Long ago is all around

39

Welcome! Thank you for joining this hearth of inquiry and reflection as we explore living well, instead of living “fixed.” On Sundays I share chapters from my memoir and for those who are new here, I recommend starting from the beginning with the Preface. I’ve conveniently linked successive chapters at the bottom of every page so you can binge read and catch up easily. Or visit the Table of Contentsto pick up where you left off. My mid-week posts explore “living unfixed” through voices in the community—videos, quotes, interviews, poetry, resources and prompts—providing opportunities to reflect on your own life experiences and cultivate strength, resiliency, solidarity and meaning from the messy and unfixable.

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PREVIOUS CHAPTER

The Madison Historical Society houses twenty-five cans of film from Charlie’s tv show Long Ago is All Around. I arrange to arrive a day early to my next gig in Wisconsin and binge watch the footage—I’ve never been so eager to hang at a library all day. In an email to Rich, I mention my plans and he replies with one of his own:

Guess what? My daughter Gretchen (Greta) who works in Chicago at a fancy ass bike shop is going to be in Madison next week from Sunday to Wednesday. Apparently there's a bike show or something there. I just talked to her and told her of your plans. She'd love to connect with her newfound cousin. She's 31. You'll love her. I told her not to pick her nose in front of you since she'll be the first Brauer you'll meet. She said that she would behave herself. I don't know if this will work with your schedule, but I hope it does. P.S. Save the trip to the library. I have copies of those episodes from his TV series. Perhaps for a plate of cookies, I'll get you a DVD sometime.

Gulp. I could bail. I could tell a white lie and say the photo shoot was canceled. I could change the dates. My mind spins with a string of escape plans. Now that it’s real, I don’t know if I’m ready. I thought I was but my body disagrees. I read Rich’s email again; he is so casual, so non-threatening. He makes this inaugural meet-up seem normal and easy, like two old friends grabbing a beer.

I’m on a treadmill and I can’t get off. From the moment I first received the DNA results, a momentum far outside my control has been in charge. I cycle from manically excited to totally wiped out two to three times a day. The treadmill keeps running but my body trips over itself trying to keep up.

I say yes—partially because I don’t want to disappoint and appear like the high-strung ball of nerves that I am, and partially because I really, really do want to meet my newfound family. I want to get through this everything-is-scary-and-new phase and the only way to do it is to dive in. Friends say I’ve been brave these last six months. I don’t feel brave at all. Communicating behind screens is one thing but meeting a family member in the flesh makes me want to tear up the script and hide.

A few short hours after I arrive in Madison, Greta and I will meet. In person. I check into my room, unsure of where or how to sit on the hotel bed. I watch myself play-act “chill”—flipping through channels, not checking the time every five minutes, not noticing my shaking hands, not fooling anyone. I try a few nervous system hacks but they only red alert my brain even more—You’re watching your breath…are we in danger? You’re in child’s pose…are we not safe?—so I let them go. I’m keen to meet this bright, young woman and learn about her life, her family. Our family. If I can stay focused on Greta, maybe I won’t leave the earth’s atmosphere.

When the sun sets, I drive to the city center and park a block from the bar, ignoring the spot out front. I need some time to put sneaker on pavement. A walk along one city block isn’t enough to integrate past, present and my imminent future but it at least paves the way.

I am intentionally early. Instead of scanning the room as I enter, I walk straight to the bar and order a shot of tequila, poured into a glass for sipping. I would love to order two doubles and finish the first before Greta arrives but I can’t rely on it helping, and in more recent scenarios, it might quicken my demise. As I wait, I look over at the door. The next time it opens, it’s going to be my cousin. She’s going to be early too.

The bartender thumps down a lowball glass and my heart replies with a racing thrum, just as a stunning, rosy-cheeked young woman bounds through the doors, catches my eye, and before I can say “OH MY GOD” she’s in my arms.

