Novel Treatments / Pockets of Change part ten and end

Once I sold newspaper subscriptions in the meanest Tampa Housing projects , unworried because my boss, Dan,  was always able to keep me at ease, somehow—I knew I was safe. I’d seen him respond to a coked-up black stranger waving a cocked and loaded gun at him with “Get that gun out of my face ; I can’t talk with a gun  in my face.” The authority and mellowness all rolled into the voice were the perfect combo to make the guy sit down and shut up--usually really stupid; you never show a gun at someone unless you’re ready to use it. But in our case it was good because now we knew what he came with and that he was all bluster. But anyway I knew I could trust Dan--he and I would take these swamps behind the Mall on with his mortorcycle and lose and wheel a muddy choppper a mile or more, or lock the keys in his car and walk 6 miles, but we always were like blessed.
I had another friend I had an even richer experience with--running a red light, he pulled into a corner gas station and going 45 mph got between two or three pumps on his side and 3 on the other side so close my tires were on the cement stand the pumps were up on, impossibly missed shearing off part of a parked truck at one of the pumps and dodged a gas truck turning in, hit the road  by passing between two cars so close together I was sure the outside rearview mirror on my side scraped the car all the way down if his wasn’t scraping the other’s, and got us out of the path of a car with headlights aligned with ours. He shut off the engine and I heard--me, who thought at least, that he’d known what he was doing through every fantastic life-saving maneuver, heard him say,”I can’t believe we just came out of that alive.”
I realized this man was no Dan. I explain so you understand why I would go door-to door in the projects alone for Dan.  (He showed me his gun, I just don’t remember if I made him). He sat in his Tampa Tribune van and all his new, low-IQ (or why didn’t they have jobs?) recruits lined benches on both sides and hopped out where he told them. He was real good at getting team spirit up, making everyone feel like they knew everyone else, like he did. I was to go with this blond Dan was wondering if he was giving lots of freebies away to friends and other no-no s. The blond didn’t know I knew Dan, and thought I’d come by way of the same ad in the paper he’d responded to, but day two he didn’t show. A lot of his new people were black, but Dan, who also made very good decisions, put me in a section of  College Hill alone.
I soon saw why (maybe). Every door that was answered was answered by a woman with babies. I hadn’t thought about it, but America wasn’t going to pay employable young men to sit around and watch TV. The projects were incredibly safe.
Except that I was hounded by 3 good-looking guys my age who whistled me over like a dog as they strolled across the grass-less yard the families shared, near 3 broken swings.
My employer (not Dan; he was just a driver) had the exceptionally bright idea to distribute colorful plastic tumblers, to those who paid for subscriptions, then and there, which meant youths wandering through housing complexes staggering under stacks of cups. (When the paper came around my neighborhood selling subscriptions, I asked,”Where are  my cups?”
They’d never heard of them.
“You’re getting 15% off the newstand price,” one said hopefully.)
The youths in the projects that day told me I should give them  their free yellow, red, green, blue,pink, purple, grey, and orange cups (8 to a household, another bright idea), and newspaper, as a teeny tiny start at reparations for what I did to them for so long.
“I’m not 200 years old,” I said.”You might be.”
“It’s for what your people did to mine, see,” one pressed.
“Well, guess what. In 1915 my people had never set foot in America in their lives.” I was happy to burst their bubble.
My people enlarged since then.
Other than some confusing back-and-forths by all sides to Kansas City (where they never meet up ), I seem to be French and a Young. A Young seems to be a Michigan woodsman for 4 generations before me. Who they were before then is anybody’s guess, but on Grandpa’s mother’s side—lordy.
Sarah  Alice Browning-Lionberger.  No one has pictures of any of her children, or her 11 sisters before they were 70. Grandpa seemed to have a need to rectify this by producing prodigical pounds of photographs of his own wife and kids, with an eye for art, so that an arm makes a quirky tree branch, too. I like his work, but want to see him and Cy at 12, too. It didn’t happen.                                                                                                                                                                                                                           This could be a consequence of their poverty, or all those yard sales and caboose rides out of town. Or maybe C.H. lost their home and everything in it and that’s the trouble between them all. But there’s a photographic blackhole.  
In all his mother’s pictures, she looks the same—black, thick-framed eyeglasses, wide mouth with thin lips, always shut tight, heart-shaped face, white bun, low forehead. And the 3 to 6 sisters with her have the same identity,but taller, but dark-haired, but wrinkled. All of them side-by-side look like a picture of a group of owls. It’s the owl-eyes.
This is a little girl who came from class and gentry and married a donkey and lost her self-respect. Her remnants are almost exclusively indications of a massive search she undertook to proove she was somebody. Charles Henry had done a good job of proving she wasn’t. Alice fretted. The 11 sisters weren’t a big help--the first was 22 years her senior, and each subsequent one two years later, so that when she was 53, her sisters were  75, 73, 71, 69, 67, etc. The seven youngest stuck together--Ella, Florence, Emma, Ollie, Mary, Lena, and Alice. When Alice was 2, for example, they were 4, 6, 12, 14, 16, and 20. The other four had married, moved away, and were mothers, and never lived in a house with Alice.
The 12 sisters were born and raised in St.Louis, Missouri by a preacher. Alice’s  name was Sarah Alice Browning-Lionberger and she kept both surnames for a long time, demonstrating pride. A visitor recalled a gaggle of girls chasing a turtle, catching it by a foot or neck with a loop in a rope, and dragging it home for Mama to make turtle soup.
Two little girls had died--the ones 6 and 8 years older than Alice--named Oleaugh and Mary Caroline, when they were 4 and 2, and the next two babies had been given their names again, even though the entire family had known Ollie #1 for 4 years.  At least Alice had escaped that bit Of bizarreness. Her grandparents were dead by her day but her mother and father told her of the Lionbergers, how they came to America from England in the 1620’s, took up a huge claim but left for awhile because the Indians were bad, making sure the English had to camp on the polluted part of the Jamestown river. They returned and reclaimed their land  when “all was better”,and these fancy people had a deed signed on sheepskin by Lord Fairfax. They were big landowners, the elite.
The Brownings were just as exemplary; Alice’s mum was Mary Ann Browning, whose great-grandfather times a mouthful had come from England in the 1620s. The first, an uncle, William, came to Jamestown, then called College Lands, and moved on to a nearby town. A few years later, 1922, his younger brother John sailed over from Gravesend, England--where Pocahontas died-- with his sons, ages 7 and 10. Why no wife, no other kids? History suggests that the southern part of England was swampy and infested with malaria and T.B. Maybe he fled here after losing his loved ones. Meanwhile, Alice’s sisters tell the press that the Lionbergers came here for religious freedom. Several reasons, evolving into one united purpose; the preservation of that family. William was one of the principle men of the colony. My great grandfather times ten was a burgess of Culpeper County, one of Elizabeth City County, and then of Culpeper again, from 1629-1632.
