But I don’t know for sure.
And I won't.
***
And I’ve thought a lot lately about how I had lost touch with her there at the end, as she pulled in her resources and drew almost exclusively upon her inner circle. I wasn’t really in that inner circle anymore, and hadn’t been for a while. I was still family and all, but I had been going through my own thing, whatever that was. And she had been going through hers. And though we really enjoyed seeing each other when we saw each other, I lived four states over and she’d had my mom to help her through it, and she had faded considerably there at the end, anyway.
And then, of course, I had been me.
And so we’d lost touch a little.
***
But I loved her. And I miss her.
***
It wasn’t only that, of course. I should say that we’d had little moments in our adulthood when everything had seemed golden and lovely, but those moments had become fewer and farther between in the last several years as the family generally had just run into some tough spots. And by tough spots I mean all along the way – all up and down the line. And I think my sister and I, and all of us, really, for that matter, all up and down the line, had felt just felt a little bit shell-shocked. And so we had lost touch.
***
But I was also thinking, just now, this night, about how there was this one time when my sister and I had been in each other’s inner circles.
I was thinking about my childhood.
***
You remember that time back when the world was new? I was thinking about how it was in that place. In that time when my sister was probably the most important person in the world to me. The period in which I was learning the world, the time of pre-language… before she was taken away and made into a girl and I was taken away and made into a boy… in that inbetween time.
When we were just beings.
***
I was thinking about how that period had turned me into the man that I am.
***
I mean, when I was growing up, I lived out on the edge of town, and for better or worse was dropped down the chimney of a family that had this wonderful, but insular, feeling to it. And we moved to the frontiers of town just as our forebears had once moved to the edges of the frontier… so that my dad – who fancied himself a Renaissance cowboy – could have more space.
To be left alone.
Because we wanted to be left alone. There’s that, for sure. But, of course, there was more to it than that. For example, there was also the fact that we were just an insular kind of people by our nature. You know what I mean?
We were a little clannish.
***
Maybe you should look that up before you read further.
***
Anyway, you read my family history and there were lots of brothers of one family mixing with daughters of another family and then switching back in the next generation. Most of it was because they were all really poor… since dirt farming didn’t pay particularly well… and the rest of it was because they didn’t get off the farm often enough to know many girls except the ones on the next farm over.
It wasn’t, of course, quite that bad.
It never is, of course... But it was bad enough.
***
There were lots of kissing cousins in my family as it came down through the ages. I don’t think anyone ever showed up sporting six fingers, but that was only because there was someone in each generation, in each family, in each sub-clan, that was appointed – perhaps even self-appointed – as the keeper of the clan secrets. And with that person there was accorded great trust and responsibility… for keeping track of family genaeologies and other elements of family business… so that everybody could know just who was far enough down the genetic chain that it’d be OK if you wanted to date’em.
That is if you’d wanted to. Of course you didn’t have to want to. But just if you did.
***
And my grandma was the one in my family who kept the running tallies in our collective heads regarding which ones were OK and which ones weren’t and which ones had uncles who were no account bastards that still owed them money from that time in ’57 that they bought ‘em that blue Chevrolet.
My grandma was the one who kept track of that sort of thing in my family.
***
She was, I guess, like everybody’s grandma. Except that she also read the farmer’s almanac to find when the best month to get pregnant was.
You see what I mean?
She was fucking old school.
***
It actually wasn’t even that bad though. Not exactly HBO’s Big Love or nothing… but I will say that sometimes when I see that show… it feels like – except for all the sister-wiving – a lot like… home.
Like when I watch the glances they give each other, the way they almost communicate telepathically… like they are always likely to be guiltiest criminals in any room if the cops show up… like they are always ready to pick up sticks and disappear into the night… I’ve felt that.
***
Though it’s never utilized, the gypsy spirit is a necessary tool in the cultural life of any clan. To keep the clan organized for departure at the drop of a hat is… of utmost importance. And one of the ways you do that is to have a system of hand signals and eye movements that are meant to communicate to others that it’s time to cut and run… but in noticing that… the hand signals and the rolled eyes… we must not mistake what is being truly communicated. It is not merely, or even primarily, a system of hand-eye coordinators. Rather, it is an empathic communication. And so we must not take the symptom for the disease. You know?
Because the clan isn’t a clan because they have a gypsy spirit… they have a gypsy spirit because they are a clan.
They communicate out of a sense of survival.
***
Well anyway, back then I could have looked up from the yard and seen those kind of folks, all except for the mormonizing, just kind of standing around over there in the next yard, having a kind of next-of-kin resemblance.
