Three Weeks With My Brother

Still, I tried my best to read the ribbon. It had two words, and the second one was "Mention." I knew that much right away, but the first word didn't seem to make much sense, so I tried to sound it out. It started with an HO, had an R in the middle, and ended with BLE . . . my lips began forming the word, when I suddenly paled.

Oh no, I thought. It can't be . . .

I stared at the word trying to blink it away. But it was right there, for everyone to see.

The world began to spin as it finally dawned on me. Of course, I thought, it made sense. I felt my stomach lurch and I wanted to cry. In the distance, I could see my brother proudly showing off his rocket and ribbon, standing among the people who'd done Great. Meanwhile, people like me had done exactly what the ribbon said. Horrible. They'd given me a ribbon that said Horrible Mention.

I don't remember leaving, but I do remember walking home. Micah knew I was upset but I kept shaking my head when he asked why. Finally, when the feelings became too overwhelming, I thrust the ribbon toward him.

"See!" I cried. "I did horrible. That's what the ribbon says."

"Your ribbon doesn't say that."

"Look at it!"

He stared at the word, trying to sound it out like I had, then slowly looked up at me as if he were about to cry, too. "That's not very nice," he mumbled.

Oh . . . no . . . I was right. I realized I'd been holding on to a ray of hope that somehow I'd read it wrong. That I'd made a mistake. But I hadn't, and I felt the dam holding back my emotions begin to burst.

"I tried my hardest . . . I really tried . . ." I blubbered, and all at once I began to cry. My shoulders shuddered violently, and Micah put his arms around me, pulling me close.

"I know. And your rocket wasn't horrible."

"But they said it was."

"Who cares about them. I think your rocket was one of the best."

"No you don't."

"Yes I do. You did a great job with it. I'm proud of your rocket. And I'm not going back to Cub Scouts ever again. Not if they'd do something like that."

I don't know whether his words made me feel better or worse; all I knew was that I needed him.

By then I wanted to forget all about it, but Micah wouldn't let it go.

"I can't believe they said you were horrible," he kept murmuring in disbelief, and every time he said it, my shoulders slumped even more.

When we finally reached home, we found my mom cooking in the kitchen. She turned toward us.

"Hey guys! How'd you do?"

For a long moment, neither of us answered. Micah offered his ribbon, holding it low, almost as if embarrassed. "I got second place," he said.

My mom took his ribbon and held it up. "Wow! Congratulations! Second, huh?"

"I almost won," he said.

"Well, second place is great. How'd you do, Nick?"

I shrugged without answering, trying to hold back the tears.

Her face softened. "You didn't get a ribbon?"

I nodded.

"You did get a ribbon?"

I nodded again. "It doesn't matter though."

"Sure it matters. Can I see it?"

I shook my head.

"Why not, sweeetie?"

"Because," I finally said, beginning to break down. "It says I did horrible!" The tears started flowing, and I squeezed my eyes tight, trying to stop them.

"It doesn't say that," my mom said.

"Oh yeah, it does," Micah said. "It says he did horrible."

I began crying even harder and my mom put her arms around me.

"Can I see it?"

Perhaps it was the security I felt in my mom's arms, but I finally summomed the will to reach into my pocket and pull out the wrinkled ribbon. My mom glanced at it for a moment before using her finger to turn my chin toward her.

"It doesn't say horrible," she said, "it says honorable. That's a good thing, sweetie. It's saying they're proud of the job you did. You did an honorable job."

At first, I wasn't sure I heard her right. And a moment later, when she sounded out the word for me, I even felt a little better. Still, part of me wished I'd never received a ribbon at all.

In 1971, a series of earthquakes convulsed Los Angeles. The first one struck in the middle of the night, and I remember waking up and feeling the bed shake violently, as if someone were attempting to toss me out of it.