The boy named William, who came here at age 7, is the one we come from. He has a son John who has a son John and down it goes. My  great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, John Jr., married in Jamestown about 1696, and had 7 sons at least, one of whom was Frances Sr, born 1700.
Frances, Sr., my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, was born in Caroline County, Va., and lived to be 75. He was deeded 250 acres in Spottsylvania County in 1724. In 1735, he was granted 40 acres in St. Mark’s Parish in the county of Orange in the Dominion of Virginia, by George the Second “of Great Britain, France and Ireland”. A part of Old Orange County became Culpeper County in 1749 and in 1833 a part of Culpeper County became Rappahannock County. The lands patented as above stated were afterwards known as the Browning district. They were located at the headwaters of Battle Run, and on the north side of Gourdvine Creek, parts of the Rappahannock River. In 1747 he was granted 2 tracts: of 100 acres in North Little Fork and 430 acres in Culpeper County. He married Elizabeth Lloyd of Maryland in 1723 and they had a baby every two years for the next 20, a total of 9 children. The first was named Francis Jr.—born right away, in 1724. The rest were Nicholas, John, Jacob, Edmund, Caleb, Ruth, and Mary.

My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Jacob Browning, born about 1736 in Culpeper, married Eizabeth Bywaters in 1758, had 14 children, born a year apart except for a one-year break between the two oldest girls, Mary and Sarah. Jacob Browning was one of the nineteen men enrolled with his brother, John, in the militia of Culpeper County Va., as a foot soldier in March 1756. His father, Francis Sr., supposedly served in the Revolutionary War, too, and managed to accumulate over 900 more acres in his 40-some years.
Jacob Browning as said had 14 kids: Samuel, George, Edmund, Jacob, Lloyd, Mary, Sarah, Delilah, Betsey, Thomas, Edith, Jane, Nellie, and Annie. His third son, Edmund, was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Edmund was born in Culpepper County in 1761 and married Sarah Allen of Pottawatamie County, Iowa in 1790. They had 7 children--David, Allen, John, Nancy, Clarissa, Jonathan and James Green. I’m  descended from the oldest: David, born in 1791. Edmund was a farmer who moved to Tennessee and had and raised his kids there. He lived to be 75 years old and was noted as a fine violinist. One of his sons, John, moved to Salt Lake City and was the father of John Moses Browning, the inventor of the Browning machine gun and so many other weapons -- he’s got more patents for weaponry than any body else (still). The above is all in Su. Or Le. Himmings Statistics at large—Vol.VII p.22: Vol.III, p.128: and Vol.1, pp.139 and 148, as penned in her approved application for DAR status by a great-granddaughter of Jacob Browning, and in “The Chronicles of Border Warfare” by Alexander Scott Withers. Sui. You try to read her writing. I have the application. (It was approved.)

My great-great-great grandfather, David Browning, married Vasti West in 1811 and they had 13 children. Mary A. was born in 1828. Mary A. Browning was my great-great grandmother. She married Emmanuel Lionberger in 1847, at the age of 19. They had 12 children within the next 22 years, with my great-grandmother Alice being the last one. All were girls.
The Brownings accumulated a lot of land but with each of 7 sons having 7 sons, their inheritances probably came down to a rock apiece. They had a plantation and in 1837,”for religious reasons”, set their slaves free. (That Browning was a preacher, too. Several were.)
I sit at a table with letters in Alice’s and Eva’s penmanship all around me, revisiting Alice. Here she is, aware she’s got commendable ancestors and wanting to proove so badly that the genes didn’t miss her, but her husband’s been making her look like a washerwoman. Her search for her roots is so obvious among all the paperwork she’s saved. A newspaper article from the Kansas City Star saying that the “seven sisters” reuniting are related to “the poet” Browning.
A letter from a Lionberger she located stating that “A great many Lionbergers lived in Berne in 1875, as the old men among them whom I consulted assured me that their ancestors had always lived there”. This must have been a bum steer. Another letter, different writing, includes,”We Lionbergers are probably Alsatians of mixed French and German blood.” She also kept a cut-out newspaper article about a Lionberger who was an assistant attorney general of the United States during McKinley’s administration.

When she looked for proof for good genes, it didn’t seem to occur to her that they walked behind her. One of her children co-founded one of Michigan’s most popular banks when I was growing up. Another got a college degree, with honors, and made two inventions that made stoves work better, and a third was so revered that 47 years after his death, the public can, from their homes, buy waterbottles, fishing caps and photo albums  with his initials beside a fat rainbow trout slicing through  the river yelling “Trout Unlimited!” It would make her smile—her sister Lena had to rear her middle three kids for her; Paul’s middle name of Holden (and the “H” in PHY) came from Lena’s first husband, who died, named “Uncle Hody”, Holden Cully.( She then married a Baptist preacher who I don’t doubt had a hand in raising Ben and the girls.)Love ya, sis!
And the genes haven’t gone “out” yet; her son’s son was a stockbroker, if only long enough to show that he could do it, and also knew every dang bird species in the world, just like her son did--and that’s over 4,000 species, of which Paul Anthony had seen at least 1,800--unfortunately, he trusted his life list to a computer program called Avi, and my 13-year-old daughter was told she could use his computer as long as she didn’t delete that program, but she secretly did to free up space, taking with it his bird list and what he’d seen in each state and country he’d been to in his life. (Which would duplicate birds seen elsewhere sometimes). I remember there were up to 4,060 species, I believe, and he’d seen just short of half. I know he is railing in his grave at that little hard-headed girl, so sure “you can just put the CD of the program back in anytime”, unaware that she deleted all his data, unaware of its significance, thinking only of how much more valid her purpose--to send all her old friends from her old school 100 digital pictures of her a day--is.
I remember being 13. But I was 18 then. At 13, I was still a responsible girl, secretary of my Junior Achievement club and about to be faced with my first real moral conflict when the guy I’d taken a shine to for over two years, miraculously in my J.A. club, pushed me to cover while he took the booth next to ours’ money he’d watched the very nice girl, who he was very pleasant to, hide. (I went somewhere in the middle. I told the guy, “Sometimes  we look far away when it can be the people closest to us,” with a look at the thief. The guy later thanked me for helping him get his money back.
“I didn’t do anything,”I said quickly. “You’re mistaken.” And I steered clear of him and in fact all of them--I quit J.A., which had been promising me a better future--I was one of five  finalists for the Southeastern Michigan Junior Achievement Secretary of the Year in 1969 or 1970.)
It didn’t help to be put on that spot like that. This was a guy that made me red when he looked my way but actually knew nothing about me--I was not inclined to go around saying “I have a ski boat I can use on a great lake any time I have a driver and a spotter--you’re invited” or “I have this neat bedroom you can look out at night and see deer at the salt lick in the full moon light.” Like Dad, I didn’t tell anybody anything and more or less didn’t even realize it. I probably would not have recieved evidence my heart-throb was a thief if he had known we had money. How many teen thieves pick obviously upper-middle class teens to confide a lack of values to? I would think you’d expect at minimum to be judged critically.
