but because she’s the last surviving kin who has earned the oath I made not to eviscerate family in fiction. She’s the living one who matters. And I have almost single-handedly wrecked her life.
Except that I didn’t. We are all, individually, responsible for wrecking our own lives. Yes, I made life harder for her. It’s not easy growing up the elder sister of the only son, especially when he sucks in every ray of sun from everyone.
She doesn’t think I wrecked her life. To this day she knows I love her. We just can’t talk. Our paths diverged. I can’t stand her path. She can’t stand mine. We are both Lairds. A thing. A thing that’s a blessing and a curse.
Right now, I’m missing her. In less than a week, she’ll turn 69, one of my magic numbers. We were a better brother-sister act than most. Just a year and a half apart, we had to be mortal enemies or eternal friends. We wound up falling somewhere in between.
That’s not mere lip service. We are both what our flawed father raised us to be. Independent, take-no-prisoners, go all out when you believe the right is on your side. I did that. She did that. And now we have nothing to say to one another.
But I’ll take this singular moment to say, “I love you, Susie. And Happy Birthday.”
To say anything more would be to violate my oath. But I have stories in my head, well worthy of FSF, beyond compare. Still there. In my head. I always felt the need to protect her. And I mostly failed, which should have taught me something. A lesson learned very late. You can’t protect anyone. Sorry, Susie.
2021? Jeez. I called 2020 for what it was because before that I had called 2019 for what it would be. Horror years. Remember that thing about how you can’t protect anyone? True. You can’t. But I tried.
As kids, we played with her Ken and Barbie dolls. Ken’s arm kept falling off. I saw to it that one of Susie’s presents was an Austin Healey 3000. Orange in color. Ken and Barbie could both fit inside; that’s how capacious it was. True. Look it up.
I rescued Susie during the Revolutionary War. You laugh. We lived on about 30 acres of farmland. We ventured, sometimes far afield. Well, I did. With my sister, I ventured only about a field away. We were playing Valley Forge. I had my air rifle, she was bunkered in, waiting for the Brit attack. Then she goes, “Oh!” Her leg was stuck. My plastic rifle butt wasn’t up to the task of digging for help. So I ran down the hill. (Never since). Sparing you the details, we rescued her.
We rescued each other at a hellhole called Cornell University. I escaped. She didn’t. But she contributed immeasurably to my learning in the process. She was an architecture student. I was a grad business school student. White privilege, right? We were both miserable. My only friends at Cornell? Her friends — John, Cheryl, Warren, and that other one — Mark. Who died….
[Ed. 2023: That last bit not true. I had friends too. Gayle and Serena my roommates, Old Harrovian Anthony and his Taiwanese Madonna wife who saved me repeatedly, the coal country genius Robert Ludwig, the Colorado matron and Coors courier named Pixie Hankinson, the Japanese math whiz in our study group Junichi Kogo, the charismatic black certain-to-be CEO from California Hushel Roberts (who rescued me with his fiancé from isolated stupor one bleak Thanksgiving), the naval aviator who talked me out of signing up on the fighter pilot trail of my father, the immigrant stickler from Haiti who bar-talked me to renewed fluency in French, an illustrious professor named Tom Dyckman who seemed to understand why I needed probability theory, and always, complicatedly, Susie my sister.]
…, a group enduringly the reason why everything in my life still seems eerily arranged far in advance. The architecture crew was education by ordeal in a way business school wasn’t. Bizzies worked hard but we didn’t pursue art for its own sake with no profit motive. Given the week’s Le Corbusier ‘form follows function problem’ to solve, we stayed up all night. Scrounging for straws, water paints, plastic bits. We, meaning ‘I’ too, stayed burned the midnight oil until dawn was doing chin-ups on the horizon building models of post-modern convention halls, Roman villas, and gas stations. While I was studying matrix algebra and Accounting up the wazoo. I came to conclude that Le Corb was full of shit. I loved my sister. She was trying to do IT, the art thing. She painted a painting, four feet by six feet, of a door opening into a room. Blue background, yellow door, red floorboards with big black seams. Bold, crude, beautiful.
She thought I got the lion’s share of family talent, but that painting told me she had my father’s gift with watercolors, which she extended to acrylics. The painting was BIG. Inspiration. She made her own choices after that. I was only polite about her reams of poetry. I was working on my own, which usually came in well under twenty lines. I asked her to give me her door painting when she moved and wanted to throw it away. She readily agreed, but I lost it during some domicile change. It was too big to hang onto. I lost it along the way, and her too. She is a Professor Emeritus now in one of the states I’ve never been to.
Power still out. Me, just talking. Here’s the thing. Way back when we were kids, we had a faraway thing at the back of the yard called the Ice House. Where colonials stuck their air-conditioning blocks of, well, ice. Susie and I made it our dirt pile. Roads, home lots, everything, all to provide space for the travel of Tonka trucks, 60s car models (usually convertible), and whatever else I could scoop out. Not at the dirt pile, but skyscrapers too. I was a busy bee. We both had that urge to build stuff, shape stuff, make that dirt pile bigger with the detachable ramp from our Tonka moving van. Then we turned out so different. She had big ideas about women. I had big ideas about lit-er-a-ture and the meaning of life. I was right. Our mother went to Ohio State. She married two men who matriculated in Michigan. The wrong turn she took and can never take back.
Back in the teenage years, we both went for college interviews. She was lustrous*, I was broken, on crutches. Bee sting. Doctor told me I could die. One more sting could kill me. Princeton liked me. I didn’t like them. Still don’t. But I don’t like any of the places I applied to or went to anymore, either. Susie’s mum about that. At least as far as I know. We don’t talk. Anymore.
Power still out. Damn.
END OF YEAR 2020...?
I keep trying. But probably not trying hard enough.
Stay tuned. I DO have something to say about 2020 and 2021. You’ll see.
* Vassar. Early acceptance, which she got. It used to be the Big Three were Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley. Like _______, Yale, and Princeton. He wanted her to go to Number One, like his sister and niece did. He wanted me to go to the best too, except not _______, which would have meant the end of everything. Which is where I went in fact, of course. _______. Susie went to Vassar. The president of her graduating class was a tranvestite named Jackie. Why we were all so proud. Right. Same year I graduated from _______. Life’s a bitch.
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