Dana woke up about the same time and started screaming. I could hear the rumbling and crackling of the walls, saw toys toppling over. The ground was vibrating, looking almost like liquid, and though I didn't know what was happening, I knew it wasn't a good thing, and I suspected we were in danger. Micah understood this as well, and jumped out of bed to grab my sister and me. He was pulling us to the center of the room as if to huddle, when my dad came bursting through our bedroom door. He was buck naked and wild-eyed. None of us had ever seen him naked before, and the sight of him standing in the doorway was in some ways even more shocking than what was happening around us. My mom was right behind him--unlike him, she was wearing a gown. Surging into the room, they enveloped us and forced us down to the floor, piling us together. Then, they both lay on top of us in an attempt to protect us from falling debris.

The ground continued to rumble, the walls continued to sway, but there was something calming about being heaped together as a family. As scary as it was, I remember suddenly feeling that we were going to be okay--that somehow this obvious sign of parental love and concern was enough to protect us. It wasn't until I saw the damage on television that I realized how bad it had been. Throughout the city, buildings had crumbled and freeways had buckled. The Richter scale had estimated the quake at a magnitude of 7.2, making it one of the largest quakes ever measured in the area.

For my brother and me, the quake required that we inspect the damage ourselves, and we spent the next few days probing and searching like FEMA representatives. Perhaps it was our way of trying to get the fear out of our system, and it seemed to work during the daytime. At night, though, we'd lie in bed, having trouble falling asleep, and suffering from nightmares.

The aftershocks continued for days after that first big quake. In the beginning, my parents would continue to rush into our room as they had the night of the first quake. But as the aftershocks continued, their responses grew slower, until finally they stopped getting up to check on us at all. After that, the three of us would rush into their room.

In the midst of yet another aftershock we kids thundered into their room, launched ourselves airborne from the foot of the bed, and heard the whumph of air escape our parents' lungs as we landed on top of them. My dad, obviously tiring of this sort of thing awakening him in the middle of the night, heard my mom's exortations to "Do something, Mike!" and decided to put a stop to it once and for all. Getting out of bed--naked again, but by then we'd grown used to it--he suddenly performed what resembled an Indian rain dance in the middle of the bedroom. Waving his arms, he spun in circles, chanting, "Stop earthquake, stop, oh, yey, mighty earthquake be gone . . ." and in the moment that he stopped circling and chanting, the earth suddenly stopped shaking.

All we could do was stare at him. We were awestruck as he crawled back into bed and shooed us from the room.

I don't suppose I need to explain the significance of such an event to young minds, and after we crawled under the covers in our own beds, my brother and I understood exactly what this meant. Coincidence? I think not.

As Micah explained solemnly, "Our dad has magic powers."

This, of course, made us see our father in a completely different light, a new and exciting light, and I must say that when I got back to school, I wasn't reticent in sharing this information with others in my class. They, too, were amazed.

In addition to stopping earthquakes, my father was also able to stop the rain from falling. Not all the time, mind you, but only when we were driving in the car, and only for a little while. It didn't matter how hard the rain might be coming down, but as we hurtled down the highway, my

dad would glance over his shoulder and sometimes ask us if we were ready for the rain to stop. If we said yes, he'd tell us to close our eyes, remind us not to peek, and then, in the moment that he said "Stop," the rain would stop falling. It would be utterly quiet for about a second--the roar against the roof completely silenced--and then, just as suddenly, we'd hear the rain begin to pound again. As he explained: "It takes a lot of energy to stop the rain--I can't keep it up for long."

It wasn't until a few years later that I noticed my father only seemed to have these powers when we were approaching a highway overpass.

In 1972, things began to change in our family. With my sister now in kindergarten, my mother started working, so after school we found ourselves alone. We had an older neighbor who was supposed to look in on us, but she seldom did. Instead, we'd head up to her apartment, tell her that we were home, then ignore her for the rest of the afternoon. This suited her perfectly. She was more of the "contact in case of only dire emergencies, lest I miss my soap operas" kind of baby-sitter, and besides, we'd been on our own in the afternoons for so long by then that we didn't really need someone to watch over us.