And I don’t know how proud one can be for turning in everybody who’s “bad”, either. I never told my mom about Walter Reuther’s pilot’s sister. But it was a shock to be expected to just keep my mouth shut and not tell somebody nice where their possession had gone. And why do I owe someone who’s snaky my allegiance over someone who I like? Nothing ever said I did—the dude must have been counting on a passion he was never going to see.
There’s a lot more gray, perhaps, as you age, but I ‘m a Young, and I win stuffed animals at every  state fair booth where they guess your age—I’ve never looked it. And I haven’t gone there in my head. Like Dad, I remember everything, lots of things, including where I was standing and where the other was when it went down, and I probably had the capacity to learn the birds, but I had my own interests, at one point my hopeless romantic setting me on religious stained glass with a fever.
Leaded, hand-painted glass is known to last over a thousand years, making all else as dust, to me. The fact that we had to bleed sweat and tears to live off of it was pure and good in God’s eyes. All the people with double-entries, high ceilings, steel appliances and sunken tubs were going to go to hell because if we all lived conservatively more of us could live better. I basically made up my own religion, and it called for honesty at its core. When I met my husband I told him I could overlook a lot but never a lie. Having grown up with a liar (Debbie, of course!), I never wanted to know one again.
Frankly I felt lucky when I saw attached twins who lived, 9, 13-year-olds sharing legs and arms, their faces very close together. My worst nightmare. My twin had had an uncontrolled jealousy from at least age 4, when the parents remember one of us pushing the other down the basement stairs because she was in front waving goodbye to Daddy and the other one was jealous.  They always said “one of you” as I brushed back my hair to show the scar. Debbie and I both remember it well. When she knocked me down, I came right back up and pushed her (but Mom caught her).Debbie of course wasn’t going to correct the “one of you” vision, although she freely admitted it to me. As she grew older she learned that it was best never to admit anything from the start, as if the people who saw it had gone on 10-second LSD trips and missed what really happened. When we went out west at 12, she fell off the pool slide stairs at a motel in Needles. Debbie going down a pool slide is an image I’ve never had and wonder if she was trying to come back down the ladder and that’s when she fell. She said it broke her arm; Dad ignored her because we had no health insurance out there and he had no idea where a doctor was. At Disney World there was a sign saying “Nurses’ Tent” right after Dad paid for us all to go in for the day, and Debbie obstinately walked straight over there, which was soon calling for Dad; then we kept seeing them waiting in the tent, half a day. She returned to us with a sling and a dislocated elbow that would work itself out when she played, the doctor told Dad. Too bad she didn’t play.  From then on, if we were painting the dock 4 years later and quickly neded a rag, or her dry hand to hand us a tool, she said haughtily,” You know I can’t bend my arm out” as the paint ran down the boat or whatever.”Ah ha! Caught you!” Tony would yell at the grocery when he saw her unthinkingly reach out with her full arm extended to move the comic book selection around.
“No I didn’t; you must have thought you saw something but I  guarentee I can’t unbend my arm that far out,” Debbie said. Tony reiterated that he’d seen it and she sniffed that his eyes must be playing tricks on him, then. And that was her approach the rest of her life--she was there too and didn’t hear or see what you say you did. The only people never recipients of such outrageously irritating conversations were our parents. After her death, Dad gave me a box with dozens of notes in it from Mike, saying things like “She’s got the kids--you’re fooling yourself if you think you’re gonna get the house cuz of that--that’s why SHE will--you have to make her name literally mud. Poop.”
I can’t imagine when such notes were passed, but I remember once over my parents’ home intercom--enlisting Mike first to go around and turn every one in every room to loud), she played a tape of a message I left her on the phone. It did not benefit me. But her action  would have been booed by any of the 5000 respectable, classy friends I’d had in my life, for it’s reasons. Mike had done some physical work for Dan, who was by then on portable oxygen. Debbie grabbed me aside and dug her fingers into my arm, telling me not to give Mike any money for the work--he’d just spend it all on beer--did I understand? I asked what to pay him. She thought I could say I gave her the money to control. I told her that if a person labors they earned that money, not a controlling other half. She said to give him “pills.” Then he came in suspiciously (he was paranoid, for real) and we stopped talking. On the phone I’d told her I only got exactly enough pills for the 30 days I got them for and never had one left over--that it didn’t work that way. When you are tolerant to a pain narcotic you take it at regular intervals--stopping when pain stops is not an option. That’s why certain drugs were only used for long term impairment. Other pain pills are only for a few weeks and you can stop anytime with no withdrawel symptoms. “The only pills I could spare Mike are things he wouldn’t want,” I said. “He’s not busting his ass for one Soma.” The Soma, a muscle  relaxer only looked at as an abused drug in Florida, came up because he’d pulled a muscle moving a 100-pound window  and asked for relief. Debbie chopped and cut the message up so that I was saying Mike could have Soma from me.”The only pills I could spare Mike--he’s going to want a lot more Soma.” I jumped up in horror--Debbie had asked me to give him pills, and was now playing an”incriminating” proof of it to her parents, minus her role. Sure enough, Mom walked up to my seat at he table and said, “Why would you want your sister’s boyfriend to stay on drugs, Deanne? Why, when you know how long she’s been praying—we’ve all been praying--for him to quit? Why are you against Debbie and Mike succeeding? Are you that jealous?”
Dad said,”I’m thoroughly fed up with your inexplicable jealousy,” and let Mom kick me out.
She was out of it that day, swatting my legs with her cane, “Go on, get out of here, you’re going to go to hell” when we’d all dashed there to escape a hurricane in Tampa.
We’d spent all our money on gas to get there; Dad had been going to lend us the gas home. But I wasn’t going to ask him and hear him hate me. We stopped at the first unboarded-up gas station we saw and gave our new $20 mag lite with new batteries to a redneck for $6. That got us home, where we weathered out the hurricane. ( A tree branch that was usually way up in the sky dipped low enough to snatch my prescription eyeglasses and rise back up with them. Two weeks later they were hanging on a branch at car-window level and I got them back. )
The silence between my parents and I  had started with Tony’s death—a time I stuck my nose in, told Grandma I feared he was on drugs because of that three-necked beaker Dad had found in the toolshed at the cabin while Tony was uncharacteristically insensitive to our pursuit of wildlife  with his obnoxious, off-key singing.
Listen to this, Sister—I made it just for you.
