Memory. That was the topic of Tuesday’s and Thursday’s lecture. Consolidation. Storage. Retrieval. State dependency and spreading activation. Hippocampal tuning and the transition (or lack thereof) of traumatic memories from the immediacy of a first-person perspective to the more distanced handing-over into possibility. The ship on the horizon. The train pulling away from the platform. Or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ windhover riding the currents “rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing,” circling out and away in the mountain valley.
At the end of the second lecture, I showed a painting by Matisse – Studio à Collioure. I had never done this before for past classes, and I wanted to try something that would convey the sense that the forms of our memories – their alignments and relations – the fecund and personal. Alive but also strange, with a sort of creatured beauty. Plants, buildings, living objects. Purples, reds, yellows. This is what our individual lives have uniquely selected for our interior landscapes. Sure, in class we say that memory is the process of consolidation – a brain’s circuitry tuned by the potentiation of neurons. Post-synaptic potentials dialed up and down in white noise of static. But this static is ships and balloons and the rooms in which we actually breathe – the pyered offerings we place on the flames of living. The smoke sent out like a prayer or pleading into the grinding maw of entropy — the transformation of absence into “consolidation,” “storage,” and “retrieval.” Because what is the alternative? Absence unnoticed and fallen away?
***
It was a Wednesday morning when I learned of my brother Rance’s death. I was talking on the telephone with my oldest daughter. She is a “morning person,” and so when she and I speak on the phone it is often in the morning with me drinking coffee while ironing clothes in my living room and her walking her dog along the sidewalks and parks of D.C. While we were talking, my home phone rang and announced a call from my parents. I told this to my daughter, and let her know that I was going to let it go to the answering machine (I still have one of these). But the overheard tone of my father’s voice was broken. I told my daughter that it sounded like something bad had happened and that I needed to call “grandpa.” On her side, my daughter said that she had just missed a call from her cousin, and so we both steeled ourselves and said goodbye.
Only just the previous day, Rance had texted my other two brothers and me a series of long texts about my parents. The previous week he had gone to stay with them. There had been an emergency. My dad had gotten Covid and while quarantining, my mother had developed heart issues that required an ambulance to the local hospital. There had been a flurry of communication between my brothers and me, and it had been Rance who stepped up to fly down and take care of them. He had a coinciding spring break. So, the pieces fit.
After Rance returned from taking care of my parents, he himself came down with Covid. He texted by brothers and me about how he’d left things – how he’d spoken with my dad about maybe paying for someone to start checking in on them. While he was with my folks, Rance I exchanged some texts. He told me about how shaken our parents had been when he had arrived, but by the end he was telling me about how he’d gotten a half dozen cupcakes for them from a place downtown. That would be the last direct communication between my oldest brother and me — a text about how our mom, despite all of her health issues, still held on to a very strong sweet tooth. This was the kind of thing that he and I both enjoyed sharing. The quirks and oddities that made people wonderfully, uniquely who they are.
Now though, the text chain between Rance and me is buried under more and more layers of other texts. The sediment of living over the frozen past. At first, periodically, I would send him a text just to bring the text chain back up to the top. Simple things. Letting him know that I still missed him. Letting him know some piece of information about his wife and children. I knew that I risked forgetting to reach out to him, and that at some point the text chain was going to sink away for good. Maybe slowly, bit by bit into the strata of… of what, I wasn’t sure. Or maybe in updating a phone or computer, it would become lost.
Sure enough, two months after his death, a text that I sent out displayed a red exclamation and a red-fonted “Not Delivered,” And then, soon after, a message appeared on my phone telling me that I had been blocked from “originating” messages to my brother. I rationally knew that this was not deeply meaningful or symbolic – that it was just a phone number that had now been passed along to someone else with their own concerns and friends and family. Still, it felt like more than that.
