Now all I want to do is right new titles and breath deeply thinking about the next step. This is the year of the horse and I think I might f caught my breath for good. There is one major problem with living out of a bag, it is that you are living out of a bag. But the benefits. Especially for a landscape artist. I mean I do have allot to haul. the bus is a very good mobile home base. But it must be tucked away for now.
Of course once I write and feel upbeat about what I am saying I question myself.
Maybe I should explore heavier concepts and see if the mood lasts. A picture flashes into my head. It is a dolled up street where the Chengdu gets to be tourists in their city and in time. Red glowing orbs are hanging from stone shops and restaurants. Small vendors encase a lilly pond and Bantu tree bathed in hanging red prayers. How this spot has survived or evolved I do not know, but it has mutated into a street mall selling the memory of itself. I am sure there is one in every city, even if it be an abandoned row of warehouses telling a story of lost prosperity.
Well this place was in Chengdu. Sichuan providence of China. I took a picture of my parents. Ernie is caught unawares, his patented smile replaced by a tired and probably uncomfortable man. Pamela leans in. It is not that she is in a bad mood. It is simply that so much information is flooding in to her face through predominantly the area around her glasses. She squints. Her brow comes down. She will be locked in this state, chewing her tongue, until you say something to her. Then a youthful innocence bursts forth, until the dwarfish golem returns. So Pam needs a nap. It is the only picture of them together looking rather miserable.
It was the first time they were in the same room, except for two rather short events, where they were promptly able to complain about each other, or escape each other in seventeen years. In someways they behaved as people who could not handle it. Each brother had a suspicion on who was crumbling, turning biter, or holding together. We all had sides. Sides OI never wanted to exist. But old cracks had been exposed.
If Gabriel's bride was to be brought back to the states, she needed a visa, and a couple of sponsors. Gabriel had asked Nathan and Ernie, his brother and father, along with Pam. It was the end of the scmester for Nathan. He got back to Gabriel about two months later. Gabe always talks on Skype. Grace was in the room when he turned down her sponsorship. He told Gabe he had worked hard for what he had, and lawyers explained that if there were problems with Grace's finances he would be held responsible. He called Ernie and Pam who both contacted lawyer's they were related to. Ernie, his wife, who advised he not do it. And Pam's niece, who does not study that form of law, but got Pam nervous enough for Pam to tell her to stop telling her about it.
Gabe suddenly had only his mother sponsoring his wife's move to America. Who is some where between thirty and a hundred thousand in debt and working at peir one imports, having taken a slightly early retirement from teaching due to extended abuse from New York Public schools. Grace it seems at that moment questioned hr move to America and some elements of the family she was joining. I got to sit on a moral high ground on the sidelines, since I lived in a bus and had technically no income to declare the previous year.
Ernie, Nathan, Gabriel, Pam and myself. The five are united again after all those years. Ernie is ultimately alone. He has Nathan and Gabriel as allies in a way because he has raised them in his intellectually abstract form of expressing his thoughts, beliefs, or whatever sense of himself he wants to talk around. Pam is the rogue, to charged with emotion to not be isolated. Except at an early age she kept me close, I learned where her rage came from and turned into a force of nature that no member of the family could contain. Somewhere around six or seven my rage emerged. I fought like a demon possessed. With my brothers mainly, but it spilled out to the streets and my parents thought outside forces were turning me into a little gang kid, moved me to a Quacker school, kept me back a year, and eventually moved the family to Brookline. For some reason the anger did not abate until I was able to focus my energies on fencing. I had to wait. My mother had informed me that she would be divorcing my father once I graduated high school. Since they had kept me back a grade, I now had about ten years to wait.
My father and I have never really got along per see. I think my anger scared off him and Nathan. After about six or seven I remember a cooling. My birth house in Maine was sold off then. The only home my parents owned together, and a fantastically unique place that i have only two bottles from. Dr. Trues Elixir, who had his laboratory under the garage a hundred and twenty years ago.
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