And he’d put a tape of his guitar solos in Dad’s player and burn up the batteries and I wouldn’t hear a thing. Now I think of him playing it over and over, likig it, remembering my musician friends in Tampa ( Johnny G Lyon was his favorite but he knew Weird Al’s guitarist and bass player and the roadie for the Bellamy Brothers), thinking this was up that alley and I’d really like it; rising, turning on the tape recorder, picking up the guitar, playing it for me. My Tony, standing at the marina ramp with me when we were 14 and 11, collecting money--there’s no way it was my idea, but he was 11!--running alongside me on identical snowmobiles, toward places we’d never been, taking hills sideways for the thrill, “following” (OK, chasing) a black bear we found at the dump for an hour. Tony, 6, chasing me and the neighbor girls around with sticks wrapped thickly with spider webs, crying that he was going to bloody murdalize us. Playing Combat in the dtches and 101 trees at dark, him a Kraut, me an American. Tony who, the night Terry died, couldn’t sleep and so while the pastor of our Catholic Church, our neighbor 2 doors down and his wife--a family that filled a whole pew every Sunday--, Dad’s  right-hand-man Tonto I mean Chief, and his wife, Quinelle, and Dad, sat in the living room trying to reconcile Mom and Dad, busted into Dad’s desk and took his silver coin collection, the key finally accessible on the keychain Dad had dropped on the kitchen table when he heard the news. Tony who told me the next day that he hadn’t been able to sleep all night and thefew times he did a moment, dreamed he was talking to debbie and then Mom was coming down to the basement asking him where Debbie was (which is what she did with Terry;”He’s dead,”Tony replied, continueing his homework without looking up)and him saying he didn’t know but thinknig then that he’d just covered her with a sheet, but saying he didn’t know. “I think it means I killed Terry,” he said.
I wasn’t hearing him. “No, you just feel tremendous guilt because Mom kept shaking you while you tried to give mouth-to-mouth, going, ‘faster!’, and each time his head that you had turned to the side went upright, until he choked on the apple. It was her fault but she’’s too weak to handle that.” Tony had passed CPR three times. Now he agreed;”I remembered as soon as I layed him down that with kids you do it different but Mom wouldn’t let me , she kept pushing on me, grabbing my shoulders.” I know when Terry began to vomit apple Tony continued to give mouth-to-mouth, this to a boy who’s spit, to Tony,  made a full glass of milk poisoned.
Tony never mentioned thinking he’d killed him again, but he very quickly became self-abusive, right when Debbie and Freddy needed him to. I relived it all many times before I wondered if Tony was hiding something from himself or not even hiding it. It was an accident but it would have been seen by everyone as murder.  Puling the sheet over the head while denying kowledge of the person’s whereabouts. Substitute: Putting the belt around the neck and nonchalantly saying “he’s dead” when asked, not really thinking so, but moments later, knowing he’d killed him.
No one will ever know.

I sensed something and I tried to intervene. Times when calls to Tony netted strangers who went off to get him and forgot I was on the line, a time when Tony caled me and said “Congratlate me, sister—I knew you’d appreciate how hard it was. I made it all the way home!”
“All the way home from where?” I said wearily.
“From the cabin.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“With a concussion it is.”
“You have a concussion?”
“I was going to offer the other driver money but we both got out with money in our hand.”
“What does that mean?”
“He didn’t have insurance, either. I guess I should have seen a doctor instead of taking the money. But, I made it, little sister!”
“What part of you ?” I said.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Does Dad know you were up there?”
“Dad’s gone. He’s been gone for about 4 weeks.”
“He doesn’t know you got hit by a car?”
“I had to get that sucker out of the ditch before the law found it,” Tony said, his voice sounding different, but I was unable to pinpoint what drug he might be under the influence of. I’d only tried pot and beer and my deliberate overdose, purchased with a twenty-dollar bill from a high crew who picked me up hitchhiking.
That scene was funny in itelf. They asked me if I knew anyone who wanted to buy quualudes when I got in. There were girls and boys; I wasn’t afraid. I asked how many they had. They said how many you want? and someone handed me a baggie of them. It was by no means full, but I took a handful and put them in one pocket, a handful and put them in the other pocket, then bought 20. I had no plan at the moment—a guy I’d stood outside the jail to wave at and hear my name boom out on the street 5 floors below had gotten out of jail after some 136 days and while we were at a bar, left with the girl he was dancing with. I was really naive. That that was how people did drug deals was not yet in my conceptulaization of guys and girls. I was an Archie comic book reader who’d been burned once to find that Micky Dolenz, my hero, had hidden his marraige to to keep his girl fans hoping. Spent some time hoping on a local guy to have him leave the bar he brought me to--without me. This was after the pain caused by my junior high crush turning out to be a snake-charmer. Entwined in it all was the loss of Terry, Debbie’s bold new direction and how she posited it to the parents one way but the rest of us saw something else entirely, and Dad’s coldness to me as I exited high school with factory jobs and a cocky attitude to hide my fearful one. I assumed he knew he’d “drank up my college education” so we never discussed it. He liked to say with some bitterness,”You’re the only gal I know who has three class rings from 3 different schools.” It wasn’t true--I had two, from two. But he got quite a kick in saying it, and this alienated me more.
I still had all these round white “Rohrer” on me when the West Bloomfield Hills police pulled us. Unlike my friends, these peopel gave up easy. The driver said he had no license so they were busted; dudes and a chick in back toking a j just kept on toking so they could be as high as possible in jail.It was hopeless to get out of it so I swallowed each pill, one by one.  I was going to eat soap at the police station and vomit it up but a police lady accompanied me to the restroom and I couldn’t. The police station Made me call my parents to come get me. They said no and I better be home by midnight or I didn’t have a home. I said I’d just taken a drug-overdose and if they didn’t get me right away (we were 15 minutes apart) I’d be dead  before 12 o’clock. They said good and I walked out to Woodward and stuck out my thumb. That’s the last thing I remember--I know I was wobbling by the time I approached the highway--I probably had seconds of concious life after that. Some boys brought me into the downtown Detroit hospital and said they found me on a park bench but I recalled opening the passenger door of a car of wobbly faces…I had not been violated.  
I did tell Dad about Tony and drugs first.  There had been a day--one day--when marijuana was legal in Michigan while the state’s Congress waited to reconvene to word the law properly. Dad and a buddy came to pick me up. I was used to these Dad buddies—everyone liked him wherever he went. But this one began to strike me as young for Dad. He was a college professor and had pot and betal nut leaves.Usually they weren’t so into other cultures.
The nuns had announced on the P.A. as school let out that the same rules for smoking cigarettes held for smoking marijuana. One or two brazen girls with life-long nun issues stopped by the principle’s office and the headmistresse’s office and showed them rolled joints, then stuck them behind their ears. A resounding whoop went up when the nun first began, “As most of you know by now, the Michigan mariuana laws were struck down today…”
So I got in Dad’s car and said,”Pot’s legal today.”
“That’s what he’s been trying to tell me all day,” Dad said. The buddy asked me to roll a joint. I didn’t know the first thing about it. But as I tried to wrap the pot instead of rolling it, Dad looked over his shoulder and said “Surprise of surprises—she even knows how to roll the damn things.”
The betal-nut paper ruined it and Dad and I got headaches within 3 tokes. The professor was into the tribe he specialized in that used betal nut and did a lot of talking about their belief systems ansd purposes for betal nut. We sat there with aching heads,bored and depressed. From then on we both told others, “No thank you—it doesn’t do anything for me.”
