Train Your Parents

My brother Kane hardly visits anymore.  He used to come out for Thanksgiving at my folks house but as the place became cluttered where milk crates line the floor and Amazon boxes perforated the brick, man made walls, the less he showed up.  It could be that he just found the niche he was hoping for out in Nebraska with his wife or maybe every time he is shown sight of the house he once grew up in, his analness sprouts up.  It’s not like he has tried to ever fix the situation.  Both my brothers, who do not resemble each other, one olive skinned like myself and the other paley white with brown straight hair,  both the same height though, have never tried to fix the situation but they rather use the out dated, retrograde, action of complaining. 
    “It’s a shit hole.”  Sean will say.

    “It’s worse then a shit hole because everything you put in it turns to shit.” Says the wittier Kane but then the worst part happens.  They both glance at me waiting for some sort of reply.  But I’ll just stare back them.  I don’t like to fit the crowd and I find no judgement to be had on anyone for collecting things.  In a world full of consumerism, isn’t this the obvious path.  doesn’t it make sense to save every cardboard box you can obtain because you might have a use for it later.  Or if you can get your hands on anything free, wouldn’t you take it no matter the object.  My father, Kevin, who is olive skinned like me, and is pretty much skin and bones with dark gray hair, has a love for art.  He has been an elementary art teacher for twenty odd years at our local school in Wonder Lake.  He also has a hatred for wasting it.  I’ve tried on several occasions to throw away my things that would include an object that he defines as art.  Then he does his instively process of going through the trash bags and digging out anything he deems worthy of keeping.  This has led our family to throw away things the day prior to trash pick up.
    But my mom is no better.  She liked to complain about his obsessive compulsive disorder towards his weakness.  He just recently brought home 5 Macintosh computers. 
    “What the hell are you going to do with them?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He might not know but I am pretty sure after many occasions observing my father that I do.  He won’t let anyone throw away art.  He was the teacher that almost everyone I know loved and a lot of great talented artists have come from his classes.  Former students, in their twenties, would come back to him asking for their art and he would still have it but after many cut backs at his school, he has just got deported from his classroom and is a walk about art teacher.  But those computers have been in his classrooms for ten years and students would do art on them.  Probably the hard drives are full of trivial art pieces that kinder gardeners to 8th graders worked on and even though he had to follow suit and trash his whole room of more traditional art, he can not possibly let these go.
    But like I said, my mom is no better.  She always like to poke fun at his weakness of collecting and he has occasionally trimmed his stash so she can maneuver through the house.  Even though she has her shit as well.  My mom doesn’t have the same kindness towards already made pieces of art but she is a crafty woman.  When I grew up she was really into cross stitching.  I would sit on her lap and because her eye sight was declining, would stick the needle from the bottom on up.  Then, since her three neck surgeries and back surgery, she has lost the fine touch in her hands so she had to drop it.  Then she moved onto stamping.  This was a hobby of hers for about seven years and she bought everything she could possibly do with the art of stamping.  She still makes some of the most prized collections of holiday cards this side of the United States.  Patricia, my mother, also has hundreds of bottles of acrliyic paints that she hardly uses and I have obtained.  She loves doing murals but she hardly has the time or space to do them in so she has only done a few lemon trees and vines around the houses.  Somewhere in between all of these she started getting into the art of fake bouquets.  When she makes one of something and gets praised for it, which she usually does because she has a knack for fine detail and a on-board memory for color palette, she will go out of her way and get everything she possibly can.  We now have a whole shed dedicated to bins of fake flowers.  She just got into jewelry making and even though everything she makes is beautiful and celebrated, the more crafts she sees on television or in magazines are getting new stations in the household.  Corners of rooms are taken up by tables that are have no space because they are bombarded by the fine art of crafts.  But she also has another problem.  Well two more.  She is overweight and even though she used to care about her health, the recent injuries has pushed any luck out of her body and her strength is dwindling.  Finally comes her love of books.  Not just any books but romantic novels.  She loves smut and reads a minimum of three books a week.  Hard cover too.  What in the world is someone supposed to do with paper backs upon plastic bins full of practically pornography.  She has thousands littered around the house but still finds the time to complain about my fathers nostalgic imagery. 