I do still have the voice recording that my father left on my answering machine that morning when he called to announce my brother’s death, even though now, 28 months and counting have passed. It isn’t masochism. I don’t press the button to listen and re-experience the pain. I don’t want to relive the moment or revel in some sort of self-punishment. It is more a superstitious belief. That maybe, if I keep the recording, there will be a way back. Like chalk marks in the maze, or shore lights lit for the night boats out at sea, or the porch light left on for the dog that has run off. Here. We are still here. Come home.
***
The morning that I learnt of my brother’s death, all I could think of was how afraid he must have been. His wife had gone out for a morning exercise class. His daughter was asleep in her bedroom. And there, that morning alone in a kitchen, he died.
The morning that I learned of Rance’s death, I texted my younger daughter who was on a spring break trip of her own in Portugal. I texted three close friends. I texted my two other brothers – one older and one younger. I texted my girlfriend, and then I went to teach my psychology class.
Later that night, I ended up at a pub that is within walking distance from my house. It’s where I would go to write a couple-a-times per week back then, and what I remember from that Wednesday night – what I remember is an overwhelming belief that if I could just manage to string together the right words, they would be a rope that Rance could grab ahold of and pull himself back. I knew that it was urgent – that with each second the depth was deeper and the chasm greater. So, I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote… But it didn’t work. The words were not enough. Rance did not appear at the table to laugh or to express incredulity in his own way. When I walked home that evening he wasn’t there and the next morning when I checked my phone’s location app, I saw the icons of his two sons moving along train tracks on their way from NYC and Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. The magnetic fields of love and grief. They were heading home to be with their mom and sister, these two moving icons “CC” and “MC” on my phone’s screen.
***
My brother Rance was the oldest of us, my brothers and me. It is one of those things that doesn’t matter, but of course, it does. One of my best friends is the oldest of three brothers, and his own father nearly died of a heart attack at a young age. As he was being spirited to the hospital the father had told my friend, a young boy at that time, that it was up to him to take care of the family. My heart aches to think of that young boy having his childhood taken away like that. And after my brother’s death, when I first spoke with my other older brother – he who had shared a room with Rance for the duration of their childhood and teen years – when I first spoke with him after Rance’s death, he at first sounded out a brave face. “This happens.” “I’m thankful that we saw each other over Thanksgiving.” It was when I asked him, “I don’t know if this matters, and I want you to know just how important you are to me not matter what, but have you thought at all about how you are now the oldest of us brothers?” I asked it something like that because I know my brother, and I suspected there couldn’t help but be this weight, and when I did ask this question, that was when he broke into tears over the phone.
There is something about being the eldest sibling. There just is, and it is not asked for that weight of poured-in hopes and anxieties. I will say, though, that there is also something about being the kid brother and looking up to, and watching, and taking for granted our older brothers. That is what I heard over the phone with my now-oldest brother. My cool, tough, motorcycle-riding brother – in some ways about as different from Rance as a brother could be, and yet he too had been Rance’s kid-brother.
***
All the flowers in the Cordilleras appear to be Autumnal flowers,—they were all in blow & seed—many of them very pretty.— I gathered them as I rode along on the hill sides: if they will but choose to come up I have no doubt many would be great rarities.— In the Mendoza Bag, there are the seeds or berrys of what appears to be a small Potatoe plant with a whitish flower. They grow many leagues from where any habitation could ever have existed, owing to absence of water… With the Specimens, there is a bundle of old Papers & Note Books. Will you take care of them, in case I should loose my notes, these might be useful.— I do not send home any insects, because they must be troublesome to you & now so little more of the Voyage remains unfinished I can well take charge of them.
Letter from Charles Darwin to J.S. Henslow (18 April 1835). From The Darwin Correspondence Project: The Beagle Letters. University of Cambridge, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/charles-darwin-beagle-letters
“What was it like, out there in the Atlantic Ocean?” inquired Mr. Little, who had never been very far from home.
So Stuart and Margalo told all about the ocean, and the gray waves curling with white crests, and the gulls in the sky, and the channel buoys and the ships and the tugs and the wind making a sound in your ears. Mr. Little sighed and said some day he hoped to get away from business long enough to see all those fine things.
