Don't Mess With Him - You'll Answer to Me

Forty-eight years ago on November 20, I woke up in the middle of the night to find my grandmother in my double bed next to me. “Your mother went to the hospital,” she reported, when I wondered what she was doing there. A few hours later, the phone rang, and my father announced, “You have a little brother.” My sister and I were ecstatic. A boy was unusual in my family so this would be a novel experience. I had little idea at the time how novel it was to be.

I was 9 years old and this was my first real experience with a baby. My brother was pudgy and cute and he didn’t cry very much. I learned to change and feed him and didn’t think anything about it when he didn’t crawl until he was over a year old, take a step until almost two, and wouldn’t eat table food until he was four.  When I was 12, a “friend” told me that another girl who was the “neighborhood nasty” had said that my family was trying to hide my brother because there was something wrong with him. She whispered the word, “mongoloid.”  I was crushed. Why would we try to hide such a cute little guy? In a rare expression of feeling, I went home crying and told my parents who reassured me that the “neighborhood nasty” was being true to her reputation and that they certainly were not trying to hide him.

I recovered but became super over-protective. More than once, seeing behavior that led me to believe another kid was enroute to taking advantage of him, I sped through the house, leaped out the door and screamed at those kids to stop whatever it was they were doing. And over the years, I perfected a glare that warned, “Don’t mess with him or you’ll answer to me.”  I still pull it out from time to time.  

My brother has provided my family and those who know him well with 48 years of adventure, laughs, and occasional high blood pressure. Although incapable of distinguishing between left and right, up and down, or over and under, especially in moments when I need him to follow directions because I have my thumb in a dike and can’t move, he can hook up a VCR/DVD player in no time flat. My mother once stared in disbelief at his handiwork when she realized that he had switched his broken VCR with her working VCR without her knowledge. He also is smart enough to have figured out that if he removes a certain piece from the top of the doors in his group home, the bells that signal someone’s arrival and/or exit will be deactivated. He also figured out how to de-alarm the fire system because it made too much noise and awakened him in the middle of the night for fire drills.

My brother can find nothing you want him to find, but he has perfected his disappearing act so nobody can find him! Trust me when I say he’s good at it. Even the bloodhounds would agree.  

    

My brother says the funniest things. Every time he walks through the front door of his group home, he calls out, “Oh honey, I’m home!” as if he were on the set of Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. Although some things he says are clear, his speech is often difficult to understand. Since many words sound the same coming out of his mouth, it’s often a guessing game to figure out what he is saying. Sometimes he helps us by spelling (yes, you read that correctly). He tells me that somebody at his group home made him a strawberry lello cake for his birthday. A lello cake, I think, my mind quickly making associations. A yellow cake? No, he says, a LELLO cake, J-E-L-L-O. Ah, a strawberry jello cake.  He tells me about a DVD he wants, Wicka. Wicka, I think, drawing an absolute blank. Wicker? Wicked? I try a few variations and he’s only frustrated with my inability to get it. “F-L-I-C-K-A” he spells as if I am daft. Oh!  Flicka, I say, triumphantly. Yes, “Wicka” he repeats. Okay.

My brother has unbelievable rhythm and all the right moves which he has learned from movies and Sha Na Na.  He is also as light on his feet and as debonair as Fred Astaire. He plays no favorites on the dance floor and the girls all love him. The staff at ARC refers to his harem with a laugh. Look for the crowd on the dance floor- my brother will be in the middle of it. He dances every dance and will be the last one on the floor at the end of the night, bowing graciously to the band or the DJ in thanks before he makes his grand exit.

My brother is meticulous about some things – a slob about others. On the one hand, his ability to fold clothes rivals that of any GAP employee. He even folds his dirty laundry as if it were going straight to a drawer instead of the laundry bin. On the other hand, his room is littered with random papers, empty juice bottles, and lone unmatched socks. It drives me insane.  But as I stand in a grocery store pondering the store brand vs. a name brand, he is busy straightening up the cans or boxes on the shelves - perfectly.

My brother takes great photographs and he bowls a better game than I do almost every time.

My brother walks at least 3 steps behind no matter how slowly I go. “Can’t you walk a little faster, D,” I’ll sputter in exasperation when I’m in a hurry. “Come on feet, hurry up,” he’ll command, immediately changing my mood from frustrated to laughing.  

My brother has a memory like an elephant. He remembers that I had spinach pie at a restaurant a year before and has in mind to order the same thing when we go back. He remembers the one DVD or video that was on his Christmas list that you couldn’t find/buy. At the mention of a long-dead relative, he’ll tell you the year of his/her birth (even if it was in the 1890s), and what their phone number was when they were alive – even if they died 20 years ago. But he doesn’t always remember to comb his hair, change his socks, or put on a belt.

I picked my brother up on Saturday morning, November 20, from his group home in western New York to head back to NYC where we would celebrate Thanksgiving and his birthday. I went in his room to check on his packing. For seven days, he had neatly (think GAP) assembled 7 pair of underwear, 10 undershirts, 9 pair of socks, 12 pair of long pants, and 3 shirts. It was hard to not laugh. I edited the pants and increased the shirts and before long, we were on our way. As we pulled out of the driveway, he looked at me, grinned, and said, “Hit the road, Jack.”