Like my singular experience with the tranquilizor quualude, Dad had done speed in the service. He came to the kitchen table where I was having a cigarette, after Debbie, 16,  had arrived home from  a skating rink extremely talkative and ready to go off into any new subjects immediately. Her pupils were dilated and as soon as he mentioned it, she made a beeline for her room. To me he said,”I’m not new to speed, Deanne. They gave it to us in the service to keep us awake on long missions. I know what your sister is on.”
But when I tried to hint that Tony was on drugs, Dad got mad. Tony was a junior.(PAY, Jr.) He had a BA in organic chemistry. He’d been teaxhing undergraduates for 2 years and this spring was to get his Masters. Dad didn’t want to know things weren’t as good as they sounded.
So I told Grandma.” Please talk to Tony,” I said. “He respects you more than anyone else and would listen to you.”
Grandma called Dad, all upset. “No he’s not on drugs,”Dad soothed her.”It ’s more likely that Deanne is. Tony’s got a nice car—Deanne never did take care of money right. I don’t know what it is about her siblings’ success that urges her to try to destroy their reputations.”
Within 2 weeks Tony was dead, official cause, inhalation of nitrous oxide. Grandma called Dad : Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We didn’t know.”
“Deanne tried to tell me. You called her a liar.”
I reckon Dad wished he could have forgotten that one.
Life can be funny, silly, dis-organized; it can be brutal.
Debbie needed a liver transplant just as her home was foreclosed on because federal guidelines establishing disability rules for her disease require one to be too close to death to recover. It takes 8 months or more after applying to get Medicare and Social Securuty Disabilty benefits, too. Then she had to pick an HMO. Mom’s and Dad’s said it did liver transplants at the major transplant facilities here. It turned out to be one of those “Don’t let that patient get that operation no matter what ” situations. At a transplant hospital you check in for 5 to 10 days and get all the medical tests down then to see if you qualify . Her HMO said it could get each of her tests cheaper—sometimes sixty cents cheaper, Dad calculated, and sometimes by giving the wrong tests, then having to give the right ones at a cost higher than the transplant facility’s charge. Each test took an initial consultation with the specialist to explain what and why, with usually a 3-week wait, and the test itself, a 3-week wait after the consultation. All along this route every friggin doctor told Debbie this was highly unusual. What it did was make 2 weeks’ of tests take over 8 months and by then she was too weak to survive surgury.
Debbie, you see, had tried shooting up heroin at 17 or 18 and was then dying of the subsequent hepatitis C. It takes 20 years to manifest itself, and she never drank alcohol in her life except for the few times she had tequila as a newlywed, or she probably would have gone sooner.
She left my daughters a letter about how could she let the immature 16-year-old she was make decisions for the 49 -year-old her? At 16 she had no concept of living after 50 as having any vaalue and now at 49 she wanted to live another 30 years but she’d already decided it didn’t matter at 16.  What right did that 16-year-old have to decide she had to die now? The idea of even getting the guy she loved at 16 and having bliss forever with him gave her no reason to need more than twice the years she’d already lived.  The letter had to be sure to mention that if it could keep my daughters from making the same mistake, her life wouldn’t have been in vain. She never thought right. If neither was ever going to do drugs in the first place (and why? They had two loving parents), is she ready to default to “my life was in vain?”
It was very clear to Dad and Dan, Mike and I that Debbie was either going to miraculously get a transplant, or die. We all cared, especialy about what it was doing to Dad, who’d moved her into his and Mom’s home and was driving her everywhere, missing months of pre-paid gym usage and the football season, spending hours a day in waiting ooms and emergancy rooms. You couldn’t take the job off his shoulders—he was for some reason determined to carry her to her wheelchair,  alone be the pusher, make all her appointments and get all the doctor calls and speak to them all in place of Debbie; ignorant of transplant center rules that the candidate must have a good support system, 10 people are great, less than 4 a forget it, he walked into the transplant center and  bragged,”I’m the support team of one.”
Her freqent accidents in bed compounded by an excruciating hospital-born bowel infection had us all exhausted by it all--she was entering a hospital every 6 days and demanding company;”I don’t want to die alone--please!” And the hospitals were from 1 to 3 hours drive for us. Her HMO plan had her pay the first 5 days of hospitalization and picked up the full tab from day 6 on. So her primary doctor always told her on Day 5 that she was being released and if she still had complications, to come in through the E.R. in a day or two. She’d protest she wasn’t ready to go home (“They were going to show mw how to use the bag in my side”) and her primary care doc would say,
” My company thinks you can’t get any more benefit from being here.” Once a doctor there had suspected that horrid bowel infevtion and ordered a test to see. They released her before the results came back. She was back in a week—Thanksgiving night, extreme diarhhea after one spoon of mashed potaotes, sobbing in pain and for ruining Thanksgiving,her last, for us all. That doctor noted he’d odered the test and it had come back positive the day they’d released her without  addressing it at all. He was furious.He said the system was too broken for him, the profits of the HMO CIOs taking precedence over common sense and life.
And other bad things happened to her. As a U.S. Senator decreed our responsiblilty to the most fragile lives in a bid to keep Terri Sciavo on life support, Debbie lay in a nursing home not 35 miles away, no cameras and press crushing hers, no one there at all to say, “well, this one, she sings 5 verses of “How Great Thou Art” without getting a word wrong and did a self-portrait in water-colors  yesterday of a totally spazzed human in shock and circles what she wants to see in the TV Guide and woofed down a hot apple pie when her twin got her one from McDonalds.” There was no life-support in the room. Nothing to save her if she choked on the apple pie or fell and hit her head. You don’t come out alive, so there’s nothing to save you; it doesn’t matter how you die.
We  got her out of there, but they lied. The lady told me and Debbie and my kids and their Dad that first days he came to that she was on pain meds and she bet she was in pain huh well here they were,t ake them,
I was like, hold on! Lazurus just walks out of his tomb and they clobber him with a club? heck no--you talked to them and found out if they’d lost it or still had it. You wanted to know how much came back and if that would be all forever. In Debbie’s case, she was 100% there, cheating as usual. At 5 when Mom mocked me because I couldn’t tie my shoes and Debbie could, Debbie sneaked me out of sight and showed me how she really did it--by tying two bows, not slipping shoelace through loop. She hadn’t gotten it, either. She’d just figured a way to cheat.I tied my dhoes that way the rest of my life until one of my babysiting charges asked me to tie her shoe, then sniffled, “Not that way—the way Mommy does it.” That’s when I taught myself to tie shoe bows corectly.
And now this lady was telling us that Debbie wasn’t the same person we “wanted to bring back home” but just a shell of Debbie, debbie was gone. To prove it, she asked her 3 questions: What day of the week it was, what year it was, and if Bill Clinton was President of the United States.