Stuart Little (Chapter 9)
All parents are familiar with their growing children off on expedition. Playdates, overnight visits with the grandparents, camps, college, and grand voyages to other states and countries. They read the quick observations of postcard. Maybe they are texted a photo here and there. Maybe in picking up a room they come across artifacts: a leather bracelet, a patterned handkerchief, a smooth stone. Evidence of adventured living elsewhere and brought home. Having two daughters who are gathering up their own lives, I’m familiar with this experience. As parents we note. We encourage. We inquire. But ultimately it is a diverging and a separation that comes with no small amount of pride.
Being a kid brother is also defined by this emotion. We are those left at home when others have gone off on their expeditions. Our older brothers ship home the crates that arrive at the docks, pried open to reveal oddities packed in straw. Hand-written labels on envelopes of seeds. Cases of rocks. A bottled lizard. It is left to the imagination to fill in the pieces – the whys of the selection as well as the pride of knowing that one’s brother brought these things home. The difference, though, is that a kid brother doesn’t visit the museum. A kid brother lives in the museum. The museum is his home.
When we were kids, although he was 5 years older than me, Rance was like a playmate. There was tackle nerf basketball, played from our knees. There was the high jump pit set up in the living room with bean bags as the landing pit. Once when we were racing bikes down a sidewalk in Florida with Rance well ahead, a pickup truck pulled out from a drive, hit Rance’s bike broadside, and sent him airborne. Once when we were in our 20s and 30s there was city league basketball that we played with a team of misfits. For years afterward we would laugh about our teammates who would panic and hoist up shots from half court. We had an on-going joke about one of our dogs who hadn’t really passed away, but had instead gone off to California to be a movie star, and another on-going joke about one of his dogs who we pretended could talk and claimed not to be dog so much as an overly refined human.
But there were also the off-stage observations. Trying to make sense of his sobs in the back seat of the car as we drove away, after dropping off my other older brother at the University of Wisconsin. Or overhearing my parents discussing bullying and shoes thrown from the windows of a school bus. Or watching as he fell in love, married and created a marriage with his wife. Once, during a baseball game that Rance was playing in, an adult in the stands spat out disgust when Rance missed the fly ball that had been hit deep into the outfield. But then Rance picked up that ball and threw a perfect pitch all the way to home that picked off the runner and shut up the piece of shit adult who had nothing better to do than curse out judgement at young boys who were playing a stupid game. Yes, and the indignation I felt then as a young boy is as intense now as it was then. How does it feel now, you stupid jerk, that the target of your scorn went on to get a full college scholarship, a PhD, to start a company, help raise kids that loved him, participate in an enriching marriage? How does it feel now? Being a kid brother is experiencing that protective resentment, even now, multiple decades later.
***
Being a kid brother is having a troubled friend nick-named Spidey. It was over the Christmas holidays and Spidey had called my parents’ house while I was out. Rance was there to take the call, and Spidey said that his dad was going crazy. When I got back from whereever I happened to be, Rance told me that we needed to go pick up my friend. He drove with me in the passenger seat, and he walked up to Spidey’s door with me. I can remember pulling up to Spidey’s house. It was like the fourth one that he’d been in over the preceeding years. Each one in a lower socio-economic neighborhood. Spidey’s dad wasn’t there, and he was very coy about what had been going on, but Rance told him to get in the car, come up for the night, and we’d sort things out the next day.
***
Being a kid brother is not knowing who to call, but needing to speak to someone. Once, when I called Rance, it was during a night walk. The dusk-moon rising. I was walking up a gravel road that ascends a hill to the campus observatory. My mind was like a gathering of crows in a tree, and then the settling silence that was a decision to call my older brother. Voice broken and tall grass along the periphery sliding past, I left a message that had something to do with an urgency to figure this “love thing” out.” I am sure that it was melodramatic gibberish, and as soon as I had hung up, I vaguely hoped that Rance wouldn’t call back. But he did, or rather, he texted that he as out at dinner, and told me he would call me the next day and that it would be ok.
