insearchofbud

Morning.  Phone rang.  I didn’t get up.  [sleep]  Phone rang.  I answered.  My sister Carol asked me over to Jon’s.  I found clothes, took medicine, drank coffee, hefted my sister’s Christmas present. A homemade footstool.  

As I scurried, I envisioned myself behaving like her.  Her chubby feet going this way and that.  I hurry to get out of the house.  I was faster, younger.  I have gotten fussy about socks.  Ones that match.  I remember thinking, these socks match!  They were blue.

Okay.  My sister is ten years older than me.  And always good to me.  There, I said it.  It’s a duty to honor one’s sister.  Or do I mean it’s an honor to recognize one’s duty to one’s sister? Oh, she used to spank me as a child, reprimand me sometimes, but altogether she has been good to me.  Sisterly.  I do love her! Well, sometimes she is a trial!  But I love her!  She has bipolar disorder!! Or had. But not since she contracted non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She said her mental illness vanished. Apparently.

The first time, 70 years ago, when I discovered that I had a sister, our Daddy yelled at her to wash the dishes.  I thought I saw fire came from his throat!  What a temper!  He was magnificently a college professor and an artist of the first water.  In fact, our mother used that expression, “of the first water.”  He died when we were still children, but his memory looms large, as they say.  My sister says she thinks his anger had to do with him having bipolar disorder.  Who can disagree? She said his mania manifested as a bad temper.  

Carol, on the other hand, has mania that showed up as generosity.  She bought things with her credit card.  Nice things, like handmade rugs and porcelain.  Mania.  She told me she loved her mania,  She said she earned it.  With depression!  Hypomania, I corrected her.  She agreed.  Hypomania.

In their teens, back in Missoula in the 1950s, my sister and her friends played with me as though I were a doll.  To them I was, because they were ten when I was born. Of course, I liked it.  They swung me around, tickled me, took me places.  I remember holding onto a pair of their hands on the sidewalk and they’d leap me along, by lifting me up as they ran.  I pedaled my feet in the air, then took a couple steps, then pedaled again. Giant stride, style.

Oh, they bathed me too, but I didn’t like it.  I mean, the teenage girls didn’t hang out with me in the bathroom or look at me, at my privates, but they made me bathe after I’d been up on Mount Sentinel getting infested with ticks.  Bathing was a huge inconvenience to a kid like me, but the girls had wanted me to do the correct things.  For health.  They cut no corners where I was concerned.

At Jon’s, my sister was laying on a recliner when I got there.  No.  I remember that she met me at Jon’s front door, but then she retreated to the recliner.  She told me about an author she liked, whose name I can’t remember.  

More importantly to me, she told me about her dog that she had had for only about a week, I guess, before she got rid of it.  It had a name, like “Skippy,” or something. 

Carol said she spent $400 on Skippy.  Her psychiatrist prescribed her a lapdog.  A service dog.  So she went to the pound in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, her home town, and paid $160 to have the small dog spayed and vaccinated.  And to pay the pound fee.  I forget what breed it was.  She said it weighed about 12 pounds.

All was well.  The dog cuddled her.  It liked to sleep on her bed.  It did all of the affectionate things a dog can do.  In turn, Carol bought it a kennel, a bed, some food, a dish to hold the food, and other appurtenances, like a leash.  How could this have run up a bill to $400?  Well, now you know something about my sister.  She exaggerates.  I used to call her a liar.  She tore into me a few times, but she now takes it in stride.

What happened?  Her service dog shit on her rug time after time.  She said she walked her new dog, did all of the right things.  The dog did not shit on her $3000 Persian rug, but she had to pay to have her apartment carpet cleaned.  Finally, she got rid of her dog.  Sent it back to the pound.  Carol said she no longer even considers getting a lap dog, a service dog.  She wants no dog because she travels too much.

My sister has had a long, good life.  I think she has, anyway.  At 18, she married a law school student fresh out of the Army.  I was in the 2nd grade.  Four years later they had their first child, and I became an uncle.  I loved that role.  It meant I could boss him around and buy him candy and show him magic tricks.  Today, I’m thinking that’s why he feels resentment.  I don’t know.  I’m not sure he remembers,but he keeps me at arm’s length.

Carol had baby after baby.  Seven in all with her husband, the law student, then lawyer.  (She lost the 2nd, stillborn.) Carol’s houses kept getting bigger and bigger.  My brother Tom tried to keep up with her and keep her houses painted.  In turn, Carol took care of my brother.  He had schizophrenia.  Perhaps bipolar disorder as well?  She and I helped Tom get disability insurance payments.

Then Carol’s husband started bouncing his secretary and Carol’s marriage ended.  On her own, she moved first to Arizona where she scraped out a living in Wickenberg, teaching and tending bar.  Then she married a jolly bearded gravel-pit owner and they moved to Alaska.  There she taught school until she retired with a good pension.  Her second husband ran away, so she dumped him.  Both of Carol’s husbands have since died.  She is a double widow.

Here’s what my sister ended up with:  she gets a generous retired teacher’s pension from Alaska.  Her six children are all successful adults.  Two are lawyers; another, the oldest and arguably the smartest, is an excellent house painter; her youngest has a PhD in biochemistry and lives in Berkeley, California; Jon is a mental health counselor and finally, her one daughter is the mother of five and has a fabulous job raising funds for some kind of worthy outfit.