Most people in comas for a few days aren’t sure how many days they lost; it’s still unreal to them.But Debbie had heard Dad say he was missing his club yet again to be there on a Wednesday , so she said, “Wednesday.” The other two were easy. She had to cheat on the first, she admitted, but I assured her that if they hadn’t told her how many days she was out they had no right to ask her the date.
When that lady had tried to drug Deb back to sleep as soon as she came to, I got ferocious. I demanded the names of the drugs and the amounts and told Deb she could refuse them and explain why to the doctor. The lady said “here take your pain pill first,” and debbie dutifully took it.
“myself, I prefer thorazine for pain, “the lady said.
“What?” Debbie said.”I can’t take thorazine! I have a bad reaction to it! it make sme a zombie who can’t think and I need to think so I’ll eat so I can get my transplant!”
“There’s nothing in your chart about you being unasble to tolerate it. But we’ll write down what you said and give it to the doctor in the morning. now here, take these.”
“What is it?” Debbie said.
“Your pain meds.”
“You just gave her those!” I protested.
“NO, she just got thorazine. This is her oxycontin now.”
In other words,as we were making Debbie’s case for not taking thorazine, the witch was tricking her into taking it right then!
“There’s going to be a lot of trouble if this is why she’s asleep all day and incommunicative and any other negative things in those notes on her you’re keeping, and on anyone else here,” I said hotly.
When Dad was getting her released to him, the lady said, “and this is the prescription she’s on,” and handed one to Dad.
“I thought she was on two things,”Dad said.”I know she was on two things.”
“Well, if you insist,’ said the lady, and wrote out a second prescription. The first was for 40 mg of oxycintin, the second for 20mg.
“You should have said two KINDS of drugs, Dad,” I said loudly. “This makes absolutely no sense. She could break more big ones in half or take two small ones at once. This shit  makes no sense at all.” If anyone was proud to be an American in 2005, they were happy duping everyone or they were duped. The country was out-of-control as far as cheating, hiding behind others, etc.
And that’s what we were going through, her last three months alive, and the last thing Dad wanted was for me to get livid at Debbie as she died.
But I’d just learned something that had me boiling mad. I had said something to my kids about yes I was a hunter once and their father smiled and said,”It’s ok, we still love you, Mama. We know you picked up a dead raccoon that got hit by a car.”
“I what?”
“That photo. It’s OK.”
“But I didn’t! I didn’t find it dead!” I thought. I knew right away where it had come from. “When did Debbie say this?”
“Oh, gosh, hon, she’s said it so many times. I heard her tell Walt, and Mike, and Barbie, and Leonore—whoever sees it here on the hutch or your website… .suposedly your brother took the picture and told her it was staged.”
“Which brother?”
“I don’t know, Deanne—I never met either; I can’t keep their names straight.”
I looked at the photo. No braces—that meant it was taken after Terry died, for I didn’t go to boarding school until he’d died, and I had braces all through boarding school. Debbie’s husband Fred had a story he liked to tell, that  yet “another” guy picked Debbie up hitchhiking or ran into her in a store and accused her of taking his $20 and not coming back, which implied prostitution. Only when she opened her mouth and he saw “no sodder mouth” would he realize he had the wrong girl and apologize. Of course, not having ever taken money from anyone with the promise of meeting them later to work it off, I knew it was all fabricated. Decades had erased that pain and now this was coming up. I couldn’t let it ride.
I marched into Mom and Dad’s, where Debbie had lived since losing her trailer, and said to her, “Number one, a porcupine is slow and once you see one, anybody can hit it—they don’t run. A  squirrel running around a tree trunk and leaping from tree to tree would be a conquest to pose beside.”
Dad looked at me over his reader-thin bifocals.
“What are you telling me this for?” Debbie said.
“You’re telling a number of people that I didn’t reallly shoot that porcupine in the picture on my web site and hutch—that I found a dead one on the side of the road and picked it up for the photo.”
Dad said,”Who was supposed to have taken it?” That should have tipped Debbie off—he said, was supposed to have, not, did.
“One of the boys,”Debbie said, as if he was nuts.(Think Mom or I went out in the woods with Deanne when she had a GUN?)
“If one of the boys told you I  held up a dead porcupine why didn’t you tell me and get my reaction before telling everyone else it was true? Besides, you didn’t tell people, ‘one of my brothers said she faked that’; you told them, ‘She faked that photo.’”
“I have 2 witnesses—”
“You can have 30 witnesses Debbie if they’re all dead. It doesn’t matter how many dead ones you have—not you.”
“What’s this about?” said Dad.
Debbie tried her blank look on him. “I don’t know. She just came out of nowhere—”
“I saw how she came,”Dad said.
“She told everyone I held up dead roadkill in the picture of me with that porcupine.”
“There’s live  roadkill?” Dad said. Then,”How would she know?”
Debbie may have thought that what was’t being said was how she’d never gone outdoors to stumble upon such a scene.
“Terry and Tony told me,”she said.
“How would they know anything about it?” Dad said.”I’m the only person besides Deanne who was there.”
“Someone took the picture,”Debbie argued.
“I know. me.”
Debbie looked confused. He’d never taken a picture.”Are you sure?” she tried the old “You’re not sure of yourself” tactic.
“Of couse I’m sure. I still have that gun.”
Debbie worked her face to keep it devoid of any appearance of her mind hatching a scheme . She wrote all day every day with the intention of being discovered like Emily Dickenson after she died. I didn’t feel that she was observant enough or went through enough to suceed.
I said,”You should have observed the guns, Debbie, when we were kids. It was meaningless to you which one was in this photo but you see, it was Dad’s—it wasn’t one of the ones I could just grab up and go off with. If it was there, Dad was there.”
“Like you never sneaked anything—”
“That’s enough, Debbie,” Dad said.” I don’t want to hear another word out of you.” Maybe here he placed a mental picture of the photo of him at 8 with a gun and a dead raccoon, next to my photo at age 17 with the porkie, each of us holding a gun in one hand and a dead animal’s foot in the other. How would Debbie work within the Audobon Society? “Every one of these people could be making all these birds up! I refuse to count them…”
It takes integrity to have things you designed become American collectibles, to have a birder’s life list that starts at age 14 and ends at 86, to throw back delicious trout you’ve alll agreed not to kill, even when no one is watching, for the benefit of future generations. I doubt Dad liked his sons’ names sullied, either.  Dad recalled my integrity and Debbie’s lie cost her hers.
I guess he’d shut the years at the cabin up in a locked compartment of his mind the way he put up creels and waders and tackle boxes of flies Grandpa tied. The people he’d fished with—his father and mother, his uncles Ben and Cy, his Dad’s friends and his Mom’s friends and his sons were gone. But when he had to dust off a porcupine-hunting memory, he realized that in preserving the moment in film, he had engaged in a dialogue with his descendants.
