Red Is My Color

I should have known something was amiss last Easter when I arrived at my brother’s group home to pick him up for the long ride to Virginia where our sister and her family live. He had his old 35 mm film camera in its case and sitting on top of his packed suitcase. “Why are you taking that camera,” I asked. He ignored the question. I handed him the camera case, and started down the hallway wheeling his bag. “We buy film?” he implored.  “I guess we can,” I said, “but why don’t you take your digital one?”  “This camera this time,” he said. I was annoyed. Film isn’t easy to come by at just any store, plus it meant another stop, plus the cost of the film and the eventual processing.  I held my annoyance at bay. I took a deep breath and thought, ok, why not. Everybody likes a change now and then. Aloud, I said, “All right, we can stop at Walmart and see if they have any.”  

  

My brother has been camera-crazy since I was in high school. And he has quite the eye.  His photos have won awards in Exceptional Artworks Exhibits and have been displayed locally in our hometown.  He’s even sold some of them. However, in addition to taking some really fabulous photographs, he also takes hundreds of what I call “garbage photos”.  Those include photos taken off the television and “still life” of various objects found around the house…. a toaster, a ceramic Indian he made, a box that holds a video, the contents of a drawer, the cover of a wrestling magazine, a cup with a straw in it.

After our mom passed away, the task of taking my brother to get his photos developed became mine. It didn’t take long to realize how much money was being spent (i.e., wasted) on what were mostly “garbage photos.”  It irritated me no end. I thought about getting him a digital camera but rejected the idea.  I imagined him getting frustrated when he couldn’t figure out something about the camera and breaking it. It wouldn’t be the first time frustration led to breakage.

A year or so later, however, I relented.  My sister and brother-in-law and I went in together and bought him a point and shoot digital camera.  He was hesitant at first – the concept of taking pictures with no film did not compute.  The little screen through which one frames photos was also confusing. He was used to framing through an eyepiece. But with encouragement and practice, gradually he got used to the camera and the old film camera was relegated to a desk drawer. Until Easter this year.

Sometime in May, I was in my hometown for the weekend visiting my brother as I often do. Saturday was coming to a close. I’d returned my brother to his group home, and I sat outside talking with my aunt and uncle at their house. The conversation turned to him. One of them noted that David doesn’t take his camera with him as often as he used to (for years, he would not leave the house without his camera.)  Yes, that’s true.  Perhaps that might be my fault. I hadn’t been very diligent about taking him to get his legitimate photos off the little storage device. Because he wasn’t always handing me little canisters, I tended to forget about getting his photos printed. I said that next time I was in town I would make it a point of taking him to get some prints made of whatever he wanted.  I said perhaps he was losing interest because he wasn’t seeing the products of his picture taking efforts. I should be more diligent.

So the next time I was in town, I approached the issue. We had just pulled in the driveway of his group home after eating breakfast out. I was dropping him off so I could go to the hair salon, after which I would pick him up again to spend the day together. “Tell you what, David,” I said. “When I come back to get you, let’s take that little chip out of your camera and go to Target to get photos printed. We haven’t done that in a long time.”  My little brother stared straight ahead and shook his head. “Maybe not,” he said. I persisted, “Why not? I’m here and we have the time. Let’s just go and do it.” My brother bit his lip and opened the car door. “Hmmm. Not today.”  He put a leg out.

“Wait a minute, David.” A bad feeling was creeping over me. I was remembering Easter. The light bulbs started going off in my head.  He put his other leg out and stood up. “David, I’m talking to you,” I said. “Don’t ignore me.” He looked down in to the car at me. I kept my voice even. Or at least I think I did. “David… did something happen to your camera?” He burst into tears and slid back down in the car.  “David, what happened to your camera?” Between sobs, he managed to get out, “It broke.”  “Oh, Dave, how did it break?”  “Fell on the floor,” he cried. “Kaboom.”  “Honey,” I tried to console him. “What broke on it?”  Through his tears, he wailed, “the lens.”

My mind was busy processing. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe he just thinks it’s beyond repair because he knows nothing about cameras, really. “Honey,” I said. “When I come back from getting my hair done, show me the camera. Maybe it can be fixed. I’d like to take a look at it.” My brother cried harder. Another light bulb exploded in my head. I hated to even ask the question. “David,” I said, “do you still have the camera?” I closed my eyes and prayed for patience.  “No,” he shook his head and sobbed some more.  “What did you do with the camera, David?”  “I throw it out,” he admitted. “In the trash?” He nodded, “uh huh.”  I was incredulous.  But I also could see the logic that propelled the action. My brother has been watching (and learning from) television for almost 50 years.  Smart criminals get rid of the evidence. Kill someone. Hide the body…… Break a camera. Throw it out.  But smart criminals don’t have a meddling sister who asks too many questions.

