Am I My Brother's Keeper?

A week ago my brother arrived at my house as we were finishing putting things away from the trip to New Hampshire. After saying that he had a problem and needed help, he said, "You know, I have heard you say that there is a time in life when if your kids don't get you, your parents do. I'm sorry to tell you that it might also be a sibling."

He proceeded to describe a disaster occurring in his life, and he just couldn't think through what to do or where to turn. I don't want to broadcast the specifics of my brother's situation all over the Internet, but it is bad......beyond description bad.

My other brother and I knew his life was in a terrible downward spiral, but he has previously stiff-armed us when we have tried to offer help. I guess he had to get to a point of desperation.

So, he is now living with us until other arrangements can be made, and my husband and I are being consumed with the details of trying to help him put his life back together.

This is not convenient. Some of it is, in fact, quite unpleasant.

My priorities for the next few weeks are totally altered.

We are supposed to have an empty nest.

But, there is just no way that I am going to stand before the Creator and Sustainer of the universe and ask the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

I know the answer is 'yes' whether or not it represents my choice of activities.

"Divorce Sale"

On Thursday, I had occasion to drive across the northern portion of New York State, take the ferry across Lake Champlain, and drive across northern Vermont and into New Hampshire. Once I got past the first 40 miles and through the rain showers, the day was sunny with blue skies and fluffy white clouds. There were areas in the Adirondack Mountains where the leaves have started to change colors, so patches of brilliance filled me with wonder.
On my drive, I saw something I have never seen before. A sign posted near the road read, "Divorce Sale....Everything Must Go."
I have seen Rummage Sale, Garage Sale, Yard Sale, Porch Sale, Moving Sale, Estate Sale, and recently for the first time, Basement Sale. I have never before seen Divorce Sale, and it filled me with a different kind of wonder. What depth of pain and/or bitterness would be required to post a sign along the road advertising the end of a marriage? A "Rummage Sale" sign would have done nicely. Why did the person having the sale feel it necessary to broadcast the message that "Everything must go." All the material possession jointly acquired must go, but posting this sign also seems to be an agonizing cry that all of the hope and dreams felt at the beginning of the relationship must go too.
I am so sorry that someone....even though I have no idea who....is suffering.
I am so grateful for over 40 years of a relationship characterized by mutual respect, understanding, helpfulness and affection. I wish I could bottle it. I wouldn't even sell it. I would give it away.

Indelible Image

I had trouble sleeping last night. A "video clip" created by my brain kept replaying in my mind.

Several months ago in the late afternoon, I had just arrived home from work when I heard sirens converging on our neighborhood.

I live in a section of the city which has many Victorian style homes. Some are still owner occupied properties, but a few have been split up into apartments. I know most of the neighbors who own their homes, but the apartment dwellers tend to be shorter term occupants, so over the years, I have only known those who had children who were playmates of my children.

As the sirens stopped, rescue vehicles cluttered the intersection nearest my home. The house they entered was only three houses away, but on the opposite side of the intersection. I knew no one in that apartment building. I went out on the sidewalk wondering what could be going on that merited so many rescue vehicles....police, an ambulance and the fire department rescue truck had all arrived. A neighbor came and stood with me.

The rescue workers had been in the home only a very brief period of time when a uniformed man ran from the house. My impression was that he was one of the firemen, because he wore dark slacks with a light blue shirt. The police have dark blue shirts and the EMTs in our city seem to wear white shirts. He rushed across the porch, bounded down the steps and sprinted toward the back of the ambulance which waited with door flung open. On his forearm was draped the limp form of a baby. The child's head was cradled in his hand. The body was prone on the length of his forearm with small limbs dangling on either side. As the man's body moved with his strides, the arms and legs of the child swayed...there was no muscle tone, no resistance to his movements.

I murmured to my neighbor and to myself, "Oh, God....it's a baby."

But in my mind, I said, "Oh, God...it's a dead baby."

The man leaped into the back of the ambulance. The doors were scarcely closed when the ambulance raced away with sirens screaming.