***
Being a kid brother is pulling my car up to the curb outside his house after a 10-hour drive, and the porch light is on over the front door. When my daughters, Delphi and Lydia, were younger, they would tiredly pile out of the car. I shamble up its steps, knocking quietly so as not to wake up his wife, hoping that the dogs don’t erupt in a scrabble of barking. And there is my brother in sweatshirt and pajama bottoms, lifting himself up from a living room chair. Maye he is watching television. Maybe his kids are there in the living room with him.
“Heeeeey, big man.”
For a while Rance was cycling through the show Law and Order. If sports were happening, it would be sports. If certain cooking shows were on, that would be playing. He would ask me if I needed water, and we’d sit and chat. Night-time weary – long drives and end-of-days, but also secluded and intimate in the way that nights can be when the rest of the world is asleep. Dogs jumping up to put heads on laps. The television on. We talk about the drive. About our parents. About academia. About “my pigeons.” About our children. About his wife. Catching up. When it was soon after my divorce, it would circle to my ex-wife and maybe her folks. Usually, we’d get to a point where he would mischievously ask me if I wanted some scotch.
I can see him in a chair with his feet propped up on a foot rest, dogs around him, rounded belly, head back. We had a way of talking with each other while watching the television. It was like two things running in parallel, briefly sharing the same track, and then diverging. Eventually, though, it would be late, and if I had traveled alone, he would tell me that I was upstairs (in his oldest son’s room) or down (in the spare bedroom), and I would lug my bag and backpack into this shared other space and close the door.
There is something particular about being in someone else’s bed, turning off someone else’s light, and in the sleep-descending dark, sharing space with another’s presence – the arrangement of furniture, the feel of carpet underfoot, the posters up on the wall, the contours of the mattress, the position of the closet door stocked with hanging clothes. When you are a kid going to your first sleep over, it is unsettling, and then, with time, it ceases to register. But when it is your brother’s house – this place of memory now that he is gone –there is a sense of privilege and a sense of, not exactly comfort, but protective solidarity.
***
But more than anything, being a kid brother is going into rooms that we’ve been told we are not allowed to enter, touching things that we’ve been told not to touch. The collection of beer cans. The collection of science fiction paper backs. But especially the stereo and the records. One of the great mysteries I experienced as a kid brother was the records that my older brothers brought back from college. Here was the evidence of greater world out there. This was proof of what it meant to be older and independent. Girls and cars and midnight movies and independence. Vinyl records, album covers and liner notes. Music heard on the other side of their bedroom door.
When I graduated from high school, my two older brothers gave me a Sony Walkman as a graduation present. They had saved up the money for this themselves, and with the Walkman each of them had made me a mixed tape. When I went off to college I took the Walkman with me, and as a tried to find my way in college I would click in place those tapes and settle the foam speakers over my ears. Late at night I would restlessly walk the emptied campus streets wrapped in songs sent by friends and the songs of my brothers. My own records would be converted to cassettes, chopped up and ordered in ways meant to convey an internal meaning. Here, I took the time to piece this together in order to share it with you.
Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers: Roadrunner
Driving with a favorite song blasting on the radio. This song captures that feeling better than any song I’ve ever heard. There’s a sense of being alone, but also loving it as the landscapes go by. Night time. I’ve got so many memories of driving in a car with brothers, family and friends and the radio (tape cassette, CD, music app,…) cranking out a song that elevates the shared experience. What’s especially special about this song is that it was the first song on a tape that Rance made for me. It went along with the Sony Walkman graduation gift as if to say, “Now you get to join us on the journey to adulthood.”
