The Jim and Dan Stories Revisited: Chapter 11
The last few weeks of my brother’s lives played out like the conclusion of a dramatic Hollywood script, a plot with a twist. The road trip they took, two weeks before the first death, became the beginning of a larger journey, the one in which they would both leave this world.
I have decided to share my book, The Jim and Dan Stories, chapter by chapter, to have it available online, since it is no longer available in print. The book, which was used in a Radford University grief and loss class for counseling students, is part an account of my brothers last weeks and their 2001 deaths a month apart, part memoir of growing up together on the South Shore of Boston in a large Irish Catholic family of 11, and part a chronicle of coping with the first six months of life-altering grief. I plan to post a chapter every Wednesday until the book is done. I added a new side bar category “Jim and Dan Stories” on the blog (to the right) for easy access to chapters which will amount to the whole book eventually.
11.
Hobbits and Orphans
Writing these stories has been a journey, one in which I don’t always know where I’m going. When my sons were young, I read all the books in the Lord of the Rings series aloud to them. The hobbits in the stories would often set out on foot for long journeys. Often, there was a river they would follow in their life and death adventures. I seem to have a river too, an internal flow that my writing follows. And there is a lot of walking.
On this day I was walking with my friend Katherine. We stopped at the beaver pond to rest, before heading back to my house. I was having a hard time stopping my mind from racing and my body from moving. I was even having trouble making eye contact with her. I watched the water fall over the dam and tried to be present. I told her about my parents plan to visit in the spring. My mother still had an open-ended plane ticket to use, one of the ones that Dan had purchased for her because she was part of his “liver transplant team.” My parents had visited me several times on the way to or from my dad’s veteran re-unions, but that was back when my kids were still young. I was excited about them coming now that I wouldn’t be so pre-occupied with the needs of my kids, and because I hadn’t thought they would come again. I wanted to take my dad to see the new WWII D-day memorial in Bedford, Virginia.
“It’s very special that you can still do that with them and that you know the importance of it,” Katherine said.
Now I looked her in the eye, knowing she, like many of my friends, no longer had her parents. “Thank you for reminding me of that,” I said. I liked the idea of feeling grateful for what I had rather than sad for what I didn’t.
Later at home, the computer wouldn’t let me online. “I think the hard drive might be fragmented,” Joe said. Remembering my ride home from New York years ago with the Mohawk woman, I wondered if computers were physical manifestations of ourselves like our cars supposedly are.
Fragmented, I liked that word and wrote it down. I felt thankful for the simplicity of pens and paper and for the ability to walk, like I had that day with Katherine, using my own two feet. I felt grateful for the instinctive flow within me that was guiding me while writing these stories. It was a flow I was learning to trust.
Some Things Don’t Change All That Much
“Dear Abby, How can I get rid of freckles?” was my first published piece, written sometime during my pre-teen years. But my interest in writing really started several years later in the bedroom I shared with Sherry, when I read her my first attempts at poetry. We also used makeshift microphones to sing along with the Bob Dylan songs playing on our green hi-fi stereo. Bob Dylan’s lyrics woke me up to language more than anything in school ever did.
As teenagers, our bedrooms were our sanctuaries, places we could make our own. I covered the floral print wallpaper I had outgrown with purple tissue paper from the boutique I worked at in Boston. I pasted cut-out characters from “A Yellow Submarine” and “Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club” on it.
Jim and Dan were in the room across from us playing Jim’s record albums, “The Doors,” “The Kinks,” or maybe “The Four Tops.” Their room never changed all that much; it wasn’t as creative as ours was. Jim’s weather gauges hung on the wall, along with a BB gun rack and some sports team pennants. Their bunk beds were in the corner across from the large wide bureau, the one that Dan and Sherry tried to sleep in once.
They were supposed to be in their beds asleep when Dan got his bright idea. They took out all the clothes and put in pillows and blankets. It would be fun, Dan told Sherry, like camping. Dan, who was seven then, promised Sherry, who was five, that he wouldn’t shut the drawer on her. He got her settled in and then climbed in himself in the drawer just above hers. They weren’t in there long when the whole thing fell forward, crashing down with the sound of an explosion, which brought my dad upstairs in a hurry. The whole time Dan was facing my father’s wrath, he was trying to tell him that Sherry was still in the drawer. Dan was worried about Sherry because he promised he wouldn’t shut the drawer, and he knew she was afraid of the dark.
