Common Ground

I didn't know my brothers well.

The younger was a sullen and cruel creature and even as a young child was prone to fits of violent temper, defiance and obscenity. He rarely spoke at the dining room table, content to shovel food into his mouth until he'd had enough and then sulk away. He was a loner with slightly suggestive mongoloid facial features and a perpetual smirk, one lazy eye and ragged, dirty fingernails chewed to the quick. As a teenager, he took to slicking his hair back and grew a straggly mustache, smoked and drank heavily, and spent most of his time with other leather jacketed teenage thugs. Physically as well as emotionally, he took after my mother - chunky, fleshy and short of stature with a hot temper, a natural sneer and an inclination to degrade and deride everyone not white and Protestant. He was born, so my grandmother liked to say, at war with the world. He favored dirty jokes, racial slurs, hard core pornography and guns and I was grateful he shunned eye contact and kept to himself.

My youngest brother was more like my daddy, a peacemaker at heart who longed for normalcy and closed his eyes to conflict. He was on the shy side, not growing out of his introverted nature until he was well into his 20's. He was taller and more compact with an open and friendly face, a vivid imagination and a natural respect for rules, breaking only minor ones and always repenting. He rarely skipped school, hung with a rowdy but reasonably well behaved group of friends, and as a general rule could be counted on to be honest and upfront with his feelings. He became obsessively protective about my mother after his marriage and during her last years would often confront me, accusing me of being hardhearted and uncaring, stubborn and intractable. He wanted me to forgive and forget and I would not accommodate him.

We were a houseful of strangers from the beginning. There were three and five years between my brothers and myself and we had no common ground, we shared no interests, no friends, no history. When our paths happened to cross, it was sheer chance. We had nothing to talk about and were too far apart to know where to begin even if we had wanted to. We went from indifference to hostility to all out warring with each other and finally to total and permanent estrangement - the thin threads that had held us broke with my mother's final illness and her death finalized the split once and for all.

It's hard to regret the loss of something you never had.