Part 1: A Plain Paper Card

Inside my desk there’s a tattered card. It’s made of thin paper that’s been folded, and the outside flap has been printed:

The family of

 

acknowledges with grateful appreciation

your kind expression of sympathy

The inside has no printing. But unlike on the outside, the obvious blank on the inside is filled in by hand and black ballpoint pen, as it was intended to be.

 

12-26-92

Thank You for coming

to see Eric.  George

Please call Me

      286-7876

Mother

 

Had there been no need for the card, he would have been 46 this past Wednesday, and at that still my younger bother, the baby my mother thought of as innocent and maybe a little too fragile in this too scary world that she brought him into. I don’t know if it was that, or just something else that made it impossible for him to face the Christmas before his 30^th birthday–the last Christmas of his twenties–the last time he could believe himself deserving of that impunity that comes to us only because we are young. Or maybe it was the other way around, and in that awesome clarity of intuition that seems come only to women, and more often to mothers, she saw something ahead of him that he was bound to run into. They said it was toxemia, an accidental death from too many drugs. I never thought of it much as an accident. He told me once earlier that the number of drugs he had taken would have killed me.

Part II: An Electrical Cord

We grew up in Humboldt Park in the sixties a couple of blocks from the Our Lady of Angles Elementary School. It had burned just a little before we moved there. The catholic parents, Italians, Poles and Czechs, wouldn’t look at you when they talked about it. In the alley other kids told us that the nuns told the little children before they perished to pray instead of run, and that God would protect them.

We were poor enough then to expect our clothes to come in a cardboard box from the lady across the alley, and to never much see a beach or go on a vacation. I bought my first bicycle with money I made from turning in empty beer bottles for a penny or two. They were left behind by the smelly men that my step-father took in to sleep our couch.  It was the place that I learned the kind of economics they couldn’t teach me latter: how to take nothing and make it something, and how to take something and make it something more.

When the coffee percolator cord needed to be replaced my mother sent me to the dime store. I stood over the choices pondering the lengths and prices, and calculating the longer cords were less money per foot. She knew I was a careful guardian of her money; she knew without exception that she could trust me to make the right choice. The six foot cord only cost a little more than the two and four cords, but could free up an already too small counter. It was a brilliant analysis of absolute price, unit price and consumer utility. I picked it up proudly and started walking to the cash register when I another thought came to my mind: why I was there in the first place, and how it came to be broken. It’s not that we didn’t deserve punishment, in many ways we were ordinary boys and we did things that ordinary boys did back then. We had our share of firecrackers, fistfights and name calling. We once started a fire in the bushes behind the Baptist Church on the corner, where she sent us for Bible School on Sundays. We put it out by the time it started to scare us  I once smacked a baseball so hard and straight that the pitcher’s mouth was covered in blood—but even then they said it wasn’t really my fault. Except for a giant M-80 that tore up our faces one July 5^th morning, the worst thing we did was call the old next door landlord a Pollack–even though we were technically Pollacks ourselves.

But there was something about the cord that seemed wrong even then, like it wasn’t something that you used to teach somebody something, but just something you used to hurt them. There was something bad about it, and cruel, and it scared me deeper than just how bad it hurt.  It was that something that made me turn around and go back for the two foot cord. It was the first time in my life that I went against someone that I should have listened to. Two or three days later when she realized it was too short to fold over like the old cord,  she grabbed it by little prong end, leaving the heavier plastic part to swing free. Then she swung it at me, and plastic part swung around and banged her elbow. It made me smile inside. From then on she never tried to hit us with that cord again.

I guess in some way it was already too late, and many years later about a year after my stepfather left, I left too. I was seventeen. Before that I called our natural father who lived in Indiana, but visited on Sundays. I told him that we couldn’t live like this anymore and that he had to take my brother and get him away from everything that was around us then—I wanted him to save Eric.

 

Part III: A Phone Call

It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to reach her before then, but it seemed when I did nothing good came out of it. So the plain paper card sat in my desk for thirteen years until last spring when I picked up the phone to find out that she was no longer at that number. I knew a guy that knew his way around and I asked him to see if he could track her down. He called me a little before my birthday in May and told me he found her somewhere in the far south suburbs. She had been married for less than a year and was found by her new husband’s daughter some days after he had gone to the hospital for reasons that seemed mysterious.  He told me that she was buried in a public plot for people without means and didn’t have a headstone, but he refused say how she died.

In the fall, he called again and said he was cleaning out this desk and wanted to put the file away. He asked if there was any reason he shouldn’t. I said, you never told me how she died. He said she hung herself with an electrical cord, and that there were pictures that I didn’t want to see.

I guess there was something about that electrical cord and how it got all wrapped up in the idea of punishment for her and that no matter how she tried to move on with her life that it was only three years before that her baby son was buried,  and her only other son never called. I have come to understand all that, in a way. But what I just can’t understand is something about the cord, and what end she tied around whatever it was that she tied it to and what end she took and put around her neck, and how long it was, and whether it was folded over, and how it reached, and how in all the ways that we try to make things work and make something out of the nothing that we are given, that there are just some things that we can’t make any better than the way they started.

 

March, 2006