Somewhere between Dansville and Corning, he peered out the windshield up at the clear blue sky, then settled back in his seat. “Well, mom,” he said. “My birthday is today. I am 48 years old.” A lump threatened my throat. I promised my mom moments before she drew her last breath that I would take care of him. I glanced over at my passenger. “I’m sure mom knows it’s your birthday today, honey,” I said. “And I’m sure she is happy because she knows we are on our way to New York City together.” He reached over and patted my shoulder reassuringly.  “I am happy too,” he said.

Breaking Tradition

For much of my life, I have taken solace in the traditions of holidays. Actually, it wasn’t just solace – some traditions were so important to me that I actually thought I might not survive without them.

Once the gauntlet of snake-necked swan statues and barking, biting dogs ended (see Thanksgiving at Aunt Boo’s House, 11/13/10), Thanksgiving became a safe holiday. From the time I was 8 until my beloved mom’s final Thanksgiving in 2005, the holiday was always spent at my childhood home. The guest list was always the same except when death, divorce or birth intervened. As a child, two sets of my grandparents were always invited (I had three sets, but that’s another story), my aunt and uncle who would have to sneak out in the afternoon to go “do their chores” (they had a dairy farm), and a grand-aunt who gave very wet kisses (yuck). Later, as my sister and I grew up, my father left, spouses were added and subtracted as we married, divorced, and in the case of my sister, remarried. Children were born and there was a long stint of status quo until our children started adding boyfriends, fiancés, and husbands to the mix.  And no matter where we were living, when Thanksgiving arrived, my sister and I always traveled to our childhood home with our families for the long weekend. 

Routine was very important and so was the menu, which never changed. I usually arrived the day before, and spent much of the day helping my mom with preparations. That time together was quiet and sweet as we cut up bread for dressing, rolled out pie crusts, sliced apples, and chatted. Late in the day, we’d get out her Spode china, brought from England long ago by her cousin, and set the table. Thanksgiving morning, with parade sounds in the background, there was usually a panicked, “Didn’t I buy a bag to roast the turkey in?” and my mom would rout through her floor-to-ceiling cupboards in disbelief that she might have forgotten this most important element (and always find one buried someplace). 

The house gradually filled with the smells of turkey and dressing and the sounds of our children complaining of hunger until finally, it was time to carve the turkey – always my job. The yummiest bites were those I snuck ahead of time and passed around to anyone in the vicinity of me and my knife. At the dinner table, our children’s voices sped through, “God is great God is good Let us thank Him for our food Amen.” Later, my mother’s voice quietly intoned, “Bless, Oh Lord, these Thy gifts which we are about to receive” when our children grew too cool to say grace.

After dinner, we always lingered around the table. As a child, I loved listening to the grown-ups talk and tell jokes, and later turn the conversation toward Christmas.  As my sister and I moved into the middle generation, Thanksgiving night usually included a “Kmart run” for Christmas stocking shopping, which was fun beyond belief. We’d run around Kmart with our carts, buying things for each other, for our kids, spouses, mom and brother, warning “Don’t look!” if we had to pass each other or stop and ask a question.

Friday morning we’d often be up at the crack of dawn – yes, that would be us out at 4:30 a.m. and in line somewhere to buy our mother a computer or buy our kids some coveted gift. As we got older (and more tired) we moved our start time a couple hours later. But the tradition of sitting in a mall with my sister, my daughter, and my nieces not long after dawn, having coffee together and heading off in our various directions to shop till we dropped was special, and in our minds, compulsory. Friday night was always given to celebrating my brother’s and my youngest niece’s birthdays. Saturday was designated for more shopping – my sister and brother-in-law might sneak off to see his family, or occasionally to play cards with their friends, and in later years we always put my mom’s Christmas tree up and decorated it for her. Finally, Sunday morning, Thanksgiving was officially over. We’d pack up our cars and head south or east – until it was time to reconvene at Christmas.

Those traditions are sweet in my memory and I smile when I think of them. The usual and customary, however, came to a screeching halt during fall 2005 when our mom took a turn for the worse in her fight against ovarian cancer. She had been hospitalized for a few weeks at the end of October and came home to hospice care in mid-November of that year. Our celebration was vastly different, though it stands out as my most memorable Thanksgiving. My sister and I, exhausted from trips back and forth to care for mom, had no inclination to prepare, bake, or cook anything. We let our neighborhood supermarket do it. We set up card tables and chairs to eat our dinner in the living room where mom lay in a hospital bed. Although the rest of us remember the meal as forgettable, our mom, who had not had an appetite for days was alert, able to sit up in bed, eat some of it, and with a big smile, pronounce it “delicious.”  We looked at each other and gave thanks.

The following year our mom was gone, our childhood home was sold, and we convened at my sister’s for Thanksgiving. My sister and I flew solo for the first time in preparing Thanksgiving dinner and everyone lived to tell about it. A few laughs, a few tears, and without missing a beat, we began another tradition in another town, another state.

This year we are breaking with tradition again. My daughter and I are staying home for the first time ever. We want to see the Macy’s parade in our adopted home town. I want my brother, who loves parades, to experience it too. The parade passes the building where my daughter works. Her office features floor to ceiling windows on the 4^th floor overlooking Times Square. Her boss has given us permission to be there. We won’t be cold (or wet) and we won’t have to fight the crowds.

Although we were prepared to “go it alone” for Thanksgiving, some of our family will travel north to join us. While we feel honored, we know we would survive if they didn’t or couldn't come. That’s the important thing. But we will all look at each other next Thursday morning in a totally different setting – surviving, no – embracing another break with tradition and we will give thanks.