family

My Brother


I hesitate to call him CrazyBrother now in light of my sister’s, DNOS, call to me this morning.

CB called our mother at about 3A.M. their time and told her he was heading to hell. He’d taken nearly all of his pills and just wanted to let her know. Mom is not usually good in a crisis but this time she called the local police for the number of emergency services in San Francisco.

By the time she got through to 911 there, he was already on his way to the hospital. It seems he had called 911 before he called her.

DNOS was in tears when she called me and I was/am my usual calm and stoic in the face of “death”. Useful? Perhaps. But not cathartic and sometimes you need the latter more.

Rob reminds me that CB wants help or he wouldn’t have called 911 or mom. Because he is mentally ill, it’s really hard to assess just how much “choice” he has. My days on the widow board with those widowed by suicide inclines me to the politically correct answer of “he can’t help himself”, but I wonder.

Regardless, he is safe and on 72hour hold and maybe he will finally be properly evaluated and get help for his long standing problems.

Somedays I wonder who I would have been had I been an only child.

Updating My Dear Readers


Looks like my sixth revision is the charmed one and will go off in the post today. I hacked about 600 words from it. It was very heavy with exposition, mainly backstory. The original was not part of a series of short stories though now, I think, it is on the verge of being a novel.

Sometimes characters and situations just spring to life and take over.

Life in the non-drenched corner of Iowa is still precarious. It seems my youngest sister, her son and her son’s dad (who is not my ex-brother in law despite the fact that I grant in law status to my brother’s ex  – and that is such a long and trailer parkish story it should get a blog post of it’s own, so remind me someday) descended on my folk’s home because nephew wants to move back in.

Quick backstory. My sister was living in a hovel with nephew. At his 15 month check-up it was discovered that he had high lead levels. Not a surprise. Their living arrangements redefined the word “dump”. Living in a parked car would have been a step up.

So I (yes it was me and my parents NEVER let me forget that) convinced the parental units to let BabySis and Nephew move in. It was not supposed to be a permanent arrangement.

They just moved out at the beginning of the month (not quite 13 years later).

BabySis is in Wisconsin with her boyfriend to whom she has been engaged for the last six years. He is the one who knocked her up the first time back during her junior year of high school. Their daughter mercifully escaped being raised by them and last we knew was quite happy with her adoptive family. She is twenty-two. Boyfriend took up with BabySis again after a hiatus of sixteen years. During his wanderings he actually had dealings with my CrazyBrother in California. CrazyBrother called home when he spotted Boyfriend and offered to have friends “take care of him”. My parents declined. See what happens when you are good Catholics?

Boyfriend is a drunk. He has lost his driver’s license so many times that he has given up driving and rides a lawnmower to his job on a dairy farm. Although he has managed to get arrested driving drunk on that too. They can’t prohibit you from exercising your right to ride a LawnBoy however.

Nephew went to live with his father. He was excited and really wanted to go but is homesick now and forced his dad to drive him the 70 some miles to my folks to try and convince them to let him move home.

This is what Nephew does when he is living with my parents. Anything he fucking wants.

So BabySis, BioDad and Nephew proceeded to shatter the calm of my parents home with a knock down that lasted a couple of hours, reduced my mom to tears and guaranteed that dad would get upset and short of breath to the point where he was needing O2.

Fun times. I am so looking forward to next week.

I only discovered the doings because I called to check up on them and to let them know that CrazyBrother was physically okay. After I hung up, I called DNOS and told her what was going on. She headed over to the folks immediately to make sure that Nephew went home with BioDad.

Nephew is home with BioDad. BabySis is home with LawnMowerMan. All is once again on the functioning side of dysfunction on the WestEnd.

Did I mention that I finished my story and am sending it back to the magazine?

Well then, next there’s the packing – overpacking really. How do some people manage to travel with just a suitcase? One freaking suitcase?

I have three right now on the bed and two are full. This will not do.

So, packing. Blogging. Basking in the glow of a finished story that just might be published. And relieved that we will not get to my parents’ and find BabySis and Nephew. Just that damn bird he left behind. He named it Princess and then it got the other bird pregnant.

Five more days. Then I could be live blogging all this. Better than reality tv.

Number One Son


In every family there is a child whose designation is that of number one son. Girl or boy. Oldest, middle or youngest. Someone comes to earn this title over years of demonstrating grace under pressure, reliability, common sense and a sense of duty to those tied to him or her by the accident we know as “family”.

I have written a bit before about my father. He has a progressively terminal lung disease that has been stable for the last year but he is nearly eighty-one and his health is failing despite the relatively hopeful prognosis on the lung front from his pulmonary doctor in the spring.

He is a lucky man. He has nearly died at least three times in the last two and a half years. There is really no medical rationale for the fact that he has survived this long. And in my opinion, making the “old” half of old age is an accomplishment for which not all of us will be allowed bragging rights.

I knew it was coming and it still stabbed me a good one. Read Full Article