    But my brother Kane just came into town.  He was dragged along by his wife, Michelle, who is 2 years older then him and 2 inches taller too.  She is a litigation lawyer out in Omaha and has to come out to Chicago for classes twice a year.  Kane always comes because he is recently an un-employed student on his dissertation for a doctorate in communication or rhetoric.  It seems like every time I talk to him it is different.  He just got a phone that can text so it is much easier to get a hold of him that usual.  We used to email a bunch because I used to look up to him but our relationship has always been on the rocks.  Since I go to school out in Chicago, I am out there from Sunday to Thursday and he wanted to get some deep dish pizza while he was out and I cordially accepted his invitation to a double date. 
    I just turned 21.  A milestone and a feat in the least and through a busy schedule and the off chance that Easter would be a day after my birthday turned out to be a lousy party.  I had to work at six in the morning the next day after my big two one so I didn’t do any drinking or have any crazy instance occur so I figured I should at least order my first beer with my oldest brother. 
    He was staying all the way at the James hotel in the gold coast.  I have only really taken the blue line from UIC to La Salle to get from Jackie's dorm to Columbia.  But for these rare occasion, I had to take it to Jackson then transfer to the red line and take it up to Grand.  Jackie, my girlfriend, and I looked up the route on Google maps but they proved inefficient.  They wanted us to get off at Jackson and walk to another red line stop instead of transferring.  This led me to some confusion on the train and thus we had to do some back tracking since we were inexperienced commuters.  When we finally got there it was just like my brother to be late.  We waited outside his luxury hotel so he could take his dog, an Australian sheep herding dog, Zule, named after the dog in GhostBusters.  My brother has always been a bone fide hipster before the niche started sprouting up in newspapers and television shows.  He was a connoisseur for irrelevant pop culture trivia and would occasionally quote references that he would never cite.  This was his thing.  Every one had there thing that they did.  My mom’s would always say “Well there you go” after any time you would have an epiphany.  
    Instead of flying out to Chicago, they drove in their new BMW.  They had a valet get there black car and we were off to some Lincoln park pizzeria that my brother raved about.  Some how, even though he has never lived in the city, and I was the one that actually has, he knew more places then me on the top of his head then I have even heard about.  Right away my brother strayed from the printed directions that his wife had and she became upset.  They started bickering over the driving while Jackie and I just observed and chuckled to ourselves via our eyes.  My brother blew up in rage and threatened to park the car and get out so Michelle could drive her car but she became worry some and let him finish the route.  This reminded me of our parents.  My mom would always have my dad drive and she would yell at him if he drove improperly or was going the wrong way.  My dad would easily become agitated and throw it back in her face.  Here is one that comes back easily.
    After some pestering my mom turns to my father and asks him when the next ski show was.  Wonder Lake is only known for one thing nationally and that was our ski team.  Somehow out of some crude humor and upper class supporters, we had the best ski team in the nation.  We won or placed in the top three every year and this was marvelous.  My parents have only been to one ski show but have lived here thirty years.
    “So when does the ski shows start?” My mother asked my father with actual kindness in her voice.
    “I think it would be better if you asked that tree back there then myself.”  While pointing in some distant forest.”
    While driving through Lincoln Park we became instantly lost.  Well we actually past the pizza place that would be our destination twice but couldn’t find any parking.  Every time we spotted a parking spot on the road, Kane would pass it and when we came back it would vanish like it never existed.  We got to look at the trees in Lincoln Park three times.  Then we found an open parking lot but the machine wasn’t working and a line formed behind us taking up ten minutes of our time.  We finally parked at a Children’s Memorial Hospital parking garage and the run around ate up half an hour. 
