My brother, Ray, would have turned 75 today—if his life hadn't been interrupted by cancer, as so many have been. Too many. Cancer is the scourge of our times. The last coherent conversation I had with him he told me he was hoping to make it to age 70. He missed it by three months. And he said he did not want to die while Donald Trump was president. Unhappily, he did.
When I was a little girl, my brother was my everything. He was five years older. He looked out for me, took my side against Mother and Dad, as I did his, and held my hand when we went off on our adventures together. And we had many many adventures. Once he got into junior hight school (7th, 8th, and 9th grades in my hometown), he was given permission to ride the city bus downtown, and I was allowed to go with him. We walked the three blocks to the end of our street where the bus stopped. Ray always gave me my fare so I could drop the coins into the meter beside the bus driver. Then we took seats all the way at the back of the bus, because we were going what we considered a long way to the downtown library. Now, it doesn't seem like such a long way, but back then the bus stopped at a lot of corners. It took thirty or so minutes to get downtown.
The stop beside the library was a hub where several bus lines converged. I don't remember which line was ours—that was Ray's job to keep up with—but we looked at the time table signs and decided how long we had to "fool around" downtown. Our fooling around consisted of lots of time at the library, and almost always a movie at the Centre or Ritz theaters, both of them nearby. The library was the old La Retama Library, not the new one that stands up on the hill in Corpus Christi now. The old one was three stories with an elevator to the third floor but if you just wanted the second floor, there was a beautiful, wide, curved freestanding staircase you could climb, and climb it I did, pretending I was a princess in a castle. Ray was always busy doing some sort of movie research in the microfilm department. I never then or now knew what he was researching. It seems we came from a family of researchers. I have myself spent many hours in the microfilm departments of a library.
The third floor of the La Retama Library was the children's section. There was usually almost no one up there but me, which suited me fine. I could continue my princess pretend game uninterrupted. I gathered an armload of picture books and sat at the low round table with child-sized chairs and spread all those books out in front of me, making up my mind which ones I would check out that day. You could only have three at a time. I liked the ones with lots of colorful pictures, but not too baby-ish. There had to be a lot of words to read, too. And I wanted stories about real people, not animals which probably explains why I never read The Velveteen Rabbit until I was an adult. I had no guidance. No one to tell me which books I should pick, the ones that might be good for me, or the ones that might be classics. Nobody ever told me about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, although I did see the movie on television. We were not a fancy, academic, or even well-read family. We didn't have a lot of books in our house: a set of World Book Encyclopedias, and maybe a couple of other old books. My parents were accountants, not scholars. But at least there was the wonderful library downtown.
We also had a Bookmobile that came to the end of our street. Again, it was Ray who somehow found out about it, and dragged me by the hand down there where we got our first library cards. After a foray downtown to the big library, I could then turn in my three books at the Bookmobile when it came every other Thursday. I loved the Bookmobile, too. It was dark and cramped and smelled of books, and there were little cushioned benches where you could sit and paw through the pages before you checked out a book. The woman who drove the Bookmobile always sat up front knitting and never bothered or even spoke to anyone until they had books for her to stamp the due date on a flap inside the cover. It was another great adventure, rushing down to the Bookmobile after school for more books to read.
So whether he ever realized it or not, my brother was directly responsible for putting books in front of me and giving me my lifelong habit of reading, and later writing. When I wrote my first terrible (and forever unpublished) novel, thinking it was the greatest thing I had ever done, I gave it to Ray to read. It was about 300 manuscript pages, and he read maybe eight of them before he handed it back to me and said, (kindly for him), "It's not ready to publish." I was crushed but he was right, it wasn't. By then he had his degree in Radio/TV Journalism so I trusted what he said. But still, I was crushed. He never told me, later after I had a novel or two published, but I think he was proud of me. He always came to any event I had anywhere near where he lived.
As the years went on and we grew up, we stopped seeing so much of each other. Lives get busy and diverge, but we never EVER failed to give each other a call on our birthdays. We usually talked for an hour or more, about all the things that were going on in our lives, about members of our family we had heard from, plays he was in, books I was writing, TV shows we were watching. We talked about our parents, our dogs and cats, our houses, cars. A lot of it nonsense, just keeping in touch. My-my, how I miss those phone calls.
There's a memory I have that keeps coming to me. I tried to remind him of it when he was lying in the hospice hospital in Austin, but he was far too close to death to listen or care. It's a memory of the two of us climbing up on the roof of our house, something we were NEVER supposed to do. Capital punishment would follow if we were caught. But we sat up there one summer night when the parents were off somewhere playing cards, perched right at the peak, side by side, his arm around my shoulders to keep me from falling, peering over all the other roofs of the houses in our neighborhood, watching from a distance of maybe a half-mile, the screen at the drive-in theater out on the highway. We couldn't hear what the actors were saying, of course, but we didn't need to, we had already seen the movie downtown at the Centre or Ritz and knew the storyline. I remember it as a cool star-studded night, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's just my imagination embellishing it, but it was so much fun, sitting there with my brother, that it has stuck in my memory all these years.
Onward...