Her embrace—the first true warm day of spring. Tentative limbs abandon apprehension and cry out an unabashed YES.

I’d be happiest simply sitting next to Greta in silence, shoulder-to-shoulder, melting in her sunshine—a warmth that doesn’t question summer’s arrival. But of course, that’s not what strangers do. It’s not even what normal, well-adjusted people do. I don’t feel normal, or well-adjusted, but I succumb to propriety.

While she talks, I steal into her eyes, study her face, and I see, I feel, myself. Her bone structure, skin tone, mouth, but even more, her essence. Cells light up, one-by-one, a galaxy of dying stars reignited by a mirrored dimension of itself. I lean into the gestalt of our humoral resonance. And though she was born after Charlie’s disappearance, she speaks as if he’s been at her side all along.

This family never let Charlie go. No wonder I’m so welcome. In a strange way, through me, they are getting their long-lost tribe member back. I hope I don’t disappoint.

Early into the evening Rich can’t bear to be out of the conversation. He phones Greta. She picks up and says, “Yup, she’s right here! Yup, it’s amazing! Ok, hang on.” Hang on? Uh oh. I think I’m about to connect with Brauer #2. It’s becoming uncomfortably clear how easy it is to hide behind texts and emails. There is time to reflect and edit, there is a generous cushion of space surrounding each correspondence. Now, I’m in real time with real voices, real flesh and the real possibility of completely losing my shit.

Greta smiles wide encouragement and hands me the phone, “Take it into the bathroom so you can hear better.” I laugh, curse and comply. Before I can even lock the restroom door I hear a jolly, “Kimberly! Welcome to the family!” Here he is. My dad’s brother. My uncle. His familiar midwestern accent and warm enthusiasm are a balm for frayed nerves, reminding cells of their origin. Both Greta and Rich radiate an unquestioning love that says, You’re here to stay. The doors of my heart swing open wide.

hugging the sun

Though exhausted, I lay wide awake all night long, replaying moments, details—a film student’s cheesy montage worms into my brain. I should’ve had a second tequila, a third. My nerves can’t come down from all the excitement. Around 6am I finally get an hour of escape but cortisol sounds her 7am alarm and I’m awake now for the day. So I hit the road. I need to be on location by evening, so I take the day to mirror-neuron the unwinding rural roads. The flat, late-winter landscape, frozen lakes, the sleeping fields—these scenes quiet me. There’s also a house near the Mississippi River border I want to visit, though I’m sure it’s inhabited. I route my GPS to Ferryville, a western Wisconsin border town (if a bar and a church make it so) where Charlie spent the last three years of his life, in a home built with his own two hands.

I listen to NPR as I drive. Just when I turn into the Ferryville township, Writer’s Almanac guest, Jeffery Harrison, reads his poem, A Drink of Water:

When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
 and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
 to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
 I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
 who used to do the same thing at that age;

and when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied,
 wipes the water dripping from his cheek
 with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
 my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
 to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,

because I like remembering my brother
 when he was young, decades before anything
 went wrong, and I like the way my son
 becomes a little more my brother for a moment
 through this small habit born of a simple need,

which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
 across the bounds of death, and across time …
 as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
 and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
 my son and brother drinking the same water.

My car slows as I turn right onto a gravel road, the same road Charlie drove every day to and from his home, this small habit born of a simple need / which, natural and unprompted, ties them together / across the bounds of death, and across time… and I can’t help but wonder, what small habit born of simple need do I have that ties me across the bounds of death to Charlie?

I grab my phone from the passenger seat and dial Rich’s phone number. I do it quickly, not giving my mind enough time to comprehend the magnitude of the act. The only way to accomplish this simple task is to do it, but my stomach leaps into my throat anyway. I want to be warm and casual so I lead with an enthusiasm as true as the knot in my stomach. He’s at his film studio when he picks up.

“Well hey there Kimberly! How the heck are you? Are you on Rush Creek Road?”