“You threw it in the trash?” I repeated. It was a rhetorical question. I was buying myself some thinking time. “Yes,” he squeaked out. My next thought was the photos on the storage device. “David,” I said, “what did you do with the little chip inside with your pictures on it?”  Here comes another piece of David logic. “I erased the pictures,” he said. OK, I thought. Why throw out perfectly good pictures? Simple. You don’t. You erase them first.

I pulled him close to me and he lay his head on my shoulder. Part of me was really upset. The other part of me was putting myself in his shoes. If I broke something of my own, it would be an accident, no matter how it happened. I’d say, “oh sh**” and if it was something replaceable, I’d go buy myself another one. Nobody would ever know what had happened, unless I chose to share my clumsiness. But David….. he breaks something he owns and he can’t just go out and buy a new one. Someone will always know. Someone has to provide him with the money. Someone has to take him to the store. Someone has to approve his purchase. He can never make a mistake of that magnitude and get away with it. He always has to answer to someone. Usually me.   

“Honey,” I said. “Everybody makes mistakes sometimes. I know you didn’t mean to break your camera.”

“Oh yeah?” he sniffed. “Yes,” I said. “But you have to be careful about where you are putting it.” I was beginning to envision what had happened. My brother is, well, a slob. His room is a disaster. He piles things all over the place, often illogically. It makes me crazy. I could see him setting the camera on top of an unsturdy pile while he concocted one of his “still-lifes” and having it slip-slide to the floor.

 “We can get you another camera,” I said. Of course he would get another camera. No question about it.

The sniffling slowed down. “Oh yeah?” My brother has realized that I’m mad but not that mad.

“Yes, but you have to tell me when things like this happen. Your camera might have been able to be fixed. But we won’t ever know that because you threw it out.”

“Me a dumb-dumb,” he said. “No, you aren’t a dumb-dumb. But you do have to be more careful. And you can’t be so sneaky and try to hide things when you make a mistake.”  I probably might as well talk to the wall on this one.  

I kissed his forehead. He nestled into the space between my chin and my right shoulder.  He was still whimpering a little. “I’ll look on the computer when I get home and see if I can find a new camera like your old one.” Life would be easier for us both if I just got him one that worked the same way.  “Same? Zoom lens,” he said, anxiously. “Yes,” I said, “it will have a zoom lens, David. Don’t worry.”  

Now that he knew: 1) I wasn’t going to kill him; and 2) I would get him another camera, he wasn’t going to let an opportunity go by. “Red,” he said. “Red what?” I asked, confused. “Red camera,” he clarified. And then emphatically, he stated, “Want a red camera. Not silver.”  I pulled far enough away from him to scrutinize his face, and wondered, have I been ‘had’? “A red camera…. You want a red camera?” I repeated.  He’s just had a narrow brush with death and he’s thinking about the color of his camera? 

“Why, for heaven’s sake?” I was starting to rethink doing him bodily harm. 

My brother looked straight into my eyes. “Red,” he said seriously, as if I should know better, “red is my color.”  “I’ll give you red, little brother!”  I shook my fist at him. He laughed at me knowing that he was not in any danger. None at all.   

What Goes Around, Comes Around

I’m impatient. I’m the first to admit it. And there are occasions in the past when my impatience has bordered on intolerance, a fact about which I am not proud. It’s either genetic (from my father) or learned behavior (also from my father). Either way, he’s implicated. My mother had nothing to do with it. It is probably her influence that kept me (mostly) civilized despite my feelings.  

I felt impatient with my younger sister when we were small. She attracted negative attention to our sibling unit, especially from our father, because she wasn’t always compliant and didn’t read his signals that warned of an impending blast. If we were fooling around and my father warned us to cut it out, she always pushed the envelope and earned his roar in our direction. I’d wish very hard for her to be good or be quiet so he wouldn’t erupt.