***
But actually that’s not true at all. I said all of that for effect.
I have given you a wrong impression of my grandma. Which, by the way, is not all that hard to do… I mean how do you give a good impression of your grandma?
Seriously, I mean it. Do you squeak a little at the end of each sentence? Wheeze? For me it was always somewhere between a squeak and a wheeze… that’s just how I do it… but I don’t know, maybe I’ve lost my touch… maybe I can’t pull it off the way I used to…
***
So back to what I was saying… Maybe I’ve given you a wrong impression about my grandma. Let’s be honest. I kind of flat out exaggerated… The reason for all that cousin-swapping was not because folks wanted to earn their way to heaven… but because people were trying to survive their hell on earth.
***
That was because -- in my grandparents’ generation -- they’d been through the Great Depression. And that meant that you had to have a long list of kinfolk.
So’s you could call ‘em on in a crisis.
See, back in those days, if you went on a trip somewhere to see your family… there might not be a hotel within two hundred miles of the hardscrabble farmhouse your distant family probably lived in… and you probably couldn’t have afforded the hotel anyway, even if there had have been one.
Hell, given your family’s history, you probably could barely have afforded the trip.
Anyway… if you needed to travel, you needed to know where your kinfolks were located, so's that you could have had a place to stay.
***
And even locally, knowing your folks was necessary.
Even if it only meant that you needed someone to listen to you tell the story about how it had been Christmas time, and you had only bought that blue car for him because you’d have thought that he was going to pay you back… and that if you’d have known that he was gonna cheat you out of the money you’d have loaned him, you’d have let him go jump in the lake…
Even if you’d have needed someone who could provide you with only that level of family, you’d want that kind of family to be around. Like a family should. On a twenty-four hour basis. On call. With scheduled shifts and routinized protocols. Because everybody has a role to play.
***
But I’m just kidding. My grandma wasn’t anything like that…
***
Actually back in her day that was a real skill to have. It made you more attractive as a woman. And gave you something to do for sport. I'm not entirely sure about this, of course, because it was a different time. Not at all like today. But that’s how it seemed... and I do know that if you were really good at it you became a kind of local matchmaker, putting people together with opportunity.
Like, say, for instance you’d have lost your job. Cause’n the economy went to shit… well then you might’ve needed to know who your kinfolk were, so’s you could fall back on ‘em in a spot. So you’d want to talk to somebody who could rally the troops and raise hell in heaven. Or whatever the appropriate phrases are right here. I sometimes forget.
But you know what I mean, right?
Well that was just how it was back then. For my grandma’s generation.
As I said, not at all like it is today.
***
Anyway. If you needed to travel, say, to Arkansas… you needed to know where it was you had kinfolks, so’s you and yourn could call on them and thern. And though they’d they all had it rough, this generation of gossips… they didn’t complain about it. Even though they did complain.
This, by the way, I think I should stress, is an important point. They did complain. They were certainly capable and one even might find that they were… effective at expressing their capacity by means of demonstration…They were, in fact, practiced in the art of complaining.
But they hadn’t complained about the Depression.
***
As God is my witness, they had a deep and troubled look on their face when they talked about it. Just like they did when the subject turned to the War… in France. But they didn’t talk about it. They never complained.
And in fact, if you’d have asked them, they’d have said that they hadn’t had it any rougher than any of the rest of ‘em had had it. Before them.
***
That is true in every family, I suppose. Substitute the Holocaust or the diaspora or the slave trade or some other cultural catastrophe, and it is true for everyone. But especially so, it seems to me, for me. Because this is my story.
It seems especially so, to me, about my family.
Because they’d for some reason always seemed to be the black sheeps, the ones that had moved the “furtherest out.”
****
It had started with my great-great-granddad. Something having to do with a cousin and an argument.
***
And a hammer and a bottle of whiskey.
***
But I couldn’t tell the story straight because I never got it full from Aunt Fanny and Uncle Chalk before they died.
But it was bad. I knew that.
***
And before all that, there’d been this other great-great-great-great-great-whatever-whatever granddaddy that had won his freedom as an indentured servant serving two terms in the Revolutionary War. And while that hadn’t exactly been slavery, it hadn’t been a cake walk either... and so none of us had had it easy.
That is what they’d say. Or more precisely, what she’d say.
And one thing that was always weird to me about that story, was the fact that I was the one who had learned about it first. What happened was that I found out that we had come from some German shoemaker or other, some predecessor who had basically sold himself into servanthood in order to gain his passage to the US… where he expected he could find a better life.