Carol has about a dozen grandchildren.  A couple of great-grandchildren.  And one brother.  Me.

She still lives in Gering, a city near Scotts Bluff.

I’ll try to be brief. The outdoor temp was mid 90s, forest fire smoke made the evening sun reddish orange. Gunther, P. and I needed to walk around the block. G. needed to poop after about the first 100 feet. He made a healthy pile, easy to pick up with an inverted bag. As I tied the usual knot, P. offered to carry it the rest of the way. Why? I asked.

“It’s so hot, the poop will make the neighbor’s garbage bin stink,” she answered, gesturing toward several trash bins. “I want to put it in our own trash,” she said.

“I’ll carry it home,” I assured her.

Midway around the block, G. pooped again. I pulled a second bag from my pocket to grab it, to carry it home. By this time we were on our approach to our house. G. hunched down for a third B movement.

All was well until I felt a mosquito drilling into my shin. I looked. It was a deerfly, or perhaps a small horsefly. In any case it was biting my skin. I knew I could easily kill the fly by swatting with my left hand, which had the bag from Gunther’s first movement.

As soon as I swung at the fly, I discovered, too late, that the bag would split when it struck my shin.

For Henry, on starting at the University in Missoula next week.

August 14, 2024

My grandson, Henry Roberts, starts the University of Montana next week.  I bet he has strong emotions, but I can’t know until I ask him.  [Meanwhile, phoned, no answer, left him a message].

I don’t know. Therefore, I speak. (Yes, I believe this fits in with wisdom from the Tao Te Ching.)

Dear Henry,

I’m in Billings at home. Tomorrow we drive to Missoula. You and some of your family members will meet us at the airport there. I’m 75. You are 18.

I’m looking across our front room to the dining room table with four boxes. Two of the boxes, including one 24″x24″x21,” contain computer equipment. The others, bedding.  An extra-long quilt is folded, atop the rest.  One box was too large and heavy for P. to lift.  Our plan:  to carry the boxes to Missoula in the back of our camper van.  And reminisce, no doubt, about moving to Missoula.

These boxes trigger several memories of my own journey to Missoula in 1967, of how I felt about leaving home to live in an acne-infested dormitory with filthy socks, stinky shoes, Old Spice aftershave, Irish Spring soap and dandruff. I didn’t savor the aroma then.

Initially, I was eager to move out of my mother’s house in Dillon, just the same as Henry is moving from his mother’s house in Poway, California.  How does he feel about that? 

I wanted a new lifestyle.  I wanted to be an artist.  Maybe I could change the world for the better?  I was young.  My desires were based on an obscure feeling that I had been misinformed by adults whom I could not trust. 

Looking back, I see clearly that I was misinformed.  In my high school years our American history teacher told us a sanitized account of African slavery and omitted that as the inevitable cause of the Civil War.  He didn’t dwell on the differences between the Union and the Confederacy. We were told to memorize dates and battles. History was glossed over. The Union and Confederacy may have signed a formal truce, but the differences and animosity remain even now.

He told us that slavery was generally good for the Black people. He said we lived in the best country on earth, all the while Blacks were being beaten and sprayed with firehoses and bitten by attack dogs in Alabama. Ghettos of racial minorities exist in most large cities, a truth so obvious as to be invisible.

He concentrated on the Communist threat, instead.

He compared the grim realities of the Communist central planning system to the abundance of the American Capitalist system (for white people). 

My own high school years, 1963-1967, were the important American Civil Rights years of Martin Luther King and others, but they were not acknowledged as such at our high school, or at the Methodist Church services my friends and I attended, or in the Dillon Tribune.  This is what I mean by misinformation.  

My mother had a subscription to Time magazine and the Butte-Anaconda Standard newspaper.  The former told about the struggle for civil rights in places like Alabama and Georgia, as did the television news.  The places described seemed far removed from Montana.  The latter had articles about racial equality, usually buried in the back by the obituaries.  I remember trying desperately hard to understand the articles on the front pages about the war in Vietnam, but they were too hard for me.  Even my older brother Tom had to admit they were indecipherable and badly written.

I had a skewed vision of the world, a lack of understanding of my place in it.  But it was time to leave my mother’s house, travel to Missoula, move into a college dormitory.

Of course, my feelings were mixed.  I wanted freedom.  I wanted to learn the truth about the world.  I wanted to hang out with cool friends and enjoy the new music!  I wanted to meet girls!

I wasn’t prepared for my new world within the smelly dormitory.  A world without even one cool friend, just a know-it-all room mate from New Jersey who recently got out of a military school.

My girlfriend in Dillon had broken up with me, gave me the boot, a couple weeks before.  

I was painfully lonely.  Yes, I looked up many of the people I used to know in Missoula.  None of them panned out.  None were “cool” friends.  Most of the people in the dorm seemed confident, self-assured, purposeful.  But they were “others.” I watched them swarm past from one building to another at hourly intervals.  Stop, I thought.

Even frightened by what I thought was an impossibility:  to learn the truth about the world.  My world.  I looked vainly for a glimmer.

As overwhelming as it all seemed at the time, looking back I realize the interminable loneliness really lasted only what?  A week or two.  I began catching glimpses of people I thought I’d like to see more of. These invisible attractions proved important during the ensuing months. Ensuing decades, lifetimes.

Sincerely,

Daniel Struckman