Unsurprisingly, my brother and I suffered an exceedingly high number of injuries during our early years. Already, I'd had my head cut open by a rock thrown by a teenager (which not only involved the police, but a visit by my father to said teen, where the teen was threatened with grave bodily harm if it ever happened again), lost a couple of teeth while learning to ride a bicycle, sprained both wrists and both ankles, and nearly cut my finger off with a piece of broken glass. My brother had the same types of injuries, only, if anything, they were more frequent and serious.

Yet, with the exception of required vaccinations, we children were seldom taken to see doctors or dentists. By seldom, what I mean is "maybe once in our lives, and only then if there was a better than even chance that we might die." I was eighteen years old before I ever set foot in a dentist's office. I sometimes wondered how much blood I'd actually have to lose before my parents finally broke down and brought me to a clinic. They had no religious reasons for avoiding medical care, they simply believed that seeking medical attention would not only be a waste of time, but more costly than they could afford. Add in the requirement to be tough, and the only doctors my brother and I saw were on television. I remember, for instance, that after I was struck by the rock, blood literally gushed over my face. I couldn't see well, and was barely able to stagger home.

"You'll be fine tomorrow," my mother said after taking a look at it. "You've got a thick skull."

Luckily, I did indeed have a thick skull and was able to heal on my own.

It was around that time, however, that my sister developed epiglottitis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the epiglottis. Neither Micah nor I knew exactly what was wrong with my sister that morning; all we knew was that my sister was burning up with fever, pale, delirious, and had vomited through the night. My parents, who knew a real emergency when they saw one, rushed her to the hospital. Unfortunately, without health insurance, the hospital required a deposit of $200, and after dropping the family off, my dad sped off in search of someone to lend him the money.

My mom went into the hospital with my sister; she told my brother and me to wait near a tree at the edge of a parking lot. "Don't go beyond here, there, and there," she pointed, outlining an imaginary box about twelve feet square. Even at that age, we recognized the fear in her voice, and knew enough to do exactly as she said.

It was hot that day, probably close to a hundred degrees. We'd been left with neither food nor water, and to keep our minds off the heat, we spent the next few hours climbing the tree or walking just inside the lines of the imaginary box. We made a game of getting as close to the imaginary lines as we could without stepping over. At one point, I stumbled and fell over the line. I remember standing quickly, but the thought that I'd disobeyed my mom, coupled with the stress that we were under, brought me to tears. As always, in situations like these, my brother was there to comfort me, and with his arm around me, we sat for what seemed interminable hours in the shade.

"Do you think Dana will die?" I asked eventually.

"No," he said.

"What's wrong with her?"

"I don't know."

"Then how do you know she won't die?"

"Because she won't. I just know it."

I glanced at him. "Mom looked scared. Dad, too."

He nodded.

"I don't want her to die," I said.

It was the first time I'd ever contemplated such a thing, and it scared me. We didn't have much as a family, but we'd always had one another. Even though she was younger and didn't explore like my brother and me, my sister had already taken on the best aspects of my mother's personality. She had a perennially sunny disposition; she laughed and smiled, and--on those days when I wasn't tagging along with my brother--was my best friend. Like me, she loved the Johnny West set, and at night we would play together for hours.

My brother and I were a curious and sad sight in the parking lot. Strangers would see us as they got out of the car on their way to visit someone inside; hours later, when they came back out, we'd still be sitting in the same spot. A few people offered to buy us a soda or something to eat, but we'd shake our heads and say that we were fine. We'd been taught never to take anything from strangers.

Later in the afternoon, while my brother was climbing in the tree, he lost his grip and fell to the pavement. Landing on his wrist, he screamed, and as he held it before me, I saw it begin to swell and slowly turn black-and-blue. We wondered aloud whether it was broken. We wondered whether we should disobey our mom and head into the hospital to tell her about it, and whether it might even need a cast.