We made collages for Jim and Dan’s wakes from photographs taken of them over the years. In most of the pictures, Dan was holding a baby or had his arm around a niece or nephew. We knew the grown-up Dan loved kids, but what really surprised us were the pictures of Dan when he was younger. In almost every one, he had his arm around an even younger brother or sister. In one telling photo, Dan, who was maybe three, was sitting next to my mother on the porch with his arm stretched out touching the baby (Sherry) on her lap. He had a big grin on his face.
Dan was a lover and a champion of the lesser. And Sherry was always enthusiastic about my poems. It occurred to me recently how she’s playing that role again. I’ve been emailing each story to her as I finish, and she has been urging me to go on.
Some things don’t change all that much. It’s ironic how we spend so many years trying to grow up, only to become who we already are.
School Daze
Dan had friends with names like Deeko, Arnie, and Burkie. He wasn’t a great student but wasn’t a trouble maker either. Although my mother did get a phone call from our school principal once complaining about Dan’s long hair, which wasn’t suppose to touch the ear, back in the day when boys had to wear collared shirts and girls weren’t allowed to wear pants. She let the school know that Danny’s hair was fine the way it was. She also intervened on Jim’s behalf once when the school took his weather charts (not part of any class they were teaching), and she helped him get them back.
I don’t remember how Jim did in school. He was four years ahead of me. But I know school was sometimes a struggle for Dan, especially high school note taking. He would often fall asleep, tired from dish washing at Ye Old Mill Grille Restaurant the night before, or just bored and shut down from the overuse of language, the auditory style of most school teaching. Learning disabilities weren’t recognized then, and most dyslexics got labeled as “lazy.”
Dyslexia is a catch-all word similar to the word “colic.” There are many reasons for and versions of both. Babies with colic are made uncomfortable by their diet, the way students with dyslexia are made uncomfortable with standardized testing and force-fed scheduled teaching. A person with dyslexia has average or above average intelligence. They tend to excel in some areas and struggle in others, which create gaps of varying degrees in their abilities. Some dyslexics have trouble with language, some with math (dyscalculia), and some with both. Most dyslexics are kinesthetic, which means they learn best by doing and not by sitting and listening, which is most of what school is about.
I did well in school, although I hid the fact that I got my left and right mixed up, that I counted on my fingers, and couldn’t tell time till I was nearing junior high. My dad thought I would grow up to be a doctor, that’s how smart I was. I knew that trying to solve complicated math problems made me feel like I was going to have a seizure, but it wasn’t until algebra class that the gig was up. I had dyslexia (dyscalculia) too and just hadn’t known it.
One year in elementary school Dan really had trouble. He was falling behind and needed extra help from home with all of his subjects, his teacher told my parents at a PTA meeting. The teacher meant well but didn’t understand what it was like for my parents, both working and raising nine kids. They tried to help Dan as much as they could, or they got an older sibling to, but tutoring wasn’t exactly on the schedule in our house. Yet, at the next PTA meeting, the same teacher congratulated them. She had never seen such improvement in a child and thanked them for all of their efforts. My parents were happy to hear the news but were also confused; they hadn’t done that much to help Dan. Not long after that, the mystery was solved when Dan’s teacher discovered he was using my old workbook. Remember, I was smart then and just a year ahead of Dan. When he found my workbook in a closet, he thought he had it made.
Pretty smart of Dan, we later thought. Dyslexics learn to be inventive, like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or Albert Einstein, all of whom were considered to have been dyslexic. The school didn’t agree though, that Danny was smart, he got held back that year.
Volunteer Plants
“I’d rather cut my arm off,” Jim said when he was drafted, “than go into the Army!” I can understand why he said that when I look at the photograph of him standing in uniform at his base in Korea. He looked to be around 16 years old! (And he wasn’t much older than that.)