If he hadn’t taken the picture, would he have listened to Debbie, disgustedly thought that I had no integrity? That’s what Debbie had wanted. It was not a time to be disappointed in her but to forgive her. But he threw her “to-be-discovered-when-I’m-dead” writings away and not more than a few sentences were ever said about her again. That was their normal way with each child that had died--I found out exactly who’s way when Dad died. We knew that after Terry died everything of his was gone the 3rd day, when we finally returned to school and then home. It made me feel creepy--as if someone was waiting for me to not be watching, to do everything from  throw out the belongings of the dead to move me into every new house I ever had. I never got to pack, see the movers come, or unpack at the new home. It was always all done while I was gone, at age 6 (visiting maternal relatives in Missouri—what a fast one she pulled on us then!), 13(summer camp), 17(boarding school). Then when we started to die, the same thing: as soon as I was gone a day, someone got Terry’s bed, the dresser, all the clothes and toys, the water-skiis…
I probably would have found a Terry shirt I loved to cuddle on him, and kept it as a memoir.Put it on a stuffed animal to hug. But nobody ever warned me it was all going away if I wanted any of it, and by November 4 there was no sign he ever existed. One problem with that was, Mom didn’t know everything, and might have given away books in his room that were mine--that he and I were just experimentally pressing flowers in, or something. It was far from fair. And when Terry died, he’d left a whole regiment of little army men lined up in battle on his dresser, some stuck on one knee, some walking, some attacking or parachuting down after their plane blew up. All vanished--I thougght, that would have been enough of killing someone for a day. But she had made everything disappear that indicated his existance--Tony’s bed was even in the center of the room instead of on the side it had been on. Somehow, though, she missed two books he was reading--sly kid, realized why we shouldn’t put all our things in our rooms each night as she’d ordered all our lives—if you left something out, something of you was saved. In Terry’s case, the Scholastic Boooks The Shy Stegasaurus of Cricket Creek and The Five (or Six, or Twelve) Chinese Brothers.­
When Tony died, all his things never even made it home--Mom gave them to his friends, to empty his apartment . They got it all--guitars, stereo,  even Debbie’s records she’d lent him since she’d --e-hem--no record player to play them on once these bikers came to a party of hers.
And then I saw with shock that nobody saved Debbie’s 40 years of writings. Oh, my God, I thought; would she ever freak out …But, her fault. I asked her 3 days before her death where they were, saying I’d protect them from the parents throwing them out. She smiled at me with this smile straight from Mom, the one that says “You think you’re pulling one over on me you silly goose but I’m onto you.”
I told you that her boyfriend of 34 years’s Mom died of cancer and a year to the day, his Dad followed? Mike died 1 year after Debbie, to the day.
And I was sure it was suicide, drugs, I was so sure. Shocked, because after keepng him-drivers-license-less and stuck home waiting on her for 34 years, Debbie’s death opened the world up to him. Although when they first lost their trailer  she went to live at Mom and Dads’ and he slept under the roof at the top of a ladder on a playground slide, her death forced him into homes for the homeless which was when it was learned he was mentally ill. He’d been with her since age 19, lost both parents while with her, and she’d never encouraged him or drove him to get help.  As soon as he was diagnosed he was put on medications that made him trust us for the first time in his life. He was friendly, helpful, nice, and going through the 12 steps of AA and sober and straight. He even really acted like an uncle once to my youngest, who’d been sent home from school with head lice,”It’s only head lice,” he told her as she sobbed, “It’s no big deal. Honest.” And gave her the first smile she ever saw in him. He had spent her whole life not speaking to her ever but in front of her about her: “She’s using you, Debbie, she’s a snake” was common. When she was two,”Oh, she thinks she can get you to give her anything by looking cute. She’s no dummy. She’s faking the cute act. She’s a first-class user.” That entire ugly personality dissolved and we alone (not Debbie) got to know a very nice guy who’d she’d been trying to tell us was in there from her first brush with him as a teen but who she was complicit in locking away so that nobody knew him until his last year alive. He frequently rode the bus over and worked around our house for free, as Dan and I were both terribly disabled by 2005-2006.He’d call me every evening before bed. His last night alive, he was excited about some new library books he’d found by an author he favored back in 1969 right before he’d been closed off by mental illness for 34 years. He said he was going to go to his room early and read. He was found dead in bed the next morning, and it broke my heart, which my twin’s death had not. I’d just been through too much with her, to find out my parents hadn’t talked more than civilly to me for 20 years because Debbie had to challange my deserving their house when they died. It had been her goal to spend out her life in their home with their things apparently since she’d had a hysterectomy 15 years before she died. I had my kids, who could just get good jobs and support me. She, Debbie, sick of working all her life and ready to retire  with a boyfriend who wouldn’t work, had to have the parental home. Dad handed me those notes and, nothing said between us, began to hug me when I came over and left after that. By the time Dad died, I needed the big strong hugs I was used to and had not gotten until I was in my 50’s. I am so glad we had those few years together as Dad and only child. It really made me love him deeply.
It was liver cancer that got Mike, which he had’t even known he had. We kept putting off going to Shands together to get liver tests, since we’d been caretakers for someone with hep C. Had we, it would have been discovered. Once he really pushed for it, but my ex is the only licensed driver in my family besides Dad, who thought he didn’t like Mike, and my ex is a mule with superglue on its hooves. Or butt, maybe. You don’t get anywhere, if he’s your only transpo. It’s hard for him to breathe after taking 3 steps toward the car.
Dad was a little bit unhappy with Mike, the one he knew, who’d been mentally ill without treatment all his life, because he’d had to call Mike out for the more delicate care Debbie needed, and Mike repaid him by passing out on Debbie’s pain drugs for 2 days on the floor in side Debbie’s bedroom door so Dad couldn’t get it open to get in, and Dad couldn’t call for help because Debbie’s primary had already triend taking Debbie out of his care by force that month , saying Dad was too old at 84 to care for her—that’s when Debbie found herself in a hspice, after spending 8 months knocking back all the tests for a transplant and having only one to go. Her primary took her aside a few months earlier and said “You’re not facing reality. You know you’re going to die,”
Debbie said,”What do you mean? I have a whole transplant team-I’ve met them all, we’re all in it together, what are you talking about?”
Shoot, Debbie, the woman was saying your HMO wasn’t going to let you get that transplant. Dummy.
It now hurts me to remember the 5 or so times Dad said wonderously with joy,”Boy, if my father had been around now, he’d never have died! It’s amazing what they can do now! They never could do any of this!” After he’d said that a few times, he’d stepped right up to bat and got a cow’s valve in his heart at 85, a delicate surgury his doctor told him he gave few men over 75 because they couldn’t handle the terms, but Dad seemed able to handle it to him.
Dad almost died. Revived. We had a great summer of him while my 19-year-old went to college in Japan. Broke. The nation, without ever telling her they could, had taken all her scholarships and grants (“Oh, there’s never as much money in the summer”)and so I spent all of May and June stressing her being in Japan flat broke.(What I didn’t know was that my Dad had taken out a credit card in her name too and sent it to her in Japan with a $7,000 limit. He told her not to tell us. That was Dad, doing for my kids what he used to do for his.) Just to lose Dad the last week of July--we’d seen him twice since Mary got back, and once he spent hours with her going over her pictures from Japan I emailed him-—then deleted them! (I did not expect.) The second time, Mom kept trying to read me her entire address book while I was trying to talk to Dad about what happens if I inherited his home. Mom just would not quit following me around, droning on and on, saying names neither of us knew, reading entire addresses, seemingly a pest on purpose, demanding the attention.