We didn't move, though. We couldn't. In the end, my sister would recover, and we'd learn that Micah's wrist was sprained, not broken, but at the time, we knew nothing. Instead, we sat together with fear in our hearts, just the two of us, not saying much to each other the rest of the afternoon.

CHAPTER 4

After listening to Micah's admonition about cheating myself of the excitement about our trip around the world, I hung up the phone, thinking about what he'd said. What Cathy had been saying. What my agent had been saying. What everyone, in fact, had been saying about the trip whenever I'd mentioned it. Despite the logical arguments, despite the fact that it had been my idea to go, I still couldn't summon any excitement about the trip.

It's not that I spent my days under a cloud of doom and gloom. Yes, I was busy, but to be honest, I found tremendous satisfaction in all that I was doing. My wife was right; I was busy because I liked being busy. Perhaps, I mused, the problem was that all my energies were focused in only three areas--father, husband, and writer--with little time for anything else. As long as things fit into these neat little boxes that I'd constructed for myself, I felt in control. Not only could I function, but I could thrive. But because it was all I could do to keep up in these three areas, the idea of stepping outside the boxes to do new things--travel, adventure, or spending three weeks with my brother--not only seemed impossible, but struck me as a trade-off I would regret. And in a rare moment of clarity in an otherwise foggy year, I suddenly realized that I had begun to take this to extremes.

If I couldn't even find excitement in the idea of taking a trip around the world, what kind of person was I? I wasn't sure. All I knew was that I didn't want to stay that way forever. Somehow, I needed to find my balance again.

Of course, there are thousands of books and talk shows offering ways to straighten out your life, and experts of every variety claim to have the answers. Intinctively, though, I wanted to figure things out with the help of the one person in my life who had lived through the same things I had: my brother.

Micah had had his own struggles over the last three years, particularly about his faith. For the most part, he'd abandoned prayer, and discussing faith had become uncomfortable to him. His wife, Christine, had talked to me about her concerns a coup

le of times--she was devout in her Christian beliefs, as Micah himself had once been--and I slowly began to realize that somehow there was a chance we could help each other. And in that way, I began to think of the trip less as a journey around the world than a journey to rediscover who I was and how I'd developed the way I had.

When I reflected on my childhood, I usually recalled it as light without shadow, as if the dark edges never existed. Or if they did, they were something to be reveled in, like badges of honor. Dangerous events were transformed over the years into humorous anecdotes; painful moments were modified into sweet tales of innocence. In the past, when asked about my parents, I usually responded that my mom and dad were both ordinary and typical, as was my childhood. Lately, however, I've come to realize that while my comments were true in some ways, they rang false in others, and it wasn't until I had children of my own that I finally began to understand the daily pressures that must have plagued both of them. Parenthood is fraught with worry, and my parents--despite the long leash they gave us--no doubt worried about us frequently. But if raising children is difficult, I've learned that marriage is sometimes even more challenging, and in this, my parents' was no exception.

By early 1972, my parents were struggling to keep their household intact. We were children and were unaware of the details; all we knew was that my dad had begun whistling all the time, and by then, it had begun to take on ominous significance. The sound of those nameless melodies, with their pitch rising and falling, was the first of the warning signs of my father's anger that we children grew to recognize--DEFCON 1, if you will.

In DEFCON 2, mumbling would be added to the whistling and my dad would pace in circles, refusing to talk to anyone. DEFCON 3 was indicated by the actual thinning of his lips, and in DEFCON 4, his face would begin turning red. He was sometimes able to halt the eventual progression toward nuclear launch, but if he ever hit DEFCON 5--where he would curl his tongue against his bottom teeth so that his tongue protruded from his mouth, held in place with his top teeth, we kids knew our best option was one of two things: run or hide. We knew he'd be reaching for his belt, which had replaced the flyswatter as the instrument of punishment.