And yet, here we were a couple of generations down the line and wondering whether we’d found a way to make his dreams come true yet. I mean… had we found a way to get out from under that thumb…? And how come, if other people had, we hadn’t?
***
What was funny about that whole thing was the fact that I had come across that piece of information when I was in my thirties.
In other words, when the information came across to us… to our family, through me… my family’s narrative had already been set for years.
Locked. Down.
We’d have already sat around the table and swapped tales with others at family reunions… and shared gossip from as far away as anyone could have figured, and swapped other tales with other folks along other ways who would have just kind of snooped us out.
Or maybe it was us who were doing the snooping, I could never tell. Because you could turn my grandma loose on anybody and within three minutes, she would have found the relevant kinfolk. And then it was all “hey Billy, you might know his cousin Luke… Ginger’s boy, who came over from Alamogordo... ALAMOGORDO …“
Or something like that.
I mean, you know? It was always like that. And then she’d just start showing off…. “Honey, this is Freddie’s daughter”… Or whatever it was.
But I didn’t wait til it got to that point. I was already out the door. I didn’t stay to listen like I should have.
***
But anyway I had had this distant cousin call me up one time… and I had kind of been thinking about learning where I came from… you know, like I should think about that now that I got kids. And before, let’s be honest, all the old folks die out. I mean, that’s something to think about, right?
So I had kind of already started to thinking about it, and I’d even gone so far as to sit around with a number of folks, gathering stories. But at that point I was only just kind of beginning the process, you know? I mean, I hadn’t yet even yet started forming my list of interrogatories for talking to my grandma. I was just kind of getting the wiretap going… so’s I could listen to recordings that’d help me bring down the whole crime family. You know? Building the case against them. It would take me a while, maybe even longer than a while, to work my may up to the kingpin. You know? I mean, hemming her in. Prepping my witnesses for their interviews… Trying to figure out who’d been where, with whom, back in double-ot-6.
And then this other woman just called me up and we chatted for a moment or two, and then she told me where I came from.
I mean, who my kinfolks were. Going all the way back.
***
And in her story, the story of this distant cousin, was this story at the end of it. That there had been an indentured servant as our earliest known predecessor. And how his son, we are told, won his own freedom after serving two terms for rich men during the Revolutionary War, having gone through the same kind of process that the father did, so that he could in turn survive.
Now, by the way… I don’t know if any of that is true. I know what she told me. But I don’t know if it was true.
***
But I do know that my family took it as one of those stories that was too good to check.
You just kind of run with a story like that. Mainly because it fits with the way you see the world.
And that story was just accepted wholeheartedly by my family. Just completely accepted. Wholeheartedly.
Everything that the woman said, they accepted without question or rebuke.
Or even a muffled guffaw. Not even a nervous, dawning realization that… ain’t that hell? We have been here two hunnert years and ain’t a one of us ever had nothin’…
There was none of that.
We just kind of gave a quick look around at each other, and looked her, and she gave a nod, and we cleared our throats and gave a little shrug of the shoulders… and kind of agreed that, yes, well, that certainly explains a lot, doesn’t it?
***
Anyway, my grandparents hadn’t complained much about the Depression, though they could have. And they also didn’t complain about the frontier mood that can only be called a depression. Though they could have complained about that, too.
They just kept biting their lip and looking farther out on the horizon, and moving further out to sea.
***
And then there was my family.
And its impact on me. And its making of me a mental mind. And the fact that as I was shaping in the womb and in the crib, and in the first moment I opened my eyes and saw my first light, when I began to make out shapes and figures, and began to record my own tallies… I saw the face of my mom, and the warmth of her embrace and her laughter, her acceptance. And I saw the face of my dad, his strength and expectations.
And I saw the face of my sister.
***
See, one learns the world through interaction with those faces. You have to -- because you can’t move your hands yet. You have very limited motor skills.
***
And yet your motors are whirring away, aren’t they?
Assimilating data, putting language and spatial relations and textures and temperatures and emotions together into contexts, moving things toward the place that feels right... But what is that right place?
Well to know that you need filters. Perspectives. Theorems. You need a framework for making sense of all this data spinning around in your tiny head. And for this you need help. You need cues.
Your parents, for example, show you how to move your face. And in exaggerated fashion at that…
Really.
Remember how it used to be?
“See this, baby boy…” and you’d watch as daddy moved his lips and his eyes and his nose in strange and unusual contortions… while he made these noises from his throat.
