GRATEFUL FOR THE COLOR BLUE by Ellyn Wolfe
CHAPTER 1 INTUITION
August 25, 2002 Annisquam, Massachusetts
My intuition kicked in this morning with a message so clear it felt alive. “It’s time for you to rekindle your relationship with your brother,” it said and nothing more.
I’ve only had a couple serious instinctive hits like this across my lifetime. One wisely warned me to not get on an airplane. That was enough for me to realize, whatever it is, wherever it comes from, I need to pay attention and follow through.
Now my logical mind is racing to apply meaning, to find an explanation. I don’t know what the future holds, but apparently it involves something big for my brother and me. Maybe it’s related to the soul-searching I’ve been doing recently. If so, this will be a major piece. I’m ready to move forward in life with less baggage—baggage that has been weighing me down, like not seeing my brother for nineteen years.
CHAPTER 2 RECONNECTION
September 19, 2002 Portland International Airport, Oregon
When I see him, I can’t believe what my eyes are telling me. The signals my brain transmits are clear, but my mind is confused. I know I am seeing him, but it can’t be—my dad, dead now, oh, over ten years, is grinning and waving at me as he moves close enough to throw his arms around me.
His bright blue eyes are mine. I feel as if I am looking back at myself. They’re clear and deep, seeing more than the average set of eyes. He, too, is stunned and stares at me.
“I can’t believe it,” we both say at the same time.
“Mary and I figured it out last night. It’s been nineteen years.”
“Nineteen years. How is it possible it could be that long? It’s so good to be here and see you.”
My brain finally catches up with my eyes. “You look just like Dad.”
My brother Russell has evolved into my father as I remember him from so long ago. My brother is sixty. I’m almost fifty-four. How can that be? Aren’t we both still kids?
He tells me on the drive home to be prepared because Mary keeps two small goats inside the house. “It’s just something she does. I don’t know. It’s just Mary.”
“Oh. Goats.” My mind is prepared to accept anything because I don’t know my brother or my sister-in-law. After so much time, what can I know? To cover my discomfort, I stretch a story and tell him how an animal-loving friend took care of a horse and a few geese this past winter and, on a particularly cold night, let them come into the house. (It was a section of the barn attached to the house, but I don’t go there.)
“Same thing,” he says.
“Don’t they smell?”
“Sometimes, but I put up with it because she likes them.”
Yikes.
As he opens the door to his home in the woods, he warns about the dog. “She’s very protective, might take a bite. Be careful.” Out pops the snout of a wiggly, smiling pooch, Sage, who will lay down her life for a scratch behind her ears and under her chin. Then I hear the laugh I remember from childhood when Russ would watch Rocky and Bullwinkle and laugh ‘til there were tears. My brother is still a nut with a goofy sense of humor. There are no goats, no killer dog. We’re both still kids inside. We laugh, and some reconnection tension eases up.
In their kitchen (the goatless kitchen), over the stove is a poster-sized photograph of our dad with Russ and Mary’s only child, Russell Troy (RT to avoid father/son name confusion). They’re sitting on the porch, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, each looking as if life couldn’t get any better. Seeing my dad again brings tears. He was such a good guy—gentle, kind, loved his kids, but couldn’t express it. He expressed his love in the swing he made for us in the hawthorn tree, the wheelbarrow rides around the backyard, the doll clothes wardrobes with our names on the front that he built for me, my sister, and my three cousins who lost their own dad a few years before. Dad was pure of heart. Already I can see my brother appears to be so much like him.
How is it that Russ and I are old enough to have kids who are now adults? Time somehow stopped when I moved to Massachusetts, and he and Mary moved to Oregon. We lost touch. Can it be my kids, Rob and Shannon, are thirty-three and thirty, and RT is twenty-nine?
Growing up, my brother and I never got along. He’s six years older and was the highly revered first-born male child. I was fussed over as the baby.
He squeaked through high school, then entered the printing trade when I was in fifth grade. There may have been a learning disability that accompanied his “to hell with education” attitude, but no one knew about those things in the Fifties. I loved school, loved that my teachers knew so much and wanted to share that knowledge with me. Driving to school early on a cold wintry morning with my dad, I remember feeling excited seeing Ben Franklin Elementary in the distance. Its windows blazed light and beckoned me to come join in and leave the cold and dark behind.
I couldn’t wait to leave home for college and broaden my horizons beyond what I considered my limiting family with their old-fashioned views. Russell was all about tradition. He continued with the simple and familiar way of life we lived as children.
He choked me once, out by the apple tree just beyond the patio. It’s one of those freeze-frame moments in my life when I was truly frightened and one of many reasons I kept a distance.
Our teen years boil down to two degrading labels—he referred to me as “The Socialite,” and I called him “The Greaser.”
As adults, what we wanted from life sent us in opposite directions, and not talking contributed to the distance. I’ve read about other families who have had spats over something insignificant, causing them to polarize, deepen the rift with time, and then pass the feud along to their children. How ridiculous they are. I judge them as if I haven’t been doing the same thing.
After only a few hours of talking in his kitchen, I’m amazed at how differently I see him. In my mind Russell has evolved from the child I avoided, into a generous, sensitive, and fun-loving man. And maybe I have evolved too and can now see that he has always been this way, and it was our childhood struggles—my frustration at the special attention he had as the oldest and only boy in the family, and his frustration at the special attention I had as the baby—that colored our perspectives. As we trade stories over the next two days about ourselves and our children, the walls between us gently fall away, and a bond develops for the first time.
I fly home content with what we have achieved. But because of that intuitive message I got, part of me expected something more profound to happen. It didn’t. We reconnected, and I finally have a relationship with my big brother. And that’s enough.
The next eight months we carry on as normal siblings with phone calls, birthday cards, the usual. Little do we know this reunion is only groundwork for what is to come.
