Please Call Your Sister
A lamppost is a beautiful thing when it tells a story of love that won't give up.
Someone found the message Derek’s sister taped to a lamppost. Someone thought of her inching through holiday traffic or on a packed train from the 'burbs, phone in hand to catch the text that never arrived.
Someone pictured her buttonholing strangers: “Have you seen this man? He’s my brother.” The strangers can’t help the woman with the desperate eyes. They have one more stocking stuffer to buy, the holiday table to set, not a minute to lose getting home. This time of year in Toronto, darkness falls before 5 and Christmas trees twinkle in windows that frame scenes of domestic puttering at kitchen islands. Chop, swig, stir. Those not looking for a brother are cooking up seasonal cheer.
Someone knows every lamppost in the neighborhood, as dog walkers always do. Derek’s sister chose a lamppost on the boundary between sleek rowhouses with designer wreaths and hideaways frequented by the down and out. The men slumped on benches in the closest park have been on their way down for a while.
Who is Derek? What kind of fury or funk sent him off to points unknown? Someone remembers being young in a family riven by unspeakable sorrows that taunted and festered around Christmas. “The most wonderful time of the year,” sings Andy Williams in a hit that’s been wafting through tinseled aisles since around the time Someone discovered Bob Dylan. Someone never bought the Andy Williams line. Where there is compulsive drinking, there will be more drinking. Where there is abuse, more insults and blows. Where there is anguish, a deeper chasm ready to swallow the anguished.
Someone is a Steve Martin fan. Long before Only Murders in the Building; before L.A. Story, All of Me and much other merriment; before the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album and a slew of nominations for acting awards, there was a violent father whose beatings and rages drove Steve to cut himself off from the whole accursed family—a story he tells in a memoir, Born Standing Up. If there’s one joke in this book, Someone missed it. Steve Martin’s aim is not to make you laugh but to show you the twisted roots of all the art he’s ever made. He had an older sister who refused to be lost for good. Decades after he broke with the Martins, she called and said, “I want to know my brother.”
Someone reads notices on lampposts for the stories between the lines. It’s an impulse that can get out of hand. Maybe Derek’s family is nothing like the Martins. Maybe they are all kind people, confused and worn down by trying to help a child who, for now, will not be helped. Someone remembers the blinkered perspective of youth, when every disappointment seemed indelible and primal.
Someone is astonished to be thankful for seventy years of disappointments, wrong turns and losses that slip like notes to self into the pockets of a life. What to treasure, what to let go. First among treasured things is the love of people doing their imperfect best, which most of the time is good enough.
As Steve Martin’s father lay dying, he told his son he wished he could cry.
At first I took this as a comment on his condition but am forever grateful that I pushed on. “What do you want to cry about?” I said.
“For all the love I received and couldn’t return.”
Someone’s favorite flower is the bindweed, a tough little plant designed by nature to thrive in hard places. A downtown sidewalk is more porous than it looks, with microscopic cracks that admit the roots of the bindweed. The roots push and expand until the concrete buckles. Up comes a pale flower the size of a violet. Someone disagrees with Robert Burns. Love is not a rose but a bindweed.
For love of Derek, his sister came to Toronto and looked for him—quite a few times, by the sound of things. Maybe he never saw her plea: “We love you, miss you and want you to come home.” Someone saw, though, and answered with what might be called a prayer, although Someone is not the praying kind. A burst of longing wafted into the air and floated like a daydream of a letter bound who knows where:
Dear Derek,
A passing stranger knows that you are greatly loved. Please call your sister.
Hopefully yours,
Someone
Is there a Derek in your family (maybe even you)? Has love ever sent you on a quest for a lost family member? Do you find this post mostly sad or mostly hopeful? I’d love to know. Your comments and stories are among the great pleasures of creating Amazement Seeker, so bring 'em on. I do my best to answer every one and always smile when I see you answering one another.
Hmm... I wish it were that easy. My own sadness and disappointment concerning a family member would indeed be a sibling, an older sister with whom I was very close as child, but something changed, and I have long since given up trying to find that connection again. Sometimes it just can't be, and recognizing that is somewhat of a relief. I've tried and tried, but there is a gulf so wide between us and our visions of living now- coupled with probable resentment on her part that my life is full, rich with friends and love, music, and children-that I don't believe we can ever go back again. Beautiful essay, nonetheless, and I hope it urges someone else to try again.
