Brother Love

I have a unique relationship with my brother, Rhett Preston Kirby. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s better than other brothers, or that he does and provides what other brothers do not, though I feel that those things are true. I don’t place much value in comments of the type: “My brother, father, mother, wife, school, country, teacher, cat, chili recipe, etc. is the best that ever was!” Because, well...how could a person  ever really know? It’s meaningless for me to say he’s the best, without offering solid evidence. I’ll pass on the superlatives and just say why he is what he is in my life.

So, what’s so unique about him, anyway? First of all, unique defines his role in my life. Rhett is the only person I’ve ever known who is like him. Sure, you say. So he’s a unique individual. Aren’t we all? Well, it’s deeper than that. And here’s why. My brother and I are about as different as brothers can be. We have different likes, inclinations, personalities, ways of engaging the world. We have different skills and foibles, different things we strive for. We’ve carved out our places in the world using wholly different tools and maps. You could even say that, with all our differences, we inhabit different worlds, and that would be substantially true. What it comes down to is that, without the accident of having been born into the same family at approximately the same time, there’s little chance I’d ever have come to know him. And, it’s why I’ve never really known anyone like him. Which is what makes him so unique to me, as I believe I am to him.

It took me a couple of decades to realize this, and to begin to appreciate Rhett in a very special way. In the sphere of my life, he has perspectives on things completely unlike those of friends, colleagues and partners I’ve attracted over the years. And, because I love him, and he me, I am able to interact with this alien intelligence in ways deep and intimate enough as to instruct, enlighten and inspire me.

Of course, I exaggerate our differences. We come from the same parents, were born in the same city into similar circumstances, and through most of our pre-adult years, our physical and social journeys were parallel. And all these similarities, all that we share, is essential to the love and bond between us.

That bond has always felt absolute and unconditional. We have our disagreements; we used to fight often enough. As adults, we’ve mostly lived far apart, sometimes not seeing one another for years at a time. We’ve hardly ever exchanged Christmas or birthday gifts, and the odd time that something is given, one to the other, it never sets a precedent of creates any kind of expectation.

But emotionally, or spiritually...no, maybe deeper than that, even... on the level of who we are, we are bonded. Maybe it’s on the level of the “story” we believe ourselves to be living, how we situate ourselves and each other in the world of “meaning”. On that level, in that place, we are deeply connected, mirrors of one another, alter egos, each a kind of harmony to the other’s melody, the chorus behind one another’s center stage. We are joined, in simple fact.

He’s been with me from my beginning and populates my earliest memories. In one of them, he’s bent over on the sidewalk in front of our house, retying my shoe lace, teaching me how to do it myself. In another, he’s rescuing me from a tree down the street. With his encouragement, I’d mustered the confidence to climb up it, but wouldn’t come down again. There’s never been any doubt of our connection. And we’ve both noted, as we’ve journeyed through life, our surprise at how few other siblings seem as solid and sure, as quietly passionate about their bond, as we are of our brotherhood.

I came to realize, as I learned to ponder the whys and wherefores of my life, that there were reasons for all of this. Our mutual commitment got serious reinforcement when we moved from Detroit to New York, when I was five and he was seven. For a few weeks or months we were shuttled here and there, sometimes with our father, sometimes both parents, occasionally with strangers, while our parents tried to settle on some place and some way for us to all live together. We changed schools and neighborhoods a few times through the next few years, and so often, we were each the single familiar face in one another’s world. This shifting went on, in one way or another, until we entered our teens. At the height of our life as wanderers, we found ourselves in East Germany, where our mother sang in night clubs and stage shows, on a series on month-long contracts. We stayed in small hotels, and my brother and I would meet the local kids, and learn their games and a few new words. Once we taught a group of boys how to play baseball, in an empty lot in Leipzig, and a small crowd gathered to watch.



Our parents were there with us, but much of the time Rhett and I felt like it was us two against the world. Not ‘against’ in the sense that there was any painful struggle to it. Merely in the sense that everything outside of us was different, and only we knew who we were and where we’d come from. And no one else could ever understand all that. Why even try to explain. We had each other. And it was wonderful! We grew up feeling that, despite any differences, we were sharing one journey, one adventure, one perspective on the big world that lay ahead and all around us. It was one long adventure, and the two of us, the ever successful protagonists in some epic saga.

We moved and moved again, lived with one parent then the other, watched them become disaffected, then divorce, all the while sharing our whispered conversations in our bedroom when the lights were out, our speculations about our fate and what lay ahead. And all the while, Rhett was my protector, my biggest fan, my confidant, my guide.