Rich hasn’t been to his brother’s home in a long time, but he remembers the gravel road well enough and offers to be my GPS. The road winds into a deep valley. The hills on either side are crowded with bare trees. March is too risky for spring buds. I go in and out of cell reception so when I find a property that looks like a possibility, I snap a shot with my phone and then drive back out to the main road to send to Rich. I do this three or four times, pausing in front of each prospective house to imagine Charlie on the stoop, Ranger at his feet. Is this the one? Did he plant that tree? Did he have coffee on that porch? My first solid connection with Uncle Rich (other than the bathroom hello) is a playful scavenger hunt, not a sit-down “Who are you, what is the meaning of life?” Having grown up with much of the latter, I’m all in.

Rich guides, “Keep looking for a third floor writer’s nook. It will be the tell-tale sign you’ve found Chuck’s house. There may be an outhouse nearby and a small-ish creek also runs through the property.” An outhouse? What century did Charlie live in? I stop my car a half-dozen times to feel the breeze on my face. Even though I haven’t found his property yet, I inhale the air he breathed. I listen, Charlie’s long-lost days songbird into me.

Eventually, way further into the valley than Rich expected, I come upon a freshly painted, two story house (and a tiny, third story nook!) with a small, bubbling creek cutting through the yard. The trees near the house are medium size, about what I’d expect if Charlie planted them thirty years earlier. My mind plants him into the empty front porch—a lanky, ash-blonde man sits with an open journal, paused. A coon hound rests at his feet and thumps his tail. Inside, a table is set for two, staged exactly the way his siblings found it the day he sailed across Lake Michigan and never returned. Charlie lived alone, so is this setting a ritual act of comfort or hope?

It looks like no one is home so I pull my car to the side of the dirt road and cautiously trespass. Winter thaws as the early afternoon sun builds confidence. Birds chatter about and the creek replies. I take a few audio recordings on my phone. I want to return to these sounds, eyes closed, body transported. I squat down beside the creek, mud pushing up alongside the soles of my sneakers, and listen as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds / and entered this one; this was Charlie’s happy place, and it would’ve also been mine.

For a moment, we can lay here together.

Our shared solitude dulls anxious shards in my belly. We lay in the grass, our thoughts unfurling new synapses, new possibilities. We listen to trees while I record their knowledge in my own, timid and unformed roots.

Charlie’s home

a clear stream that flows between two worlds

I work for two days with an all female crew and share the paternity story over dinner—the women’s unassuming warmth an invitation I can’t resist. But as words escape, my breathing shallows. I laugh. I smile. I am genuinely enthusiastic. The engaged storyteller is one part of me but another character is still very much in shock. She sits silently, balled up inside my gut, praying that I stop sharing and slow down the hands of time. She wants to integrate too but she needs it her way—quiet, attuned, glacial. Like undiscovered life in the great ocean depths, she shies from the light of the world, nurtured instead by the chthonic, steady pulse of patient darkness.

After the shoot I drive to Madison for an evening flight home, but the plane is overbooked and I trade my seat for a $500 voucher and a morning flight. I yield to a night of nothingness, laying on my hotel bed and unwatch dusk empty herself from the bedding, the marred laminate table, the curtains, me. Even gloaming is too much light when the mind is on fire. Darkness is food. Silence, medicine. Eventually grounded enough to fulfill a simple, basic need, I decide: eat dinner, drink a glass of wine, people-watch other dramas. Tonight, mine is on pause.

But when I take a seat at the hotel bar, the floor flips up. Again? What now, body? I walk as calmly as possible to the restroom, steadying eyes on the path in front of me as it liquifies. It’s not safe here. I’m not safe here. Once I’m behind a locked door, I sit down on the concrete floor and press my back into the wall. It yields to my weight and fear pushes it over.

I sit for too long, longing to feel sound—my own company, this body, no kind companion.

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