Your post has me traveling down my own rabbit hole of brothers gone awry. I am the sister of two older brothers, both recovering alcoholics. My parents served in WWII came back to finish and graduate from college. They married at age 25, and even though my mother & father always held that it was best to wait till one was married until having sex, after my Mother's death I discovered that she was pregnant with my oldest brother when she and my dad said their vows. Till death do us part. They kept those vows, a fact that still amazes me for all the heartache they experienced in their own families and then the one they created. They were married nearly 50 years until my Mom died. They had been through so much (early deaths of 3 of their parents, the loss of a sibling in the war, being a shot down fighter pilot & prisoner, on and on) so that when they reached their 60s which proved not to be all they were cracked up to be, my Mom needlepointed a pillow that read "screw the golden years."
From a tender age, they assigned me the role of saving my brothers. I was not yet 11 when my eldest brother was arrested in Connecticut for selling a nickel bag of marijuana to an undercover agent. At the time the offense was a felony. If he and my parents agreed to him receiving psychiatric help in the form of spending a long stay at the state mental institution, the mandatory 5 year jail sentence would not be enforced. He was 16 at the time. I remember visiting him there, the sound of the locked metal doors being unlocked, the keys jangling, the smell of the hallways, and the metal doors slamming shut behind us. That was only the beginning of that brother's troubles. He was expelled from several schools and remained in trouble until he was 30 at which time a bouncer threw him across a dance floor which broke his arm, forcing him to leave the premises. The psychiatrist he was seeing back then said if he didn't stop drinking he'd be dead within that year. My other brother suffered from depression though truly no one paid much attention to mental anguish and suffering back then and in my family's case, the oldest brother took up so much oxygen, there just wasn't any left for the younger siblings, or anything else for that matter. Back then, the younger of the two brothers ran away from a boarding school he was attending. One seemingly ordinary day my parents loaded me in the car saying if I was with them my brother would come home that was if we could locate him. Sitting in the backseat of the car riding with my parents to find & save my brother seemed an incredibly sad and daunting endeavor which turned out to be true, as he didn't come with us that day. We met him beside an open field. We parked alongside the roadway, my parents begging him to come home. But he refused and instead we took pictures of him in that field, standing alone, hands in pockets, looking into the distance, a colorless photo on a sunless day. I went away to school too when it was clear that my brothers had blazed a wild & potholed path at our public high school which meant so many families knew to steer clear of ours even if theirs had that same or similar raw and wounded underbelly. It was the 60s after all. When I was done with schooling, I traveled across country to California and never went back home to live. Eventually I got a call from my parents. They were planning an intervention, would I come home and try with them to save him one last time. I arrived at midnight, secreted away at one of my mother's friends home. I was overcome with emotion, and wanted badly not to be anywhere but my parents' home. But as was the case in my family, whatever we were feeling, we meaning my mother and me, was put aside to accommodate what was deemed more important. The next day, we gathered in secret waiting for my brother to arrive. We sat in the living room, my oldest brother, my parents, and others who were important to that day's hoped for success. My dad had built a fire, the family dog was on the couch. My brother arrived and quickly learned what the day would hold. Each of us read our heart wrenching statements to him, telling him how we felt, how much he mattered to us and to others, how much we hoped he would take our love and advice and get into rehab which was arranged for him, how we felt he was destined to die otherwise. I watched as my father tended the fire, my mother doted on the dog. I wanted to scream. It remains one of the saddest days of my life even though, after the entire day of pleading with him, he agreed to go to rehabilitation and a recovery facility. Now, so many years later, he is still sober as is my other brother. But life has been anything but easy. He lives nearby me now. I continue to help him live, one day at a time.
Rona, I agree with you it is hard to share difficult experiences, especially family ones. But, sometimes it is a relief too, sad, and difficult, but the telling can feel like peeling back layers and layers of bloodied gauze to reach the wound desperate for air. I'm grateful for you and your sister's writing. You help us sometimes find a way.