At one point, we were in a couple of professional stage plays, sharing the same rolls on alternating nights, and bringing our very different energies and personas to the roles. That experience is a great metaphor for how we felt about our connected destinies. However different we were, we knew that we shared a path unique to ourselves, and not translatable to others. Trust, devotion, love. I learned the depths of those emotions from my brother, through those years of growing up.

Eventually, our lives settled. We wound up back in New York, with our father. A few years in the same place led to a renewed sense of home, to new friends who became old friends. We began to develop in our separate and individual ways. Rhett played basketball. I joined the school orchestra. I read books. He caroused with his buddies. So there came a point during our teens when my brother and I didn’t have much to do with each other. We were each too involved in finding and furnishing our niches in life. I remember feeling that he just didn’t fit into mine very well. I went away to school first; he did the same, a year or so later. And that was when one of the differences in us really began to assert itself.

My response to, first, leaving the extended family behind in Detroit, and then, the dissolution of our parents’ marriage, was to try to divorce myself from family altogether. I decided to go it alone, to let relations with family weaken and fall away. But Rhett’s response was to develop a love and commitment to family that’s stronger than in almost anyone I know. He simply didn’t let me drift away. For years, no matter how ‘uppity’ and distant I got, he called, he tracked me down, he visited. He remained “Big Brother” – and friend, fan, supporter, guide. The comforting and mythic reality of “Us against the World” survived everything that might’ve pulled us apart.

I just turned sixty, and in July, Rhett will be sixty-two. And the bond between us remains as it ever was. Rhett Preston Kirby is the deepest expression of love and family that I know. He will forever be the most unique person in all my life. He is my only brother, so of course I have no basis of comparison. Yet and still, the heart has grounds for making claims that no logic or reason can undercut. I assert it because, in this life I have lived, it is true. Rhett is and has been the greatest brother I could ever have had. Without him...well, I just can’t imagine.

This New Hour

When my sixtieth year began, just about a year ago, I found myself playing with the metaphor of my entire life as a single hour, each year represented by a minute on the clock. By that reckoning, last March I was entering my hour's final minute, and I approached the year with the intent of completing some things. I know that some of my friends were horrified by this analogy, seeing in it some morbid anticipation of death, but no such thing was intended. Rather, the image helped me to focus my priorities and set goals. It also helped prepare me for turning sixty, which I feared might otherwise come with a heavy psychological load.

Well, my hour ended two days ago. I didn't achieve nearly all I'd hoped to. The clock was an appropriate but daunting image to engage with, as all year I was acutely aware of the ticking away of those precious seconds, despite that my expanded time frame stretched each of them to almost a week. And yet, it was also a joyful minute, during which I was able to appreciate the breadth and richness of what's been a wonderful life.

I don't make much of my actual birthday anymore, and Tuesday was a pretty regular day, aside from a deluge of well wishes on Facebook and some other, more personal acknowledgements from friends. It was a good day, with lots of small reminders that a milestone was being passed. I was struck, in particular, by the realization that my thirtieth birthday, which was special in a number of ways, had passed half my lifetime ago! There were lots of jokes about loss of vigor, and my Ponczka finished off a long-standing joke between us, by announcing that she'd changed her mind, and was in fact not going to trade me in for two thirty year olds.

The great surprise though, came the next day, when I thought back to my analogy and realized that I was now into the first minute of my second hour. What a shift in perspective that brought. Suddenly, I was no longer summing up, trying to bring closure to a lifetime of intention. Now, the minute hand was starting down the other side of the clockface. Now, I was looking forward again. And looking forward, my view didn't feel nearly so populated with plans and goals and intention. I can take on anything I'd like. Time and space for something entirely new. In fact, the future feels pretty wide open.

X Times Seven Equals Life

It's one of the best research documentary ideas ever. And it makes for some of the most fascinating television I've ever watched. I wish I had a similar record of my own family, my own communities. Apparently the model has been copied in several countries around the world, including the US, Russia, and South Africa, but until doing a little web-surfing for this blog post, I’d never heard of any of them. Certainly it’s a model worth copying, as it offers up a treasure trove of insights into the journey through life and the human condition. And talk about “reality television”!

 

What I'm referring to is the 7-Up series of documentaries that began in 1964 in England, a product of Granada Television’s World in Action series  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Series). Seeking to explore the truth of the maxim: "Show me a child at seven and I will show you the Man", Michael Apted, then a twenty-two year old researcher, selected a group of seven year olds, from the privileged and the underprivileged classes. Apted has noted his regret that he chose no strictly "middle class" children. Also, there are fewer females than males, and except for one bi-racial boy, no minorities were represented. He says that at the time he “wanted to make a nasty piece of work about these kids who have it all, and these other kids who have nothing.”

