An artist asks me to come see how she has curated her work. I take my walking stick in hand — dreaded stick, hated stick, stick that deters more than it enables — and make my way down the hall.

My heart stops. Or maybe it simply skips one beat and then continues, but in that quick arrythmia a flash of memory lives.

She has painted a flower, maybe an iris but perhaps not. I see an iris though, delicate purple petals on a vivid green stem. Suddenly my hand wraps itself around a black mug bearing careful lines drawn by a quiet artist in a tiny nation far to the east.

The cup holds thick coffee poured from a stove-top percolator. It will pass from my small cautious hand to the strong fist of my brother Stephen. He will add milk to it while clenching a burning Marlboro between his lips and grumbling at me. Later that cup will go out to his car and ride with him to wherever he worked that year, possibly at a bar, maybe on a medic’s rig. I can’t recall.

The iris cup came to our parents’ house with him when he moved back that time. A few months later, I arrived on his well-worn heels. We bolstered each other’s flagging egos in those brief encounters in the kitchen. He didn’t eat much then; he drank coffee with cream, smoked cigarettes, and poured a finger of neat whiskey into a tumbler whenever he felt unable to cope. Later, other poisons would be necessary but in those early days, the late seventies, single malt did the trick well enough for both of us.

Over the next few months, I found a job, got my grad school admission reinstated, and moved into a south St. Louis apartment. Steve traveled a similar path. Neither of us could be seen as successful, not then, and — at least, for me, the only left to be judged — not now. But we got by.

That iris cup found its way to my apartment, eventually, perhaps because my brother stopped by one day and forgot it. I never made any move to get it back to him. I mostly used it for tea, preferring something chunkier for the strong black coffee that remains my morning beverage of choice. I drank tea in the evening during my carefree misspent youth, though not the sissy stuff, mostly Earl Grey, hot. I liked my brother’s mug for that.

Two decades later, my little brother died by his own hand, alone, leaning against a tree on land that he loved. Eventually, I laid claim to several mementos of him, including his two favorite coffee mugs that in turn made their way to his estranged daughters. I kept the pretty iris-adorned vessel for another few years. One day I dropped it on the concrete of my porch and collapsed in a rocker, sobbing, staring at the shards and thinking of my brother. Stephen, dancing; Stephen, slinging draft beer; Stephen, striding across the airport and catching me in his arms, twirling me high over his head. Stephen standing in our parents’ kitchen all those years ago, telling me not to laugh at his hangover before I looked in a mirror. Your friend and mine, Stephen Patrick Corley. The last-born, the child who was to be named “Christopher” because of his December 25th birthday, but who got named “Even Stephen” instead because he made the genders four and four in our motley tribe.

You can find anything online these days. With a simple search, I found what I think might be the actual line from which my little brother’s cup derived. The seller has four, and would part with them if I sent $32.00 plus shipping. I stared at the listing for a long time before closing the browser. Maybe the memory suffices. Maybe if I had those mugs, using them would never be as satisfying as when that lone survivor went back and forth between my little brother and me. They would never have borne first his touch and then mine, nourishing each of us, keeping some needed connection alive, back in a time when life seemed bleak but held at least a glimmer of possibility.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®