The next day I read in the paper that the baby had drowned in the bathtub. The mother had placed the child in the tub with an older sibling and apparently had left them unattended. If the age of the sibling recorded in the paper was correct, the older child was not old enough to be supervising a baby in a tub.

What would cause a mother to do this? Was she sick and in need of lying down? Was a pot on the stove boiling over? Did she receive a terribly important phone call? Was her favorite soap opera on? Was she in the middle of an online chat? What could have caused her to take this risk?

As the indelible image of the sprinting rescue worker and lifeless form kept replaying in my mind, I wondered what images replay in the mother's mind. What images replay in the mind of the sibling? Will this horrible moment define that child's life?

I tossed and turned last night thinking, "Oh, God...it was a baby."

Fighting Entropy

I suppose that most homemakers/wives/mothers are oblivious to the fact that they actually spend most of their time in the impossible task of trying to counteract the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Things tend to randomness and disorder, and those of us who try to keep a household running smoothly spend a huge amount of time trying to bring order back into the chaos.

I thought about this yesterday as I attempted to clean the basement. I used the shop vac to rid the rafters of the spider webs and dead bugs....but I know they will come back. I swept the dust and debris off the floor, but that too will be back. I gathered a large pile of "stuff" for the dumpster, but my husband will collect more. I cleaned the ash bin under the wood furnace, including the pile in front of the furnace which had spilled out of the bin, but as cold weather comes, more wood will be burned and more ashes will be created.

Of course, mothers of toddlers have an even larger task. No one can leave behind a random trail of toys quite the way a toddler can. The child is learning and exploring, but after a couple of hours of this important play, just stand back and look at the room. There is no pattern discernible in the arrangement of books, blocks, stuffed animals, toy cars, pots and pans from the kitchen cupboards and sundry other items.

I guess not everyone feels this compulsion to try to introduce order where there is none. You would think someone bright enough to have taken a physics course would be less inclined. But, orderliness does bring comfort to some of us, and we are willing to expend a lot of energy trying to bring it about. When I put something in the freezer in the basement today, I enjoyed the fact that the place actually looked cleaner.

If only it could stay that way, or perhaps, clean itself up.

Oh, wretched entropy.

Meri, Meri, Quite Contrary

Last week we visited with our daughter, son-in-law and two sweet granddaughters who live in Maine. The oldest girl, Meredith, also known as Meri, had her 4th birthday while we were there. I love all of my 8 grandchildren dearly, but I have to admit to being particularly amused by Meri. The primary cause of this being that I am afraid she has a large component of Grandma Ruthie genetic material. She is interested in and has something to say about absolutely everything. She is also a stubborn, take charge, let's get this done right personality...which I do recognize.

On Saturday, my son-in-law's sister was married in Connecticut. We tagged along with them in order to be helpful with the kids. When they got tired and squirrelly during the reception, we were there to take them to their other grandma and grandpa's house for a nap. Little Maddie (age 2 1/2) settled right down....but Meri....

Of course, being in a house and bed other than her own was not conducive to relaxing and allowing her weary self some rest. I laid down next to her thinking that I could get her to unwind by telling her some stories. She loves stories about when her mother was a little girl, or when grandma was a little girl. But, she was just way too interactive with my stories, asking question after question.

Finally after about half an hour, she asked, "Soooo....what are we going to do with me, since I am NOT going to go to sleep."

Stifling a loud guffawing belly laugh as best I could, I chuckled, "Oh, Meri, Meri, quite contrary."

To which she replied, "What does contrary mean?"

The kid has way too many Grandma Ruthie genes.

Advice on Dog Poop

What do you do when your kid won't even take your advice about dog poop?

Last night one of my daughters, Laura, called in quite an agitated state. Without coming up for a breath of air, she went from asking me questions, to drawing her own conclusions, and then paused long enough to hear what I had to say, before going straight into a rant of disagreement.

It seems that there is a fence between her property in the trailer park and the adjacent property. She wanted to know if it isn't true that when you put up a fence it has to be totally on your own property. Therefore, she assumes the land immediately over the fence would still be the property of the person who owns the fence.

