When I have the energy, I stop at the local grocery store for a bag or two of what I like to consider healthy food. But I fall prey to the temptation to let food science deliver plant-based fake food, supposedly filled with arguable harmless stuff like soy and egg white. On such days, I watch the grey lumps turn brown in my 7-inch cast iron skillet.
I stand at the butcher-block counter, leaning slightly, sometimes stretching my calves. An image rises unheralded and certainly unwanted, of my haggard father on one of countless mornings when he clutched a Camel straight and waited for the coffee to percolate in the battered metal pot on the stove. Small children lurked around the corner of the kitchen doorway, hesitant, uncertain of what might happen if they took another step onto the linoleum surrounding him. His brief, sharp glance sent them scurrying back to safety.
Decades later, one morning after I had come crawling back to St. Louis from a failed experimental relocation, I approached the kitchen with equal trepidation. My little brother Stephen faced the counter, awaiting a cessation in the hiss and grumble of the automatic drip machine to deliver black nectar. His hand gripped a Marlboro, the red pack crumpled on the tile beside his mug. I spared a grin and a small chuckle. We had been at a bar together until after midnight, with both of us having to rise for work and both of us camped at our parents’ house with no greater destination in sight.
He raised his eyes, sending a sudden pain through my belly. He looked so much like our father in that moment; I could barely stand the sight. Something must have shown on my face because he snarled, You looked at your own self in a mirror yet? I fell back, clutching my robe to my thin body, one hand guiding me backwards to the front bedroom. In the unforgiving glow of the overhead light, I stared at myself in a mirror that I propped on the desk. He had not lied.
Four and a half decades later, I sit on my porch in the cool of a California evening and think about my brother Stephen. In one week, give or take a stray day for which no account could ever be made, he will have been dead for twenty-eight years. He was the first of the infinity eight to die, on a hot summer evening on land in St. Charles County, Missouri, with no one and nothing beside him but an angel of mercy and the memory of his mother’s soft hand.
Some days I make a full dinner and eat at the table, with a knife, a fork, and a cloth napkin. I neatly fold the cotton square, one of several in my drawer that my mother made on her Singer sewing machine in the years between becoming an empty nester and dying far too young. A full metal cup of cold water suffices for drink. The air around me holds nary a waft of cigarette smoke. Of a morning, I brew my coffee one cup at a time, in a fancy pot with a paper filter and grounds from a heavy, noisy machine.
Other days, I take slices of sheep’s-milk cheese and fig jam from a jar out to the table on my porch and eat with my fingers while I read a detective novel and ignore unopened mail. I pour a short glass of leftover wine and let it run smooth as summer silk over my tongue and down my throat.
Some days, I practically skip down the steps to my house and play loud and rowdy songs as I carelessly drive the levee roads. Other days, I trip over the flagstone walk, and then let the silence of the car embrace me as I cautiously navigate the treacherous curves.
On my son’s first day of kindergarten, I stumbled on the stairway to the elementary school that he would attend. He turned an anxious face towards me, no doubt intensely aware of how sick I had been. Are you going to die before I’m big? he asked, in a voice more anxious than any child should have to feel. No, Buddy, I answered. I’m going to live to be 103, and I’m going to nag you every day of your life! He thought about that as we finished the climb. Before we moved into the classroom, he slipped his hand into mine and responded: If you’re going to nag me every day of my life til you’re 103, I’m going to annoy you every day of YOUR life. I smiled but he had turned away and walked ahead.
My little brother Stephen never made it to 40. I will be 70 come September. By my reckoning, I’ve 33 years to go. I aim to get there, because a promise is a promise. But I’m bringing the spunky spirit of my lost brother along for the ride, held close in my heart. For him, and for my little Buddy, I’m going to keep walking forward, through the diamonds and the stones, to whatever lies ahead.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The Missouri Mugwump®
In memory of Stephen Patrick Corley, 12/25/59 – 06/10/1997.
With endless love.