Considering everything, specifically that she was not herself from the instant he died—I’d say that was the last time I talked to her, too. I remember she said they met one place and Dad corrected her without looking her way:”We met at China Lake.”
Then she had to tell me, like I hadn’t heard it a thousand times, that they eloped to Las Vegas and then married in the Catholic Church 5 days later.  I don’t know why people of sound mind have to tell the people they’ve lived with, had Christmas dinner with for 53 years, the same old stories they told them at age 4. Are you afraid you left something out as you pad out of the world on scruffy slippers? It’s not likely to be something that major.
I forgot to tell you, Deanne—I;m not going to die.
The day he did, Mom went right home and came out of their bedroom after an hour with plastic bags of his clothes and put them out the door for the Goodwill who she said she’d called. Next, his desk contents began to go in the garbage. No one could stop her--she went back to the Mom she’d been the last time he’d drank and took off--about 1980--that instantly, and said “It’s my house. I can do what I want,” words she’d said all my life until he’d quit drinking and they’d moved here and she’d played the quiet, agreeable wife. Dad had put a lot of the inheritance Grandma meant for all of us into this house but when he died Mom said,”I’m going to sell this house and get a small  one-room apartment and put the rest of the money in the bank. I’ll be rich, and you won’t.” This last line was sung in the sing-songy voice of fighting four-year-olds.”I have a dollar and you-ou don’t…” I was so surprised to see Mom snap so bad.  My kids immediately refused to return to her house. She threatened to jump in the pool, then said she was just kidding. Then,within 3 months, at 83, she took her life. And-—it didn’t work. She was a vegetable in hospice, not a loved one in God’s arms. You can’t make God take you when He didn’t intend to.
She made it seem my fault; look what you did to me by placing your daughter’s education over me.
The sad part was, although I thought I was making my daughter’s education a priority, my daughter chose to fail her 3 high school classes she was bright enough to take while in middle school.We could easily pull her before she failed them, the teaches had assured me--but she hid the notes they sent me and forged my signature on her first report card, giving her 3 permanent  Fs on her GPA. Why? Because Grandpa, who she was so close to, died? And with her Dad on oxygen, me on borrowed time, and the people we always said would raise her gone, is she scared to death she’s going to a foster group home before she’s 18? She won’t say, and she doesn’t have a place rich with  activities she loves that she thinks will always be in her life, like I did when I lost Terry. She did spend 3 nights and 4 days camping and canoeing the Au Sable with me recently, but the bugs were no fun for her, and her sister hated outhouses with a passion--neither was ready to love my wonderful world. They weren’t even impressed by the fact that my grandfather’s name was in every rental canoe available.
At least they got my Dad. They will always know what a class act is, what a good parent and grandparent does, how intelligent those in their 80s and 90s can be. Only the Au Sable is missing—fish guts and odors, to them. But they did know a real sportsman and gentleman. They’ll recognize those who fall short.

It’s sad for me to see a photo of Dad with sons 9 and 7 standing beside him, coming to the top of his swimming trunks. Little boys on a trip out west with their dad, so excited about buffalo and coyotes, canyons and Indians. That’s when he should have been with them every single day—because soon enough, he was going to have to live another 24 and 37 years without them. Those should have been the years he took off during. But we never know, and neither of them would ever say their time with him was shortened. They were as rich as I was with what, who, and when we were.

There’s a lot you’ve withstood if you’ve been at the Au Sable region for more than 48 hours in spring or summer.You are always wiping dead or dying legless, wing-less gnata out of the inside corners of your eyes , and if you don’t run when a batch encircles your head they’ll die up your nose and in your mouth if you open it. When you get to a mirror you dig them out of your ears.  Rarely, the wind keeps them behind you like your dance troupe instead of ahead of you flying into your face. They last from daylight to dark.
At dark, and also just after sunrise and the grass is all wet with dew, the mosquitoes come out of the woods’ dark edges. They have two irritants--a poison that makes you itch after it’s injector stings you, and a hum as unmelodious as waxed paper over a comb that keeps you up all night promising you that one bite she gets before, filled up on your blood, she goes off to lay her eggs and die.They don’t like just getting it over with--they want to torture you, too.
There are horseflies, too--big, fuzzy, rasin-colored bodies on wings too short to sustain them , but they do; when one finds you it goes around you in circles, accompnying you everywhere, which sure doesn’t cut it if your plan was to be out for several hours, and you really shouldn’t be wasting .22 bullets on these. You just get sorely tempted. Mostly they go by your ear--like a millileter from it—with a nasty loudening, then quieting “bzzz”, and as you duck your head, get caught between your hair and your face with a big rattle of bzzzing and bouncing.They are as ubiquitous as the deerfly.
Deerflys are shaped like air force jets in pins and things. Unlike the lone horsefly, 3 or 4 of thse much smaller creeps fly around you all the way to wherever, biting your bare calves and shoulders . The bites prick. They sting. The 14 and 15 years Charles Henry and Eva spent in the “painting”, the childhoods Dad and his brother and me and mine spent outdoors in the Au Sable region,  the work the first Benjamin Young had to do all day outdoors building troughs and making block logs, the work Dad had to do in daylight to make his land appeasing to ruffed grouse (mapping, dividing acreage into 10-acre strips, building activity centers on some), Grandma fishing by day and walking to the line of mailboxes at the drive’s edege to get mail daily, all of them were beseiged by these 4 bugs every moment they were outdoors.And there were a lot more mosquitos in the region than most night-fishermen across the continent experienced. Larger communities spray insecticides for community mosquito control, possible harming animals not alerted; but the Au Sable had to depend on the mosquito Hawk, and maybe the soft-shelled turtle that peed on you and other nasties. The people of the Au Sable River must really,r eally get something wonderful from her to put up with the bugs, and those of Bear Lake, too, which populace grew to as many as 2,000 before reverting back to 200 inhabitants, 2.9 a house. A flyer declared that “The benefit derived from the pervading tranquility is immeasurable in the sense of an infinite greatness.” Many books point to “tranquility” and “pervading’ and “salubrious quality of the air”(I thought ‘salubrious’ meant bracing). Afficiendoes of the river know it points to God . People will tell you,”You gotta go—it’s God’s county” about a place in Kentucky or Hawaii or Utah,but by referring to the Au Sable as God’s Country I can at least refer you to the feeling of happiness you have the moment you’re in your “God’s County”.
It’s like that, times the number of annoying  bugs you ignore, intend to ignore when you step out the door and hear the silent wild woods.
Au Sable lovers are either the craziest people ever, or the place is wort

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