It started out quite subtly. A quick email from my estranged brother asking for some clarification about my wedding 40 years ago. My brother and his wife had different memories; she claimed to remember being with me as I was getting ready. My brother said she wasn't there. He was right. I replied with more than a little trepidation.
A few weeks later, I got another email asking if I remembered Easter when I was a little girl in my backyard in Farmingdale, New York, wearing a white dress and playing with bunnies.
A little history: My brother and I first reconciled 10 years ago, the year my dad lost his battle with bladder cancer, after a long estrangement that began with the 2004 election and his involvement with the Swift Voters. I remember being shocked when my dad came to pick me and my daughter up in New York and Rush Limbaugh was on the radio. We stayed with them for about five days, and Fox was on most of the time. There were a lot of political arguments. It was not fun.
When my father got sick, I went back to New York for two weeks and my brother came over a few times a week. We spoke regularly on the phone. After my father died, as the heir to his estate, he started making decisions that I didn't agree with, which caused our relationship to deteriorate again. When my mother died five years later, we were civil with each other, but after her death, our relationship deteriorated again. My brother and I returned to California the day after the funeral and left my father to clean out the house, which was quite large and had a lot of valuables. I still feel guilty about that. This is one thing I have to make amends for.
Shortly after our email exchange, in which he asked for clarification about my wedding, he wrote me a quick email to let me know that he was having trouble dealing with aging. The Love Songs of J. Alfred PrufrockIt seemed to relate to his feelings. He loved rereading it, and he said that the hardest thing for him was to accept the fact that all his memories were going to die. I told him about Marcel Proust's Memories of the pastHe ordered immediately Swan's Way And after a few weeks of struggling with it, I gave up. But that's okay, I said. I don't think I would have been able to tackle Proust if I hadn't read him as required reading in a literature class in the 1970s.
I then suggested he consider taking a memoir-writing class and told him how helpful it had been for me, that I had taken it three times. Unfortunately, all of my writing is stored on a hard drive and doesn't seem to be accessible on modern computers. He told me that he once lost a book he was working on; one day it was on the computer and the next it was gone. He wasn't interested in memoir-writing, but I thought his younger son might be interested, so I told him about Gotham Writers Workshop, which offers virtual and real-time classes in New York City.
In the next flurry of emails, he told me he'd just had dinner at his older son's house, raved about his beautiful dinner plates, and was told they were a gift from me. You always give great gifts, he said. He also mentioned that his older son was going to attend a fiction-writing workshop in Gotham. I replied that I was a little confused on both counts, because I don't remember buying plates for my older son, but I had recently bought dinner plates for my younger son's wedding, who I thought might be interested in a writing class.
Mother's Day was approaching. A few days later, I received an email from him asking if I had found a gift for Mother's Day. He told me, All the beauty in the worldIt arrived with the other Amazon packages I had sitting on my bedroom dresser, so I hadn't opened it yet.It tells the story of a man who quits his job to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
I have found joy in these interactions. They are all short and non-confrontational. We never discuss politics. He is deeply conservative and I don't know if he supports Trump or not, and I don't want to know. Finding out my brother is MAGA has ended a relationship that has been fraying for years.
This reunion was quite special, and it is fascinating to me how many things touched or revived memories. We may both have different memories, but that hardly matters. At the heart of this reunion is a rich sentimentality, something we both lost in life, but in old age, we both seem to yearn to recreate it in the same way.
Kitchen Table Kibiting is a Community Series It's for people who, rather than throwing pies at each other, would like to share a virtual kitchen table with other Daily Kos readers. Stop by to chat about music, the weather, the garden, what we made for dinner, etc. If you're new here, you may notice that many of the people posting to this series already know each other to some extent, but we welcome guests to our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.