 

The children were interviewed, asked a range of questions about money, class, race, whether they wanted marriage and children, and where they saw themselves in the future. It was conducted with the view to catching a glimpse of what British society might be in the year 2000. It was originally conceived as a one-off, though apparently the original show included this post credits narration: "If you want to know what happens to these children, watch Granada Television on Tuesday 2nd May in the year 2000.”

 

What actually happened proved way more interesting than even that thought-provoking tease. Because, when 1970 rolled around, Apted, now in the role of director, tracked down the children – now fourteen – and interviewed them again. By 1977, at the third go-round, the potential and promise of the exercise really began to show itself. Some of the twenty-one year olds were exactly what their seven year old versions had hinted at, but others were startlingly different. I won’t spoil it for you, but seeing the change in Neil, from 7 to 14, then on to 21, can’t but make you wonder what happened in his young life to cause such a transformation.

 

Apted, who eventually moved to Hollywood, where he directed such fare as “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, “Gorillas in the Mist”, “Thunderheart” and “Nell”, returned every seven years to track down the fourteen children and create another episode in the Up series. From time to time, one or another of them has refused to participate. One of the 14 hasn’t participated since he was twenty-one, though, ironically, he’s become a documentary film-maker himself.

 

The series has continued right up to the present, the latest episode, broadcast in 2012, catching up with the “kids” at age 56. I can’t recall for certain whether I was introduced to the series when the participants were 21 or 28, but being just two years their senior, I feel as though I’ve been taking my life journey right alongside them. One can’t help but contrast and compare, not only them against one another, but also against one’s self. But I imagine that this is the case whatever a viewer’s age.

 

Despite Apted’s original, incendiary intention, the series did not mature as a political piece. While there’s certainly lots of room for partisan or sociological analysis, it stands as a much more personal exploration of life’s challenges and rewards, its small joys and the abundance of sacrifices it demands of us. Watching the show, you develop affection for some, perhaps judgement of others. You empathize, mourn, smile along with. You understand.

 

I’ve missed episodes through the years, but have always caught up when I had the chance. And now, the entire series – except for the very last episode – is available on Netflix! A great feature of the presentation is that each episode contains clips from all of the previous episodes. This is an invaluable aide when several years separate viewings. When binge-watching the entire series on Netflix, they can become pretty repetitive. But even with that small drawback, I can’t recommend this series strongly enough. Though its diversity is limited in being set within the mono-culture of a single, European country, there is a deep universality to this series. It will give you much to think about: How much are we all conditioned to live the lives we lead? To what extent are we free to remake ourselves, and to what extent are we subject to the whims of circumstance? To the extent that we have choices, what have we made of them? How might we have done better, or worse? How have we touched the lives of others, and how have our lives been touched by them? And, the one that is ever present, for us and for the fourteen kids of 1964, on and off the screen, what lies ahead?

 

The End of Homelessness

I suspect that homelessness, like hunger, ignorance and other forms of poverty, will be with us for awhile longer, despite the best efforts of many government and social programs designed to bring about its end. With the rapid pace of change and the upheavals they can bring, it seems unlikely that individuals won’t continue to lose their way and find themselves falling beyond the edge of the social spaces that most of us live within. And, like those viruses and bacteria that mutate their way past the vaccines and medicines designed to stop them, homelessness may well take on different forms, appearances and manifestations.

At the Streets to Homes program, where I work, we’re seeing some differences in the landscape of homelessness that present as challenges. For about 8 years S2H has been out in the streets of Toronto, patiently and diligently seeking out the hardcore homeless, those who avoid the available shelter system in preference for sidewalk grates, abandoned buildings and alleyways, garages, the undersides of freeways and parklands. And we’ve had an effect. Though a lot of the more challenging cases of homelessness persist, particularly among those with serious mental illness, the landscape is changing. In a recent team meeting, a long time supervisor said that when the program began, workers were expected to house a minimum of eight persons per month. These days, we’re doing well to average one or two per month. Those one or two are likely to require as much work as the eight used to, but the reality is, the numbers just aren’t there anymore.

This should be cause to celebrate. Except that, the successes seem almost to work against us. Housing numbers decline and this generates pressures to justify the program budget and the jobs it sustains. And the social workers who fill these jobs, and who have played a huge role in bringing about the change, begin to worry for their own security. What happens when the work to which one has molded oneself ceases to exist? We feel a degree of empathy for the small towns given a death sentence when the factory shuts down, and for workers in obsolete professions struggling for a livelihood. But, on the other hand, time marches on. Societies and their needs change. And we must adapt, or risk being left behind.