That’s weird, right?
But isn’t that what it looked like? And still does? The father there, making his ridiculously exaggerated contortion noises? And the baby there, reaching out in strange fascination?
Well that’s how it was in my family.
***
So the father makes these noises and the baby stares at them and is amused because the face is so… [he touches it]
fucking… [he grabs it in his meaty fingers, feels that bristle of the beard and the leathery skin against his own tender fingertips]
flexible… [So shapeable. I mean seriously, feel of this… Wow! It feels like playdoh. You can just kind of move it around on his skull, too. And this… listen to this… listen to how the pitch from his throat gets higher when I dig my fingernails into the flesh of his inner cheeks like this-- ]
Right? Isn’t that how it was?
***
And then one day the baby wakes up to realize -- hey – What the fuck? What if there is more going on here than just a show for the baby? What if that shaping of the mouth and the raising of the pitch can mean something else entirely – something more than just a mere plaything to push around for my own amusement.
And then he moves to acquire language.
***
And then… to unleash his own voice.
***
Well who do you think has been at his side the whole time, showing him how to move his lips, how to hold his fingers on his lips, to feel his lips.
So’s he could understand what mommy and daddy mean when they part their own lips and go “nuhng nhung nhu nhu…” Who was showing him that he had to kind of flex the lips to focus that “nhung” -- with a kind of circular push on the outer rim of the lips? Who knew that?
You know?
***
Who was it that taught him to walk?
His sister.
***
See, the problem is that as you grow, as you learn… you need to do a number of things that require the use of a certain kind of perspective. I can’t begin to tell you and won’t venture a guess about which perspective is better, but you must have some explanation for how the mind is invented. Try this. Read Locke or Kant or Hume or Hegel or Kierkegaard or B.F. Skinner or Piaget. Or Wittgenstein. And then read Nietzsche, and throw them all out the window. And then read ee cummings. And then read Emerson, and finally, Whitman.
And then read them all again.
Do you begin to have an idea in your head now? For how our minds form?
***
Good. So we can go on...
But first… just by the way… why no Plato? Or Shakespeare? Or Pythagoras? Or Carl Sagan? Or Buddha? Or God?
***
Anyway. One needs a certain perspective, the kind of thing one learns to bring to the world through interaction with the faces that one sees… looking up from the cradle.
And mine was shaped in large extent by the fact that I had a smart, tough, keen-minded, older sister to guide me through those early years.
***
I mean that’s kind of important to have that.
Right?
***
Think about your early years.
Or better yet, think about the early years of your children. Because isn’t it easier, really, to tap into your memories of their lives than it is to have to tap into the memories of your own life?
I think it’s at least partly because we are watching them with adoring protective eyes, and we don’t miss a trick. But it’s also because we get to filter all the good and bad shit out, to kind of sort it… to make meanings of the way they hold their spoon... to take pictures of the way they snort their cake. Right?
We are shaping them just by loving them… right?
And that’s easy to do. But that’s only because of who we are right now.
Right?
***
I mean, think about it… We know how to filter. Right? We’ve learned how to process information and do all kinds of neat things with it, right?
Right, so we watch our kids and make out our little timelines and take their pictures and build our scrapbooks… but through it all we can see through their struggle, through their joy, through their accomplishment and development… we can see how their minds develop because we have filters. Right?
But that’s not how it is at all for them. Or for you, when you were their age. Or for me. When I was their age.
Because at that at, it's all chaos.
***
And what we have lost, what we are forced to lose as we move from childhood to maturity, is the capacity not to filter information. The ability to deal with chaos.
Right?
***
Did you just filter? Of course you did.
***
We simply do not how know how to not do it… because we have been socialized to do it. We can’t help it. We operate according to social and emotional and relational and intellectual and spiritual and survival filters… all… the… time. Even the zen among us. Even the stoned. We have hierarchies in our brains because that is how our brains have been formed.
***
But in those early days, in those early moments, and later in those early years, we are just bumping up against a world that is new.
***
See... when we come up against something new… something encountered for the first time…
We need filters. Meaning we don’t have them. It’s like the first time you encounter each new monster in Supermario Bros Nintendo, where you’d run up to them and let them kill you so you can see how they do it, what their powers are, so you can work your way completely through the game again to get back to them and have some idea of how to begin to put together a plan to kill them. You know? Or maybe you do something else will get you there, make your own metaphor here... but the point is that as a boy you are learning the world against this horrendous onslaught of information coming at you and sometimes you just let it wash over you, through you, to feel its wrath… to learn from it…
And then we learn to filter ourselves, to control, to order the chaos.