Marshall Crenshaw: Someday, Someway
On the other side of that cassette Rance gave me was Marshall Crenshaw’s greatest hits. I’d never heard of Marshall Crenshaw, and never heard his music. What to make of it? His voice was so smooth and bouncy, and so different from the melancholic Pink Floyd that I was drawn to. It was like Rance was saying, “Look. C’mon. there are other possibilities. College life can actually be fun.” When I’d walk the streets of Providence, RI at 2:00 in the morning Marshall Crenshaw’s rock-a-billy callback would walk with me. And in so doing my brother Rance would be there, too, walking along with me.
New Order: Your Silent Face
Tape cassettes weren’t the only way of sharing music. Vinyl had its place, too. When I was in college, for one of my birthdays, Rance gifted me two records by New Order. He was in graduate school at this time. Once again, this was music that I had never encountered. The new wave bass. One of the great things about vinyl was the album cover art, and one of the records had a painted photograph of a bouquet of flowers for its album cover. I love bouquets of flowers simple, colorful, in a vase on a table and shadows moving across a room as a day goes by. That’s what this song makes me think of.
The B-52’s: 52 Girls
I’m repeating myself, but older siblings returning from college were like ambassadors of possibility. The B 52’s would break out into the mainstream, but when I first heard them coming out Rance’s room, well I was 12 or 13, and this song was all the glorious hyperactivity of shackles thrown off.
Sex Pistols: God Save the Queen
And speaking of shackles thrown off – let’s open the specimen trunks sent home and brush off the Sex Pistols. I can still remember how Rance would snarl out, “We mean it, man!” as this song was playing. Mind blown. Here was a music that was nothing but drive and snarl. Really? This was allowed? Heck yeah, and it’s awesome.
Rocky Horror Picture Show: Sweet Transvestite
But there was always the sense that the Sex Pistols and B 52’s and New Order were really just about having fun. Taking the piss out of the universe and groovin’ while doing it. I heard the Rocky Horror Picture soundtrack probably 10 years before I ever saw the movie. There were no visuals to go with the saxophones or “come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab. I see you shiver with antici…..pation!” It was just music. Weird, catchy, fun, and completely beyond southern bible belt comprehension, music.
The Cars: Just What I Needed
If there is one group that I associate with being a kid brother hanging around outside of my brother’s closed-door room, it is the Cars. Rance came back from college after his freshman year, and it was the Cars that I heard playing on the other side of his bedroom door. He shared a room with my older brother. I remember going in (probably uninvited) and lying on the floor next to the stereo speakers while this song played. There were record covers to illegally examine, and I remember how Rance told me that he’d seen the Cars live, and they weren’t that great. I can see that. Rance liked more energy in his live shows. Give him the Ramones over the Cars any day. But no one can argue that the first two Cars albums were riding on a wave of something new.
Snail Mail: Heat Wave
Two years before Rance died he and I went down to Chattanooga to help our parents move houses. My parents were downsizing and moving from the house they’d been in for 50 years – moving off the mountain into a smaller house closer to downtown. Rance and I stayed in a hotel, and driving back and forth we’d share different things. On the radio he was playing new music that he was into, and one of the bands was Snail Mail.
Alvvays: Ones Who Love You
The other bands was Alvvays. I have no idea where or how he came across this music. Me, I’m dependent on two college radio stations that I follow (WUTC and WVKR). But this song and Heat Wave by Snail Mail were two songs that we listened as we drove over the Market Street bridge and through the downtown gridded streets of Chattanooga, TN. Our parents’ house slowly emptying its memories, items packaged and floors swept, leaving behind a haunted architectural space.
Eddy Current Suppression Ring: I Admit My Faults
The last time that Rance and I talked music was the Thanksgiving before he died. He and his family hosted Thanksgiving that year in Arlington, VA, and I had driven down from Poughkeepsie. My oldest daughter lives in D.C. and my younger daughter flew in from San Francisco which was a fun secrete and a surprise for me. My younger brother and family had come in from New Hampshire, and my other older brother and family had flown in from Chicago. My parents had come up from Chattanooga. There was lots of gathering in the kitchen. Lots of gathering in the living room (where sports played on the television). A table covered in puzzle pieces, and board games to play. Once while Rance busied himself prepping food, and I also busied myself prepping food, we swapped music that we were listening to. Eddy Current Suppression Ring was a band that I “had to check out.”