So I wonder, as the face of homelessness changes, how will the field adapt? And if homelessness were to end, what would happen to us – whose jobs and even entire careers are grounded in the fight to end it? We want an end to homelessness, but not an end to our livelihoods, to our valued roles, to the work that defines us. In a paradoxical way, when positive change threatens the security of the changer, a desire is generated to preserve the status quo. This phenomenon was noted by the sociologist Max Weber in his work on the tendency of organizations and bureaucracies to outlast the conditions they were formed to address.

I don’t recall what if any answer Weber presented for this resistance to change. But my guess is that any response will involve even more change. The changer too will have to embrace change, not just for the thing struggled against, but also for self.

I’m reminded of a favorite film, Kurasawa’s The Seven Samurai. It’s set in a time when many samurai no longer have lords to serve, or wars to wage. They are aimless. When a village of farmers needs defence, seven of these unemployed warriors now have purpose. They win their battle, successfully killing off the marauding bandits, most of them giving their own lives to the cause. But at the film’s end, they are no longer needed, or even wanted. The villagers are grateful, but a village is no place for samurai, and they’d just as soon have them gone. Two of the three remaining warriors prepare to resume their aimless wandering. In the end, the only one of them that finds happiness is the third. For he gives up his life as a samurai to stay with the villagers, to become one of them.

I think that we crusaders against homelessness will have to accept the ongoing and inevitable change in our strategies, tactics, and in our very roles, if we hope to someday end homelessness without becoming homeless ourselves.

Bearing Weight

     I feel so heavy.

     I put on quite a bit of weight during my vacation last year, didn’t take it off, then put on another bunch of pounds while vacationing this month. I feel like a different person. It was more than a decade ago when, over a period of two years, I lost a hundred pounds. It was fascinating to go to the gym, pick up a hundred pounds in weights and walk around with them, demonstrating to myself the extent of the corporeal load I’d been burdened with every moment of every day for many years of my waking and sleeping life. It was a surreal exercise, though. It didn’t seem possible that I’d been so heavy. No way possible I’d survived that. How had I climbed stairs? How had I taken baths, ridden a bike, made love? How had I managed any sense of well-being whatever, carrying such a load?

     Now, it’s no longer an exercise. I feel every bit of the extra thirty pounds I’ve put back on. I feel it in the heaviness of every movement, in the ponderous drag when I walk, in the futility of trying to hurry anywhere. I feel the regained weight as a girdle of fat around my middle, as a thickness in my limbs, restricting my movement, squeezing out the room I had in my clothing, insulating me almost. I’m slower. The lightness I’d gained, that had felt like liberation, like re-birth when I first reclaimed it, is gone.

     Horrifying to consider what it would mean to regain the other seventy pounds I lost. Surely, it would mean death – spiritually, if not in fact. It’s beyond imagining. Except that I once grew to that weight in the first place. And a year ago, I was confident that I’d never again grow to even the size I’m at now. I must remember how easy it can be to adapt, accept, surrender.

     Of course, there is the remedy. There are the many, small steps I took to reclaim fitness. The key element was awareness. After that, resolve, commitment, patience. The lightness came slowly, but it came surely. As surely as steps become miles, and seconds stretch into days. It’s time to begin, again.

The Furnished Room

           I wonder if everyone has one. That place of comfort, retreat, escape from time. It’s a very private place, protected by virtue of being disconnected, unreachable by anyone but its owner. It’s seductive, malleable, somehow always just right, somehow always enough, so that you never have to leave; you in fact have to fight against never wanting to leave. Because you know that this ‘never wanting to leave’ is an illusion, an illusion built into the very furnishings, the very walls of this room.

          It’s an internal space I’m speaking of. When did I first discover it? No telling. I know that I was familiar with it by my mid teens. It is a place constructed out of sadness, lonliness, pain. And I think I first began to furnish it when I became aware of that essential aloneness that announces itself to each of us at some point in life. I don’t know that we all do it, but for me, a quiet kid who always felt a little different, a little set apart from my peers, and already comfortable with the life of the mind, it seemed a natural thing to begin to construct this little space, to decorate and furnish it. After awhile, it was a place characterized by its reliability: so long as I could put the world at bay to some necessary but not specified degree, I could retire to my furnished room and find contentment. Not happiness mind you, and peace isn’t quite the right word, either. But certainly a respite, a time away from pressures, from demanding problems that seemed unsolvable, a space or two removed from pain, or at least from its intensity.

