Monday 7/16
Jul. 16th, 2012 11:07![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mapsedgeThat was an unexpectedly emotional start to my day.
Let me introduce you to my brother, Mike.
He GED'd out of high school because it wasn't challenging enough.
He joined the Marine Corps - during the Vietnam war no less - because they were the toughest, and rose to the rank of sergeant, though he never served overseas.
He chose not to become a drill instructor, and left the Marines to go to Annapolis and become an officer, but tired of the politics and so resigned the military.
After Annapolis, he grabbed a friend - John Merriman - and went around the world. Twice. Not flying from airport to airport, but driving, riding on steamers, walking. I have a picture of him on the shore of the Indian Ocean - or some body of water Over There. He's dressed in white pants and a white short sleeve shirt, walking away from the camera, framed by palm trees and the distant water. He looks for all the world like Jesus out for a stroll.
Returning home he went to med school, graduating from KU. He married his Chinese teacher, and did his residency in an inner city hospital in Chicago. Eventually he landed at George Washington University Hospital, became director of their family clinic. After several years he left that position to found a clinic for non-English speaking immigrants, working for all intents and purposes for free. He saved a lot of lives, there.
He died in 2003 after falling about forty feet into the dry bed of the Eerie Canal while training for the Marine Corps Marathon.
After our father died in 1984, Mike filled that role for me, though very quietly and from a distance. Though I rarely took him up on it actively, he was always there for me, by example if nothing else. When I think of what it is to be a man and a father, it's Mike I think of first.
If it's not clear already, I idolized the man. I realize that, like everyone, he had his faults. I just don't know what they were.
If you've read this journal over the years, you will have learned that I live in Missouri rather than Nebraska because my father was deeply in debt to some very bad people, and fled one winter's midnight to escape them. That story is told, fictionalized and much more interesting, in a novel Mike was working on when he died. It's a masterful piece of writing, reminiscent of Richard Brautigan but without RB's coarseness. In the narrative, Mike splits himself into two people, "John" and "Nikki", and tells their complex and deeply conflicted love story, a subtly disguised autobiography.
There was only one copy of the manuscript, and after he died his wife and daughter looked for it. My siblings and I looked for it among our own papers. It was never found and presumed lost.
This weekend, tired of muscling around stuff in the basement and tripping over boxes just to get to the freezer, I resolved to do some cleaning. Buried deep in a pile of papers I was sorting for recycling, I found it.
I found Nikki.
It (she?) was there, in the same blue file folder that Mike gave me a couple of years before he died.
I brought it to work, determined to scan it page by page until I had it done. The secretary heard my scanner, and told me she had a document feeder but didn't know how to use it. We traded: I showed her how, and she scanned the one hundred six pages for me. The teaching and the scanning were done in just under twenty minutes. Saved me a good six hours of work.
I got about nine pages of reading into it, hearing my brother's voice in the narrative, before I started to cry, so I'm going to leave it for a time when I feel a little stronger.
Let me introduce you to my brother, Mike.
He GED'd out of high school because it wasn't challenging enough.
He joined the Marine Corps - during the Vietnam war no less - because they were the toughest, and rose to the rank of sergeant, though he never served overseas.
He chose not to become a drill instructor, and left the Marines to go to Annapolis and become an officer, but tired of the politics and so resigned the military.
After Annapolis, he grabbed a friend - John Merriman - and went around the world. Twice. Not flying from airport to airport, but driving, riding on steamers, walking. I have a picture of him on the shore of the Indian Ocean - or some body of water Over There. He's dressed in white pants and a white short sleeve shirt, walking away from the camera, framed by palm trees and the distant water. He looks for all the world like Jesus out for a stroll.
Returning home he went to med school, graduating from KU. He married his Chinese teacher, and did his residency in an inner city hospital in Chicago. Eventually he landed at George Washington University Hospital, became director of their family clinic. After several years he left that position to found a clinic for non-English speaking immigrants, working for all intents and purposes for free. He saved a lot of lives, there.
He died in 2003 after falling about forty feet into the dry bed of the Eerie Canal while training for the Marine Corps Marathon.
After our father died in 1984, Mike filled that role for me, though very quietly and from a distance. Though I rarely took him up on it actively, he was always there for me, by example if nothing else. When I think of what it is to be a man and a father, it's Mike I think of first.
If it's not clear already, I idolized the man. I realize that, like everyone, he had his faults. I just don't know what they were.
If you've read this journal over the years, you will have learned that I live in Missouri rather than Nebraska because my father was deeply in debt to some very bad people, and fled one winter's midnight to escape them. That story is told, fictionalized and much more interesting, in a novel Mike was working on when he died. It's a masterful piece of writing, reminiscent of Richard Brautigan but without RB's coarseness. In the narrative, Mike splits himself into two people, "John" and "Nikki", and tells their complex and deeply conflicted love story, a subtly disguised autobiography.
There was only one copy of the manuscript, and after he died his wife and daughter looked for it. My siblings and I looked for it among our own papers. It was never found and presumed lost.
This weekend, tired of muscling around stuff in the basement and tripping over boxes just to get to the freezer, I resolved to do some cleaning. Buried deep in a pile of papers I was sorting for recycling, I found it.
I found Nikki.
It (she?) was there, in the same blue file folder that Mike gave me a couple of years before he died.
I brought it to work, determined to scan it page by page until I had it done. The secretary heard my scanner, and told me she had a document feeder but didn't know how to use it. We traded: I showed her how, and she scanned the one hundred six pages for me. The teaching and the scanning were done in just under twenty minutes. Saved me a good six hours of work.
I got about nine pages of reading into it, hearing my brother's voice in the narrative, before I started to cry, so I'm going to leave it for a time when I feel a little stronger.