Everyone knew Jim was a late bloomer, hitting rocks into the bay while other boys his age were dating girls. His nickname was “Farmer” because we had a big garden, and one of Jimmy’s chores was to take care of it. He had cages of wild snakes. Sometimes he put the snakes down his shirt just to make his younger sisters squirm. Or he set up miniature roads and towns in the dirt and then made hurricanes by spraying them full blast with the hose. Jim was uprooted by the Army before he felt ready. Maybe it did help him grow up, but it also was his introduction into drugs, which were easy to get in the Army in the late 1960’s.
An herbalist friend that I know never pulls up weeds in her yard. “Weeds, such as dandelions, are really herbs, and the volunteer ones are real gifts. They choose where they want to grow, wild and uncultivated,” she told me. Sort of like us growing up, I thought. We were never pot bound or over-protected. We had the whole of The Village from Stony Beach to Pemberton to spread out our roots. We were safe in our small hometown.
I remember a neighbor who once called up my mother to express her fear of us playing on the sea wall, a wall of large granite boulders with nooks and crannies that were perfect for forts. My mother was exasperated. No one had been hurt. What did the neighbor want her to do? How do you control nine kids on the loose? And do you really want to?
My mother didn’t have the time back then for friends, or hobbies, or to worry about her kids when they were happily playing. We never had a houseplant or flowers in the yard the whole time growing up on Spring Street. Even the garden, which was my dad’s project, didn’t last long. He worked full time and as the kids got older no one wanted to work in it. Ironically, my mother’s yard today is known to slow traffic, as people riding by admire her flower gardens, window boxes, and hanging pots. I’m glad she finally has the time for an interest of her own.
When my mother, my sister Kathy, and I went to Nova Scotia in June we were gone for four days. My father was supposed to take care of my mother’s plants, but when we returned several were dead. It had been hot, and most people don’t realize how much water potted plants need, unlike hardy volunteers. My father pleaded innocence. “Maybe I watered them too much,” he tried to suggest.
When I was staying in Dan’s apartment, I received a letter from Joe with a picture of him on our porch at home. He, knowing how some of my mother’s plants didn’t live through our trip to Nova Scotia, was holding a watering can up to one of my hanging baskets. He was wearing a blue ribbon that said, “Best Husband of the Year.”
As much as I love Joe and appreciated his humor, my mind stayed consumed with Dan. (I did keep the picture, though, to share with others when moods needed to be lightened.) I looked around the room appreciating the warm surroundings that Dan had created. He had beautiful houseplants, a fish tank, and, of course, his cat. I wondered how they were going to survive without him. I thought about the poem I wrote after Jimmy’s death…I stay up too late…trying to figure out your death…the exact location…the final moment…the terror and the grace…As if the answers could provide a cure…or gather up what has been shaken…Like clods of earth pulled up and flung…from our childhood foundations…we are broken.
Hawaiian Shirts and Wizard Hats
“What’s that 70’s show that Tom Selleck starred in? It starts with an M. The one where he always wore Hawaiian shirts,” I asked Joe.
Joe is use to my strange questions. “…How do you spell Pterodactyl? With a P, you must be kidding!”
Jimmy and Danny didn’t look like brothers. Dan was stocky like William Shatner and cute in that Tom Selleck 70’s way. Whereas, Jim was tall and slender with sharp classic features, more like Pierce Brosnan or a handsome David Brenner. Sherry thinks Dan was like John Mellencamp and Jim was like Jackson Browne.
If this were a fairy tale and Dan was the golden son, then Jimmy would be the wizard, not so drawn to beauty and chivalry but to storms, lightening, and the elemental mysteries. I could easily picture him in a wizard’s hat with a crescent moon and stars on it, hunched over his charts with his Scorpion intensity like an alchemist of the weather. Even his death, which was so unlike Dan’s, was like a wizard’s vanishing act.
“Maverick?” No. “McGiver?” No. “Mannix?” No. “Matlock?” No. It was Sherry who finally answered my question. “It was Magnum, PI,” she said. “Yes, that’s it! I shouted. “And Danny wore Hawaiian shirts too.”
_________Read Chapters 1 – 10 HERE.