          The Furnished Room comes to mind because I’ve been visiting it a bit too often just lately. In the face of challenges that seem to have no clear answer, up against pressures and needs that haven’t submitted to my clumsy, solutions, that persist in demanding more than I know I can muster, the room becomes so tempting. I sometimes retreat there for minutes and find them stretched to hours. I sometimes stop in, intending to regroup, to collect myself, before tackling some ambitious goal designed to correct some imbalance in life, or to secure some long unsatisfied need. But the quick stop will become a stay that robs me of my ambition, my will, my clarity. And I exit my room placid, forgetful, half asleep.

          At first, this Furnished Room of mine was a place I might stumble on from time to time, not a regular destination. But over time, I’ve discovered more and more of its doorways. Herb was perhaps the first grand entryway, to the point that I once mistook the high for the Room itself. A couple of tokes provided the instant antidote to boredom, to what could be a painful unease with self, and with consciousness. Smoke a joint and things were fine; pressing problems transformed themselves to mere inconveniences, to Rorshack blotches on the wall that could be seen in so many more interesting ways.

          But when I put the overindulgence on herb aside, I soon discovered other doors. Or maybe it’s that I learned that anything could be such a door, really. Television could certainly do the trick – it too could put me in the state of mind of being pleasantly occupied, with nothing at risk; aroused and stimulated, but with no skin in the game. Similarly, crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, surfing the internet, porn, food...even books. Not that any of these things are or were problematic in themselves. It’s just that, engaged with in a particular way – in a particularly indulgent way – they became gateways to that Furnished Room, that place where pain, challenge, anxiety are all somehow muted, contained, softened, de-fanged.

          (And what's wrong with a world without teeth? It's that only the bite of life can keep us fully awake. The Furnished Room is a place of sleep. Surprisingly, meditation brings me the sharp thrust to keep me from retiring there.) That method of quiet, purposeful focusing draws me more deeply and intently into the world, places me bare-skinned into the game, able and willing to feel all the nuances, the pressures, the hurts in all their personal specificity. The Furnished Room is a place where all that is dulled and smoothed over, made impersonal and vague.

          Do you all have such places? Do you have your own such rooms? I imagine that most of us do, but that it’s the degree to which we visit them that varies. I don’t begrudge myself the occasional, short visit. But with me, drop-ins have a way of extending themselves. From inside the room, looking through the window outward – if I bother to look at all – it’s easy to say, “Cold out there. Better wait til Spring”. I can forget how stirring and enlivening the cold air can be; how much more life-embracing it is to use doorways for venturing out, instead of retreating within. I can forget how a person can expand into the big world, and conversely, how we can shrink into such narrow spaces as we allow. A room, after all, is an assembly of walls, and walls always keep out much more than they contain.

Ponczka Harvests the Snow

Cloud makes us different. If I ever had any doubt about the deep ways that environment shapes us, the experience of this patch of land in the Finger Lakes has stilled it.

At home, in Toronto, I watch too much television, and blocks of time vanish in aimless google searches and following the countless lures and tantalizers the internet presents. On Cloud, we have only the power our small solar kit, unless we crank up the noisy generator, which we rarely do. No internet, no tv. What’s wonderful is that it’s not missed, and rarely thought of.

On Cloud, the position of the sun in the sky matters. The solar kit faces it, and as the sun passes away, darkness closes in tight. We have what stars and moonlight are offered, one strong propane lamp, and many oil lamps, with their beautiful, yellow light, too dim to read by. We have flashlights too, and at the moment, I’m typing by the light of my notebook monitor, but the sun plays a big part in the ordering of the day. And it feels good to be conscious of this.

Another thing we lack here is piped water. We bring Toronto tap water with us, in 5 gallon jugs, and we have rain barrels that serve us during most of the year. But when the temperature drops, the barrels come down, lest the water in them freezes and the barrels crack. The relative scarcity makes the water so much more precious, and we use it so much more attentively.

But we’re at Cloud for a longer stay than usual, and the rain water we use for washing and showering ran out. So today, when the temperature rose well above freezing, as soon as things began to drip, Ponczka went out and placed buckets under downspouts, to catch the run-off from the melting snow. And this bounty so pleased her that she began to collect fresh snow and melt it down. Within a couple of hours our supply was replenished, and later that day, we were showering with the melted snow, heated in a huge kettle atop the cast iron, wood-burning stove.

It must read as all sentimental and sweet and nice. But it’s more than that. The circumstances generate attentiveness and adjustments, and appreciation and gratitude flourish. There’s other stuff going on: we’ve put a new floor in the loft bedroom, and stacked wood for the season. Ponczka’s painting and I’m trying to get through a difficult edit. But the snowfall, the light of the sun, simple gravity and heat are valued more, because of being experienced and thought about in different ways.

It’s another good day on Cloud.