Khruangbin: Hold Me Up
Another band was Khruangbin. “I know them!” I said as I pinched out dough for squash rolls. Grooooovy and slick like summer rain. I told Rance that he had to watch a live performance that Khruangbin had given at the Best Kept Secret music festival. This is one of my last visual memories of Rance. Him bending over a cutting board, me next to him rolling balls of dough in the palm of my hand, and sharing music we were currently in to.
***
Beastie Boys: Stand Together
“What am I listening to? Right now, I’m totally obsessed with the Beastie Boys.” That’s what I told Rance that Thanksgiving, and this is where the playlist moves from memory to offering. I was in running shape when Rance died (I’m not now), and whenever I went running I listened to the Beastie Boys. There was a gravel road that I would often run along, and that’s where it would repeatedly hit me that he was gone. It would make me angry. It would make me sad. But more than anything the memory would fill me with an intense sense of urgency. And while I had these thoughts, the Beastie Boys would be playing.
Makthaverskan: These Walls
Sometimes I hear music that I just know Rance would like. Makthaverskan is one of those groups. Swedish new wave with a debt to New Order. You heard that right, this is a Swedish pop, punk band. And they are awesome. Take the Go-Gos from the 1980s, add a hyperactive drummer, stuff it all into the tank of your car, and hit the open road. By the way, there is a hilarious mismatch between their music and the live clips that exist on the internet. Their stage presence is like a high school club – hands in pockets and a bit embarrassed.
Westkust: Weekends
More Swedish rock? Yep, more Swedish rock. Listen to those drums.
LCD Sound System: North American Scum
I came to LCD Sound System the way that I come to a lot of my new music: I heard them on a college radio station while driving. I can’t say that I’m so into overly self-aware electronica. But this song is awesome. I dare you not to nod your head while listening to this song. Yeah, it’s got those Lou Reed vibes, but grooved up for the 21st century. My favorite line? “New York’s the greatest if you get someone to pay the rent – Wahoo, North America!” It’s the wahoo. Love it.
Straight Arrows: Middleman
Anthem of kid brothers everywhere! This is us in the car driving around to pick up some of the other Tuff Boyz teammates, our Durham city-league basketball team. Play the video tape at triple speed. The neighborhood drive. The players pouring out of the car. Shot after shot clunking off of the rim. Pass after pass hitting players in the back or bouncing off of shoes. The other team dunking and dunking and dunking. Let’s go middle man!
DIIV: Under the Sun
If Rance has a weakness for punk, I’ve got a weakness for trippy rock. This is another song that I first heard on a college radio station: WUTC out of Chattanooga. It reminds me of another band that I like more, Yeti Lane. But this is a solid road trip song. Roll down the windows. Look out at fields of Kansas sun flowers rolling by.
Echo and the Bunnymen: Promise
This song is an extended wale. Is it angry? Despair? Probably both. Me as a younger kid brother asking why you left. Why’d you grow up? Why’d you leave? Why’d you die? It’s not rational, but music doesn’t have to be rational. Echo and the Bunnymen was one of those bands that were almost brilliant. Not sure what kept them back, because Promise is great. But most of their songs, I hate to say it, are movie soundtrack quality.
Wolf Alice: The Last Man on Earth
Rance’s mind was a mind that craved and absorbed data. I can’t help but wonder if in the years leading up to his death whether the world, in a sense, stopped providing him with meaningful data. Did he felt seen? I can’t help but think that I didn’t do enough. That I didn’t sufficiently… that I wasn’t there somehow. That I didn’t interrogate something. That I didn’t let him know that he wasn’t superfluous. That he was needed and necessary and that there was so much more that needed doing.
