brother sister brother
Fragile, life is fragile, isn't it, more fragile than we think. I know, especially so when we're in our teens and twenties some of us tend to be careless with life. Careless, or carefree, risky. Nothing served, though, in my sitting here afraid the phone will ring, is there?
The notion of family varies from family to family and as we age and leave home and grow our own family branch, away from our family of origin, and the family branch we grew grows its own branches and widens and scatters. It's universal, this growing away, siblings scatter, siblings' offspring scatter wider and, cousins: close as children, now you don't even know their grandchildren's names. Then, as couples split, you can't keep up with relations' spouses and their stepchildren and new children. I guess it doesn't matter, all that keeping up with isn't essential to life. Or maybe it is. I think it is. Gina's always done an especially good job of knowing family no matter how far extended.
Family: brother, sister, brother. "Mama, Bubba's leaning against me". Somewhat favored, the oldest, I never had to sit in the middle. In the car driving home to Panama City from Pensacola after Christmas. Nightfall, dark, late on the highway, me asleep on the back seat. Gina asleep on the warm floor. Walt asleep in the space under the back window, remember that? I do, there was a deep, wide tray under the rear window, and at three years old and four and five, it was perfect for Walt.
Sunday afternoon picking up scallops across the Bay then as we tied up the boat down front, all three of us abandoning father for dates, leaving our father with a boatload, hundreds of scallops to open by himself, furious with a story he still steamed about forty years later, not amused when we remembered in our middle age.
Me in the right seat, letting Gina drive the station wagon. From StAndrews heading east on 15th Street, turning south onto Harrison at Tally-Ho, me shouting SLOW DOWN, BRAKES but Gina pressing the accelerator harder as she turned the steering wheel slightly, careening toward a car in the northbound lane on Harrison, me frantically grabbing the wheel and pulling it down hard to miss the other car by inches. How old were we? I must have been sixteen that summer, so Gina was fourteen. Take care of your sister and she wanted to drive. No license yet, it would have been her first time driving the station wagon. Walt may not remember, but he was in the back seat, what? twelve turning thirteen that summer.
Gina was a freshman at Brenau when I was a senior at Florida, Walt a senior at Bay High.
Sunday afternoons at Indian Bluff, and the Gulf Beach. Swimming off the jetty that was where now is Landmark Condominiums. If you look close and expand the map/chart, that jetty is still there at the east boundary of the property.
Summer 2011. Memories are not necessarily "in common". In an hour-long conversation of reminiscence at the front door as we left Community Rehab together after visiting mama, Gina told me that we "did not have the same mother" growing up, a surprise to me, the gulf, vast difference in how we had been loved. I will never get over my sadness at learning that, and there's no way I can make it up to Gina. Enough: one of the skeletons in the family closet.
Sunday dinner those years as a family eating out after church in the late nineteen-forties, Chicken Box in the woods out on 15th Street, Angelos next to the Bus Station downtown 5th Street; Daisy Mae's at the point where Mulberry Avenue meets W. Beach Drive, HMichael badly damaged that building, it may have been pulled down recently? My usual fried chicken; fried chicken or fried oysters. Gina's usual fried shrimp. Did you have a usual, Walt?
Summer, what? I believe 1943, I was almost eight. World War Two, our father was a Maritime Service officer candidate at Fort Trumbull, New London, Connecticut. We four drove to Pensacola, left Gina and Walt with the Gentry grandparents, and mama and I took the L&N to Dothan, changed trains, one or two Pullman overnights to Washington, DC, visit with father's sister Evalyn (yes, a not e), nonstop sightseeing around Washington including places tourists are no longer allowed, and the Zoo where I saw a spider gigantic beyond my imagination, my memory of the Zoo nearly eighty years later. Train on up to New London to visit father/husband. When we arrived back in Pensacola a week or so later, the Gentry household was atremor with stories of what Gina and Walt had done while we were away. Including, Gina five, Walt three or four, climbing out the upstairs window onto the roof and our grandmother finding them out there on the steep roof eating candy. The story lasted in the family for years until the story outgrew its history, now it's gone.
June 1957 Walt stood up with me at my wedding, Gina stood up on Linda's side.
Easter morning tension at the front door lest the Easter Bunny hadn't come. Christmas mornings waiting waiting waiting to be allowed to burst into the living room.
Why am I doing this to myself. Maybe because it's so late in life and it's all done forever. Life is short and Time only goes one way.
Your family also will grow up and away, leave, widen until the people you love don't even know the people they love. A generation or three later, nobody will ever have heard of each other.
There are many stories and more memories. Some just between the three of us. Some just between Gina and Walt, because I was the loner, they were the close two, the devilment.
Why am I doing this to myself? Because everything doesn't have to be an update from the hospital. And anyway, I have not received an update this morning.
Writing Friday evening and editing Saturday morning still pitch black dark out, my prayer for you is that you never have to be where I am tonight.
We haven't much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us, so be quick to love, and make haste to be kind.
Bubba