    We walked and chatted while I had a yellow American spirit cigarette.  I hardly see my brother, let alone talked to him, so this was a breath of fresh air.  Last time I saw him was for Thanksgiving which he had at his house in Lincoln, Nebraska which was surprisingly, a lot of fun even though at dinner I was alone with Michelle’s conservative family talking about how they are upset about the way people dress to church now.  Then they noticed I wasn’t saying a word and said
    “Oh so you are not the brother that talks.”  They must of been referring to my brother Sean who likes to rant and rave about everything.  Then they thought I would write a story about them because I was a fiction student but I said I wouldn’t because I don’t deal with non-fiction.  I didn’t tell them the truth which was I wouldn’t because I was bored out of my mind with their conversation.
    When we finally arrived at the pizza place it was already 8 o’clock.  I think Jackie and I left around 5 from the dormitories.  I don’t remember the name but there was 2 sections to the place past the cash registers.  To the right looked to be more like a bar and to the left, which is where we were seated, was the booths and the tables where the kids hung out.  We got a booth with red vinyl so if you spilled your sauce on it, it would be easily removed.  The cultured kids that lined up next to us in there 10 foot table, and by cultured I mean different colored, were talking literal high school, high class, nonsense.  They were talking about Ivy league schools and the differences between the ACT’s and SAT’s.  It was a bore to listen to. 
    First we looked through the drink menu and I decided on a very hoppy beer known as “Dead Man’s Ale.”  It sucked the previous hydrates right out of you and supplemented it with a cotton mouth.  I woke up every hour that night and chugged a glass of water because I thought I was going to choke on my own air.  Jackie was the only one under aged so she ordered a pink lemonade.  We got spinach dip as appetizers, some portabella mushroom caps and a smorgasbord of random ingredients on a deep dish pizza.  The conversation quickly floated to where it usually does when I am with my brothers.  To my parents apparent downfall.  They usually like to grieve over their upbringing and I am the punching bag.  They call my the golden child because my parents didn’t give two shits about what I did or so my parents think.  I just think I don’t complain about it as much and just lived within their boundaries.  Everything that I did that they thought gave me golden child status are things they have never tried like staying out past curfew or sleeping over at your friends house for a week straight or sleeping over at girls houses.  Just because I have done it gave them the impression that my parents favored me.  Then it leads to their childhood and how things “really” were which are usually drastically changed from the original context.  They blame them for their negligence but I think it goes farther then that.  You can’t blame your parents for the way you were raised especially since there are less fortunate kids that either never had parents or better yet, should of never had parents.  We shouldn’t be talking about our parents debatable negligence but their deterioration away from love and how seeing them throughout our childhood never loving each other has affected us as emotional, human beings.  Michelle had a quick fix for this which is something she has applied to her father.
    “Just train them.  You two should start being more loving to them and start saying how much you love them and soon they will follow foot.  I used it on my dad and now he is the one to call me and tell me how much he loves me.”
    Michelle’s dad is a man’s man.  He is a cattle farmer in Nebraska which is what he has been doing his whole life.  He is burly, really opinionated and conservative to a T.
    Jackie then chimed in because she used the same mechanics on her father who is a handy man around McHenry.  He fixes anything electrical easily and usually does bar jobs like pool tables to pinball machines.  Now her father says I love you before she does on the phone and will call her before she has to call him.
    “But I don’t want to have to train my parents.  Our love is unconditional meaning that it is inherent.  We don’t have to talk about it or make it known because it is just there.”  I say while Kane nods his head while agreeing.
    I don’t think it is right to try and force something that just isn’t there based on the facts that is the normal thing to do.  Yeah probably it would help sort a lot of things out in my life if I knew, through communications, that I am loved but in these situations you just need faith.  I am not religious so I use my blind faith towards the obvious.  My parents care about me or they wouldn’t let me still stay at their house on the weekends.  They wouldn’t help me out financially through school if they didn’t care about my future and they definitely wouldn’t pick me up from the train if that was the case.  They show their affection through the freedom they give me not through the words that come out of there mouths.  I don’t get verbally abused like some of my friends but they support me through every life endeavor like going to school for a faux degree like Fiction Writing.  They believe in me and that is all that counts in a reality of back stabs and false hopes.  Training them with just be conditioning them into something, someone they have never set out to be.