Phoebe Bridgers: Smoke Signals
Night walks. There was a pub that I would head over to write. A Cheers kind of place where you can be known and anonymous at the same time. There was the elderly woman who would sit with her drink, counting and recounting bills. There was the solitary bearded man who wore a big cowboy hat. He’d sip a single beer at the bar. Me, I was the guy sitting in the corner at a table with scribbling away at pads of paper. It’s where this piece of writing first started, actually. It’s where I went the night that you died thinking that I could write us out of this dream. This song was one that was playing as I walked the cold night streets back home. I liked the image of smoke signals being sent of as an offering, as communication sent from an unseen person off in the distance. It’s what these songs are – trash burned on the washed-up beach of living.
The Cure: I Can Never Say Goodbye
I hate in a way to end with heartbreak. On the other hand, you’ll be amused to hear that I didn’t even hear the lyrics of this song until I had listened to it 10 or more times. I normally don’t hear lyrics. It’s like face blindness. Songs are a gestalt of instruments for me. Anyway, it was just last summer, and I had committed myself to going up for full professor. There was a one-month push at the end in which I was trying to get out one more paper, trying to put together a teaching statement and portfolio, trying to put together a personal statement that felt authentic. It was multiple weeks of working until two or three in the morning, and during that time I had the Cure on an endless loop. Also, whether I wanted to or not, somehow the idea of going up for full had become entangled in the idea of filling your shoes. You who had been a full professor. The successful head of a research group. And me the happy-to-go-along. So, I was going to try and feel urgency for once. I was going to try and step up and fill some sort of void. …as if that were going to be possible. But as we know, these things aren’t rational. The story coalesces and the magnetic fields of our emotions align the compass. Apparently, this song is written about death of Robert Smith’s own brother, and when I did finally hear the lyrics they brought me up short:
From out the cruel and treacherous night
Something wicked this way comes
To steal away my brother’s life
Something wicked this way comes
I can never say goodbye
I’m not going to lie, when I did finally learn that I was going to be promoted to full, it was a complicated feeling. It wasn’t me that deserved it, after all. It was you. “Come on now,” I hear you say. “That’s survivor’s guilt.” I know. You’re right.
***
A week after Rance’s funeral, I sat down and wrote him a letter. It went like this.
Dear Rance,
It is just over a week since the service that was held in your honor. It was a hot, sunny D.C. day, and before the service we gathered – the immediate family – with the minister in an antechamber. There was choking back tears, and hags, and attempts to stay upbeat, to stay “pulled together. You would have done the same, and surrounded by this familial love – because it was as simple as that – this cluster of people in a church antechamber, a pitcher of cold water beside a bouquet of flowers on a central table. You would have appreciated the simple calling that brought us together just as once you stood up to give remarks at grandpa Pfeffer’s funeral. You stood up and went to the pupil and then with reasonable kindness spoke of grandpa’s hat. How for a young boy it meant accompanying your grandfather to the farm to ride beside him in the tractor, to stand beside him feeding the cattle, to be there helping stack the hay bales. You spoke about how, as you grew older, that hat came to represent the man, himself, and the constancy of love that he had bestowed up your own life. In the pew back then, still a graduate student, a newly minted young father, feeling deep-down like a mess, I remember looking up to you delivering these words and being so proud of you – hearing in those words that you articulated about grandpa an echo of the feelings that I felt towards you, my older brother.
