Joe

I’m thinking a lot about siblings today. I am grateful for mine. This year I made a promise to myself to appreciate them more, to see them more often, to call. I am guilty of letting life get in the way of my good intentions, paving the road to hell.

I am nine years older than my baby brother. That is quite a distance when you think about it. I was riding the school bus to elementary school when he was born. I was in junior high when he began kindergarten. I was away at college when he got his first pimple. I was married with a child before he graduated from high school.

He was always Baby Joe. I remember well his childhood imaginary friends, Johnny Bangus and Johnny Thompson. I see him with his stuffed teddy bear, Charlie Baby-o, more clearly than I see him as he was in college.

Years passed, he grew up, he married, he became a father. Who do I see today? I see a good man in every respect, a good husband, a good parent, a good provider, a good brother.

He is also one of the luckiest people I know. I accuse him of this often. My siblings and I tease him about it. It’s as if he got all of the luck genes delegated to our family.

When I was almost twenty-three and Joe was just thirteen our middle brother died in a motorcycle accident. I was five-hundred miles away, but Joe was at home to bear witness to our parents’ grief, and suffer his own. I often wonder if this shaped him into the man he is today. Did he strive harder to please our parents or would he have been who he is regardless?

The more I think about my little brother I realize luck isn’t something one is born with – you make your own. Joe certainly has. He has worked hard, planned well, and, yes, maybe had a wee bit of good fortune along the way.

I am very proud of the man he has become, but I can’t help but occasionally still picture him dragging Charlie Baby-o through our childhood home while making grand plans with his imaginary friends.

I love you Joe. 

Nine Eleven

“Where were you on 9-11?” I’ve seen that question multiple times today on social media. This is my generation’s version of, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?”

I don’t really have a memory of where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated, but I’ve been told I was in the car with my parents and siblings in Dallas making the trip home from visiting our grandparents in east Texas. I can imagine my father frustrated by the traffic, but this is probably just imagination. I make things up for sport.

I do, however, remember vividly the morning of 9-11. My husband traveled for his work at that time and was out of town. I had been away from the house. When I returned home the answering machine was blinking with multiple messages all asking if Frank was okay. I was panicked. Why would all of our friends and relatives be asking this question? Finally one of the messages told me to turn on the television. I did, and didn’t turn it off for days. My husband was fine. His plane was immediately grounded, he was able to rent a car and drive home. That’s my 9-11 story; at least part of it.

The rest of the story isn’t about where we were. The real story is about what happened to our nation on that horrible morning thirteen years ago. We lost our innocence. We lost the way of life we had grown to expect and rely on. We realized we were vulnerable. This realization didn’t hit me until a few weeks later. My memory of 9-11 isn’t centered on my answering machine and television. When I remember 9-11 I remember my first post 9-11 flight a few weeks later. After going through the newly established security checkpoint I locked myself in a bathroom stall and sobbed.

It took going to an airport for a flight for me to see firsthand what we really lost. The seriousness of the ticket agents, leaving my luggage unlocked to be inspected, going to the gate by myself instead of my husband accompanying me and waiting with me until I boarded, and being patted down before being allowed to board the plane. All of this while National Guardsmen stood by with huge guns. Where was I? Is this American? My airport experience is an analogy for life in the United States after September 11, 2001.

They say Americans are resilient, that we all rallied and came together as a nation. We did, but we also gave up part of who we were and we will never get that back.

My memories and feelings about that day are paltry in comparison to what others suffered. Those who lost everything, those who were there, those who responded. All we can do is remember who we once were and move forward. Be kind. Be tolerant. Love.

Labor Day

Twenty-one years ago Labor Day weekend I met my big brother and his family for the first time. The brother I learned of at my mother’s death bed at an in-patient hospice facility in Houston. Lung cancer is not pretty. Her suffering was too prolonged, she wouldn’t let go. All that Lifetime-Movie-Channel-give-the-dying-permission-to-leave is bullshit. It didn’t work. A weary nurse told us she’d seen patients hang on because of “an unresolved life conflict.” Again I thought bullshit. But, it was true. A baby, a boy, born in 1953, before she met my father, was given up for adoption. “We will find him,” my sister and I promised our comatose mother. Did she hear us? She passed a few days later.

We found him, rather, my husband, Frank, found him. I think he felt a bond to him when he learned their birthdays were back to back. The only information we had was the date of birth, the hospital where he was born, and that my mother had named him John Anthony. We also learned that my mother and my Aunt Mary, upon learning my husband's date of birth and convoluted family history, grilled him mercilessly when I first brought him home to meet the family. Their worst nightmare: Was I engaged to marry my brother? Their furtive interrogation proved not.

Two years after my mother’s death my husband handed me a yellow legal pad with the information that led to my brother. I was ecstatic. I was also scared and nervous. Is this really him? Does he want to be found? Will he like us? Will we like him? I locked myself in the bathroom and dialed the number.  On the third try, in a voice not my own, I said to the woman who answered, “I have reason to believe your husband is my half-brother.” Then screams, all I heard on the other end of the telephone line were screams followed by “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, he’s going to be so happy.”

That’s how it began. Days later, on Labor Day weekend, John Anthony and family flew from California to Texas. My Daddy, who hadn’t even known we were searching for my mother’s son, was so happy he picked up the tab on everyone’s flights for this first reunion. What a time we had. I met them at the airport with a bouquet of blue balloons, one proclaiming “It’s a Boy.” Everyone at the gate assumed we had adopted a baby arriving on that flight. Word of the real story circulated and when John appeared he was met with applause. I couldn’t stop hugging him or touching him. I had to make sure he was real.

The first stop we made was at the home of our grandmother, our mother’s mother. John knocked on her door and when she opened she said, “I always knew this day would come, that one day you would knock on my door.”

I still find it heartbreaking that John never met our mother or that our mother never met her firstborn son. We inundated him with family over the next few days. My father, my younger siblings and their families arrived the next day, followed by an assortment of aunts, uncles and cousins all eager to meet and welcome our new family member.

Labor Day will always be a special holiday for me, unique in my interpretation of it. My mother labored to bring a child into the world at a time when “un-wed mothers” were a pariah, especially in the Irish Catholic culture in which she was raised. Knowing my mother, I am certain she labored everyday of the rest of her life thinking of him, wondering how and where he was. Hoping, yet also fearing, that he might one day knock at her door. And laboring to keep it all a secret from the children she raised with my father. My father, bless him, knew about John since before he married my mother. To him it was something in the past, once confessed never mentioned.

Twenty-one years after our first meeting my brother is as much a part of our lives as if we’d been raised together from birth. He’s simply my brother. I love him, he loves me. We have a history now, a bond that siblings share. It’s hard to imagine a time that he wasn’t a part of my world.

To me Labor Day is more like Christmas. I got the gift that truly never stops giving, this unforeseen gift bestowed as my mother left us. A gift I never got to thank her for, but I like to think she knows.