Category Archives: Relationships

Births and Deaths

It is the Monday before Thanksgiving. Today is my youngest brother’s birthday. I was six when he was born, and 14 years later I took him to a Phish concert in Wisconsin, where my boyfriend at the time overdosed on LSD, lost his shoes, and ended up in the psychiatric ward of the nearest major hospital. I sold our tickets for the following night’s show and took Paul home to Chicago, not super eager to explain to our parents what he’d been exposed to: no actual drugs, but the afterschool-special-type results of mixing jam bands, camping, and irresponsible college students who had too much disposable income.

In hindsight, perhaps it was an important formative lesson.

The boyfriend didn’t last, but my brother and I continued going to concerts together. Bob Dylan, REM, Modest Mouse, The National, Maceo Parker. Our music history is long, and has included no further drug drama, unless you count that one Widespread Panic show in Berkeley when Paul was 17, but I don’t really count that. Everyone sleeps in a hallway at some point in their lives.

Now my brother is in San Francisco for the month, so I got to celebrate his birthday with him tonight, just as he was at my birthday dinner earlier this month. We haven’t actually lived in the same city since he was 11, and I like having him around. He babysits, and watches football with us. We talk about books. Tonight at dinner, everyone shared Paul stories. The time he fell asleep in his bed during a game of hide-and-seek and my mom couldn’t find him. The time he ran out the kitchen door and fell off the back of our house when the deck was being redone. The time his name in the preschool yearbook simply read P.P. Corliano—and no one knows why. Read More>

|Categories: Age, Life, Relationships | Tags: , , | Permalink

The Leadership Summit, eventually

This morning Scarlett and I were sitting at the dining room table where she was eating a typical breakfast of spaghetti and meatballs and I was drinking a cup of tea.

“I didn’t blog yesterday,” I told her, as if admitting something scandalous.

She seemed unperturbed, busy aiming an entire handful of grated parmesan cheese directly into her mouth.

“Please stop doing that,” I said, and then had a flashback to my own childhood and visits to see my Aunt Theresa and Uncle John. Theresa was my grandmother’s sister and everything about her and Uncle John seemed very old and very Italian. Their couch was covered in plastic. The fruit on their coffee table was wax. When we arrived in the morning, they were always eating cold spaghetti, and Uncle John would pinch our cheeks so hard they stayed pink for the remainder of the visit.

Scarlett continued eating her spaghetti, oblivious to my distraction.

“What do you think I should blog about?” I asked her.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “You could definitely blog about Otto throwing up and how Jack almost dropped my tooth fairy in the throw up.” Read More>

|Categories: Cure, Doctors, Drugs, Faces, Life, Parenting, Relationships, Research | Tags: , , , | Permalink

A thief in the night

On Thursday afternoon, I rolled out of my house, ready to pick Scarlett up from school. My sister-in-law, Beverley, was the driver that day, and she walked out behind me, pressing the button that opens the side door of the van. As the ramp unfolded, I saw that my path was blocked—bizarrely—by the fat black Honda instruction manual that normally resides in the glove box. I also saw that the driver’s seat was fully reclined, as though someone had been sleeping in the car.

Later, Bev joked that she thought maybe I had made Rob sleep there the night before in a moment of irritation. I laughed. “There’s no way your brother would ever sleep in the car or even on the couch unless it was his choice.” Rob is very, very stubborn, which is irrelevant to this story, but I felt like sharing it anyway. Maybe it’s a foreshadowing thing. I guess we’ll see.

Upon closer look at the van, we realized that all the contents of the glove box were strewn around the floor. I called Rob.

“Did you put the van driver’s seat into a lying down position and empty the glove box onto the floor of the car last night?” I asked conversationally.

“No,” he answered slowly, as though it had not been an entirely normal question. Read More>

|Categories: Life, Relationships | Tags: , | Permalink