One time I tried to teach her how to say the word ‘kerchief’ – a common word in the fifties as we wore them tied beneath our chins on windy days. I started out patiently enough. “Say ‘ker’,” I directed.   “Ker,” she responded obediently.  “Say ‘chief’,” I followed it up. “Chief,” she complied.  “Ker-chief,” I said triumphantly. Simple, I thought. Just say it. She massacred the word once again and I wanted to tear out my hair (or hers). After several more thwarted attempts, I changed my tactic, “Scarf. Say ‘scarf,’” I suggested, giving up before I lost it.  

 My impatience followed me to school.  Sitting in reading groups in first grade, I thought I might go crazy. S-s-s- e-e-e   S-s-s- puh- o – tt  rrr – uuu- nnn. “What is it you don’t get???” I would think, feeling nothing but frustration as certain classmates struggled to turn separate letters into words that made sense. I’d fidget in my seat, eager to get on with it, stifling sighs. Struggling to control my irritation, I’d read ahead to find out what was going to happen with Dick, Jane, and Sally, and by the time it was my turn, I’d be pages beyond where we officially were stuck, in search of something interesting. 

I was impatient in tap dance class when classmates messed up a routine and we had to start over. I recall Helen, who couldn’t remember the steps to the dance we did to Jingle Bell Rock. Since the dance was done with partners, it was imperative that she “get it” or she’d mess someone else up in the process. My teacher, Miss Joy, asked my mother if we might invite Helen over to practice the routine in our kitchen because my sister and I “got it.” We complied although I was irritated beyond words at the imposition. I had to reach very deep inside to summon up enough generosity to be able to drill Helen on the steps until she could keep up with her partner.  But I remember thinking, “What do you not remember about shuffle ball-change??”  I know – not nice.

I was also impatient in gym class when we learned square dancing. Now, granted, many kids, boys in particular, probably did not want to be there learning allemande left and allemande right – but for goodness sake, I would seethe silently, why can’t they remember their right from their left? It was humiliating when our gym teacher went around with a magic marker writing big Ls and Rs on our hands just because some kids didn’t get it.

Magnanimous? Not.

There are, however, dozens of my former research students who I’ve coaxed through math phobia who would not recognize me in those anecdotes. And certainly, people who watch me interact with my brother would swear I’m the epitome of patience.  I often laugh at myself, firmly believing that I received comeuppance for my impatience with other’s slowness the day he was born with Down Syndrome. 

I can wait easily and cheerfully in very long lines for entrance to some theme park ride or museum. When my daughter was young, while other parents abandoned ship and told their kids the line was just too long despite their wails, I would stock up on drinks for us, slather on the suntan lotion, and engage her in some conversation or game for the 60-90 minute wait. On the other hand, when she was a teenager, if I pulled into a strange driveway in an unfamiliar neighborhood to pick her up from a late-night party, and she didn’t appear right away, it would take about three minutes before I would start to feel ballistic.

Indecision has the same effect on my impatience meter.  I had a girlfriend who attended film school with me in the early eighties. She processed, reprocessed and overprocessed every decision she needed to make about her film, her personal life, her job – and even after she made a decision, she continued to question it.  I began to wonder why my insides did gymnastics whenever we were together, and one day I realized that I was stifling a primal scream.

But I also survived four years of shopping for prom dresses during my daughter’s journey through high school. Going from store to store, sitting in dressing room after dressing room while she anguished over body parts (which I couldn’t see anything wrong with) that didn’t look ‘right’ in one beautiful dress after another, somehow I managed to remember what it felt like to feel inadequate and followed her cheerfully to yet another store. 

       

So, when I saw the recent news article in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Get out of my way, you jerk!” I laughed aloud. The article was about sidewalk rage – which is akin to road rage, except that there are no cars involved. It is brought on for similar reasons – people make careless moves on the sidewalk (abrupt stops, sudden u-turns, signal-less lane changes), to which others react immediately and negatively. This is a “disorder” I understand. Sidewalk rage is also triggered by tourists who insist on holding hands and spreading out three or more deep, thus creating a walking wall through which no one can penetrate. However, tourists are the least of it – they come and go, and one can almost forgive them for they are blissfully unaware of the laws of the sidewalk. But New Yorkers should know better. I love the story one of my colleagues relates when he told someone on the sidewalk that he hoped they don't drive like they walk. I might think it but I’d never have the courage to be that blunt. I just swallow my irritation and keep going, fully and painfully aware that one day I may be the person in the way of someone impatient like me, wondering where everyone is going in such a hurry.