And the world is no longer new.
***
It's a shame, because in the beginning, before the word was made flesh, before the face moved upon the surface of the water and began to make sense of the chaos... each new thing that we came across was a completely new thing.
Even the notion of what the thing was called. Is called. Or how it smelled. Or smells.
It's all like that... What's this?! We’ve never encountered this before. OK. What are we supposed to do with this? You know?
That sort of thing.
***
And your sister is the one who helps you through that.
Helps you get up over it.
She’s the one who sits and plays with you while mommy cooks a meal. She sits beside you in the back seat and either tells when you spill your drink or shares with you her candy.
She the one that teaches you about politics and diplomacy. And warfare.
Because it’s her choice. Her candy, her choice.
***
Seriously, don’t even think of touching the fucking candy, ok? –
***
I saw that. I’m going to tell mom if you touch the fucking candy… That’s just the way it is.
***
So when mom slows down to a quick stop at the red light and flings out her arm to do the automatic arm-swing-out seatbelt thing, you learn to dive out of the way so that you’ll get behind mama’s arm but also so’s to avoid her cigarette tip. Or else you’ll get burned.
And it was sissy that taught you that shit.
Right?
***
I mean, think of how your own kids are forming. And think again about how they are seeing the world. Are you teaching them more than their sibling?
Even as teenagers? Even as adults?
***
How about for you then? Are you closest to your brother? or to your dad?
I know. Right?
***
So, again, think about your own kid’s view …
Or better yet – you know what? Think about your view. Let’s keep the focus on you for a moment. Shall we? When you were your children’s age, whatever that age might be… what did you need to know about the world? When you were growing up, when you were two… when you were twenty… what did you need to know? Who is more likely to know what, at any particular stage of your life, you are going through? Your parent or a sibling? And in those early years especially… how cool was it to have a sibling who had just run the obstacle course, or just conquered that task, or was just about to?
Didn’t your kids feel a special bond with their sissy? Didn’t you?
I did.
***
With a sister that is three and a half years older than you, she is showing you how to move and how to eat and how to read. And also how to make mudpies and cook marshmallows and chase lizards… and how to read, and how bury the hamster in the back lot, behind the apricot trees, and how not to cry when it’s your turn to put a flower down on the grave. And how to read.
And how next time you better feed the hamster.
And keep your hands away from the candy. That’s the last god-damned time I’m going to tell you….
***
You see what I mean?
***
I mean I was learning about stuff not only from my parents, but also from a sort of guru. A mentor, if you will. She would stand at my side and guide my way. Right? Didn’t you have a guru? A brother, a kid from the block, a cousin? She was my guru. But also she was a girl. So from her I got a kind of a softer view of things.
And by “softer,” I mean “frontier woman softer.” Frontier woman like my grandma, who would call me out of the garden at noon, up to the back gate, where she’d have me hoeing corn or checking the tomato plants for bugs, and she’d send me down to the barnyard with my granddad to help him catch a chicken, and I’d help herd it into a corner and we’d both leap at it and stuff it in a toesack if it was a rooster, or catch it in our bare hands if it was a hen, and he’d reach down in the sack if it was a rooster or by take it by the feet if it was a hen, and I’d run out and make a guess where I thought the body’d land, and then I’d run across the barnyard and retrieve the bloody twitching body of the chicken after my grandfather had put it under one arm and put one hand over the neck and swung its body round his head until the body’d flung off, thereby wringing its neck, and I’d get ten points toward a new bicycle for Christmas if I’d guessed within five feet where the blood-spurting body’d landed, and then we’d bring the dead chicken up to the trailer house and my grandma’d sit on the porch with me and teach me how to pluck the feathers and take the chicken apart with a variety of knives – whatever I had handy she had a method for, but some of them you had to really bear down on the blade, push it into the bone – and then we’d get up and go inside and fry the chicken up for dinner.
And I was six.
That kind of soft.
***
Except maybe not even that soft. Because my older sister was older. And she didn’t get it taken easy on her like I did.
She didn’t get the baby boy treatment, when grandma’d call.
***
End, Part the First
***
In the next episode… how growing up in the same environment kinds of turns you both into the same kind of person, how you both came to see the world in similar ways, how your younger sister, who came along much later, is very much the same as you and your sister, and how that seems to prove to you that those environmental cues are important even if they are sometimes not shared in time and space, and how you hope that knowledge, the fact that environment shapes you, doesn’t mean that your own kids are fucking doomed…