It is just over a week since your service, and the NY Knicks are playing the Pacers in the NBA quarterfinals. I know, right? The Knicks. You would appreciate the bar where I am writing these words. You would appreciate the shouting and whooping and clapping of the knuckleheads who are here on a Wednesday night. If you were here and we were having a conversation, your attention would periodically be pulled to the television. You would be letting out an “Aw, c’mon!” along with everyone else, and if, instead of this bar, we were at your home, Matthew and Christian would be having a running dialogue with you about this or that player and how much they sucked; this or that coach or owner. Rachel might be there, attentive while on her phone, taking it all in this dynamic between her two brothers and her father.And when it was time, the three of them: brother, brother and sister – son, son, and daughter, the three of them stood up in the pew and walked to the front of the church to share some words in honor of their grief, which is to say their love for you. In your absence, you were there of course. Matthew mentioned your patience (except with your laptop!) – your being a helpful sounding board on homework that extended from grade school to graduate school. Rachel spoke of your empathy and ability to be moved to tears by efforts made despite of and in spite of the odds. She said, like a teenage girl you watched A Walk to Remember every day for what seemed like an entire year. And Christian described the conversations he had with you – questions about a friend, game strategies on the way to basketball games, texted questions about taxes. They miss you, my brother, but you would have been moved by how they have transformed your efforts and example into the sinews of their own adulthoods.
***
The final song on a mixed tape is tricky one, but here goes.
Late July humidity lingers in the night air so that the paper lifts with the forearm when the pen shifts. I raise a hand to greet a passerby who is on the other side of the storefront window. He is walking his dog – baseball cap and cargo shorts. There is the splash of a street light. The occasional passing of a car cars like the drip of a faucet. I keep coming here to try and connect with my brother — my brother he is still sought by me here. Not a casting of bones, or a question posed to an Ouija board. No, nothing like that. But still, a desire to pull out some sort of pattern, some sort of melody, some sort of breathing that breeches finality. I can think to myself, “Oh, he would really like a place like this,” or “he would find the old cowboy at the bar funny” and imagine his laughter. I can recall a song out of the blue – pull up the memory like a tape once clicked into place in a Walkman. It was this surround that I took for granted. I know that now. That interstitial anchoring of self to meaning – we are brothers and within those contingencies there is a particular kind of understanding.
But I have been having this sense up here where the Hudson River a winds like pleat in the cloth of the valley. A passing over that is again felt walking along a night-cracked sidewalk. The feeling is something like this: that if on the first day I sought to cast Rance a life-line – something that he could grab hold of in order to pull himself back – now, now there is a sense of sending him on his way. Not forgotten. No, the wound is still raw. More the seasonal migration heralded by winter. Heralded by a hoped-for spring. Rance died and exited a body days before Easter. Alone. There is a phone call and the world bifurcates. A before and an after, and a brother standing as if exiting a bus on a country road. Maybe he hears cicadas. Maybe he doesn’t know why he is there. But I know that he wouldn’t panic. My brother, I never knew him to panic. He sets out to find help. He furrows his brow in some small amount of irritation. But dwelling isn’t his vibe. As he walks, he thinks of his children. He thinks of his wife. He worries over his parents. He thinks of and smiles in remembrance of an episode from a K-drama or South Park. He worries a bit over a work project he’s working on. He laughs about the randomly hyper personalities of his dogs — their pillow-humping, their now-love / now-hate towards their stuffed toys. He doesn’t question it. He accepts. It is a problem to solve. Though I don’t know if this accurate. Maybe he waits until he gets hungry and then sets out to find some food.
Rance loved good food. If there was a place that served good fried chicken, South American chicken, sushi, Ethiopian, steaks, Korean barbecue, onion rings, donuts… he’d know about it. He was a one-man Yelp. My brother did have a way of getting stuck up in his head, up in his brain, but he loved the particular, the unique, and the authentic. He traveled to Japan and India and Australia and Germany and brought back stories of personalities that made him laugh and inevitably foods that he could recommend. He loved the ribs that he could pull together on his grill. He loved his pour-over coffee with the barest pinch of salt added to the coffee grounds.It’s what we younger brothers do: collect and organize the specimens that our older brothers provide to help us make sense of things. To help us understand the world that is out there – that terra incognita of unclaimed mysteries. Rance wasn’t perfect, but I never wanted or needed him to be perfect. I only ever wanted him to be exactly what he was – my older brother. In that role he was perfect. He carried the flag well.