She didn't pause long enough for me to say that in a trailer park, you don't really "own" the land. You own your trailer and technically "rent" the land, I think. I don't know for sure never having lived in a trailer park.

In any event, the woman at the adjacent trailer is throwing the poop from her dog over her fence into what Laura believes to be the other woman's strip of land, and therefore, the other woman's responsibility.

However, the neighbor says it is Laura's problem to clean up, even though Laura doesn't own a dog.

This would seem to be something for the manager of the trailer park to resolve, but Laura is not in good standing with the manager. Prior conversations have led me to believe that he perceives Laura as a troublemaker and would love for her to move out of the park.

So, I said, "Well, since it's your kids who are stepping in it, why don't you clean it up?"

You can imagine the response to that!

I continued, "What would happen if you just quietly and graciously cleaned it up every day?"

She was having none of that. She began to rant that she would contact legal aid today and find out what her rights are.

I asked just what that would accomplish. The person throwing the dog poop over the fence is obviously not a classy lady. She doesn't care about Laura's rights, and if Laura makes waves, she adds fuel to the park manager's fire that she is a troublemaker.

Sure, having to clean up the doggy-do is a lousy solution, but is there one that will likely have a better outcome for Laura?

She hung up rather abruptly.

So, what to do when your kid won't even take your advice about dog poop? Sigh.

Defining Moments

I guess most of us have pondered the "what-ifs" of life. Those times when something or someone nudges our lives in one direction rather than another. It is never possible to figure out what might have happened had the nudge been in the other direction.

When I was a young person, I lived in a rural area outside of Buffalo, NY. Throughout my junior and senior high years, I was selected to participate in the Erie County Chorus made up of students from schools all over the county.

I had a big, powerful soprano voice that could fill up a concert hall without a microphone. In the late 50s and early 60s that was essential if one wanted to sing a solo. Individual miking was just unheard of in that era.

One year the concert included a number with a soprano solo. The solo required a strong enough voice, not only to fill the room, but also to sing against the entire choir. I tried out for the part. I really loved the song and believed that I knew better than most teen girls how to interpret it. The theme was serious and moving.

After the try-outs, I went outside the school where the practices were occurring, to wait for the bus back to my home school. As I sat there, one of the music teachers who had judged the try-outs came out of the building, and paused on his way to the parking lot.

What he said went something like this: "I want you to know that you are not going to get the solo....but you should have. You were the only person who tried out who had a powerful enough voice to sing against the entire choir. The director has made a purely political decision. He wanted someone from his own school. The girl he has chosen won't be able to do it alone. He will end up putting others on the part with her."

I don't remember saying anything to him in response. I think I smiled and nodded, and he shrugged and walked away. I had the strangest feeling at that moment...as though I actually felt my life going in one direction rather than another. I didn't feel bitter, but sort of melancholy. Later, I did feel sad, because he was right....3 girls, all from the director's school, ended up trying to sing the solo part together in order to hold their own against the choir. They were, in my view, 3 silly air-headed girls, who had no idea what the words in the solo really meant, and no ability to draw on their very souls to interpret it

Still, I never felt angry. I believed that God had intervened to push me away from a career in music and toward something else. I will never know whether singing in that setting would have caused me to be "discovered" or mentored by someone who understood the music business, and it doesn't matter.

Throughout my life, music remained a form of expression of my most intense personal beliefs. In 2000, I developed a severe laryngitis at the same time I experienced a deep emotional wound. My singing voice has been totally unreliable since. The ENT doctor didn't know if the laryngitis was to blame or whether the inherited neurological tremor I have developed was impacting my vocal chords. He was adamant that it was physiological and not psychogenic, but I feel as though the connection that existed between my voice and my very soul was broken by the terrible hurt I felt...do wounds inflicted by our "friends" ever heal?

Once my voice soared out into the air and rose to heights propelled by an indescribable joy in my spirit. Now sometimes I feel as though a bird with broken wings is flopping around in the core of myself.

When I get to heaven, I expect the wound to be healed, and I will stand on a street corner and sing for eternity.