January 13, 2015 10:07 AM
by JHF
in
Personal
{ }
The state of things in Taos, amply illustrated here
My brother Bill has cancer in both lungs. My siblings and I are at least mildly surprised he’s lasted this long, given his decades-long history of methamphetamine addiction and smoking cigarettes to boot. But I know little about him, really. My natural sympathies are tempered by the fact that I’ve been far too close to the violent behavior he exhibits when he’s “tweaking,” some of which is still quite unforgivable.
There are a few good memories—a very few—and I’d never say he didn’t try, but dealing with him at all is a difficult, crazy-making enterprise at best. For most of his life, he’s been what psychologists call a “social idiot,” incapable of making the kind of judgements that allow one to function normally in human society. He does the most astoundingly stupid things as a matter of course. One could go on, but why? This isn’t the time for cataloging his sins, most of which are of the cringeworthy or self-destructive variety rather than pure evil, although there may be things I don’t know about that could have put him away forever. At any rate, his life was never something that invited close inspection by his siblings, and mostly we ignored him. My late sister would have nothing to do with him, and I personally intervened to keep him away from her memorial celebration in Austin, to the great relief of all concerned, especially her grieving husband.
On those occasions when he seems to be straight, there’s a modicum of social awareness and decency that one seizes with a starving heart—at last, an actual brother!—until the inevitable truth swings by again to reinforce the same old narrative. He seems to have some friends, though most of them are surely felons. (The ones who burned down his trailer after he admitted to the police that he’d let them build a meth lab on the property come to mind.) This is a sixty-three-year-old man who’s probably never been invited to dinner in a nice home with real people. I doubt he’s ever eaten in a decent restaurant. I’d hesitate to take him anywhere, and yet he’s capable of being spontaneously kind.
His one endearing (?) habit is to sign off most phone calls with, “I love you, Johnny,” often after relating a rambling collection of nonsense and lies. What makes this so confusing is that there isn’t any obvious manipulation involved, and I have to consider that after all, it’s just Bill and he’s out of his mind. In the past, I’ve either screamed myself hoarse or just walked away quietly, grateful that no further interaction was necessary.
That was then and this is now, of course.
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Tags:
family,
healing,
history,
home
January 8, 2015 3:04 PM
by JHF
in
Personal
{ }
Middle River, MD in early spring
What miracle is this? Too new, too fresh… It probably helped to get as sick as I just did, coughing up bloody gunk and unable to sleep, imagining the worst, a cascade of fear of everything from leaving the wreckage of a life for her to clean up to ever-diminished circumstances if I lived. Sometimes when hope is stretched so tight, it breaks.
But the fever and the blood are gone now. So too is my anger, the lifelong rage and pain out with it (at least the unseen grip it’s had on me). The mind with massive skill at finding fault, the broken heart that knows just where to sink the blade will have to seek employment in another field. One has an inner life. Something pulses, heaves, and changes everything.
Almost overnight, the gift of partial sight—as in, no, I wasn’t raised by monsters, though in some ways I replicated their progression from potential gods to prisoners of fear. The last fifteen years, especially, when suddenly I had to do the grownup things I’d never done before—talk about coughing up some bloody gunk—drove me deeper back into the cave. “You’ve gotten much more rigid,” said my wife the other night. Oh, yes! I look back through the photos and think, why wasn’t this or that enough?
The how and why of this is sacred, because I can’t take any credit. What I’m seeing is a bigger picture of the Universe, where everyone I ever railed at has another side. I remember things my father or my mother did that made me happy. I see things I did, long abandoned, that had more than half a chance to give us all a bigger life. Someone I almost inadvertently insulted reached out to me in gratitude and recognition before I had a chance to be an idiot again. For icing on the cake, before I went to bed last night, I found a piece of paper folded up inside the folio case where I keep my iPad: it was a check for $163.41 from last October that I’d never cashed!
I tell you what, though, something’s different. As the ugly peeled away a bit like some shed skin, the first thing that came to mind was Johnny on the steps beside his Uncle Buddy’s new Ford coupe. I don’t know how it happened, but the boy’s all right, if you catch my drift, and so is every one of you.
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Tags:
healing,
history,
home,
love
January 6, 2015 3:56 AM
by JHF
in
Adventure
{ }
Last Friday, about 7:30 a.m…
The post previously associated with this photo has been deleted due to reasons of terminal idiocy. Enjoy the view, however!
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Tags:
balloon,
Llano Quemado,
winter,
writing life
December 27, 2014 10:48 AM
by JHF
in
Taos
{ }
Love of my life on Xmas Day
Six below zero this morning. If you left it outside, it’s dead or broken. More snow yesterday, powder this time, so you can sweep it with a broom. The dirt road is never plowed because I won’t make a “political contribution.” It’s been this way for over ten years. Meanwhile the main thoroughfare in Taos is a third world disgrace, cratered with tire-eating holes. (What am I saying? They probably have better streets in Tegucigalpa.) I’m no longer trying to escape, but whenever I venture out, I wonder who’s insane. Did you know “blue-haired Texans” is a phrase here? More Comanches, por favor. Wearing deprivation like a skin. Damn, the winter is hard, and this one’s barely started. There must be something I can do.
Got invited to join a hot-shot invitation-only social network a few weeks ago. Said yes, of course. The founder likes my writing. I downloaded the app, scored the invite code, and never signed in. May yet, though. They say the secret of life is showing up, but I’m not sure. Maybe you have to enter the code in that great web form in the sky. Who has time for social networks? I have lots of time but act less social every year. This is not a happy trend. Be careful what you ask for, maybe it’s already here and God thinks you meant something else.
All is possible with love. (At least I think so.) She whose smiles mean everything to me awaits my melting in the sun.
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Tags:
Llano Quemado,
marriage,
winter,
writing life
December 25, 2014 9:02 PM
by JHF
in
New Mexico
{ }
This shot taken a couple of hours before it actually snowed
Sometimes snow sweeps in like a thunderstorm. At other times it looks like this, a big gray-white cloud that oh so slowly settles lower and expands in your direction. After a while, the mountain in the distance fades away. A short time later, tiny snowflakes fall, then larger ones. That’s what happened here a little while ago. Quietly, calmly, not a breath of wind. Like someone turned a dial and the air got thick and wet.
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Tags:
Llano Quemado,
snow,
weather,
winter
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