Email To My Brother: Generations

Maybe the generations that came before us--our dad, our granddad, the granddads before him--had the right idea.
     You just sit around and puff on a cigar and let the older folks with no sense be physical or fuss with the young pups. Dad may have a lot of surgeries, but none of them were for a torn meniscus or a bad anterior horn, whatever THAT is. Our grandfather, too. It took a bad turkey to knock him out of the game. Physically, he was in perfect shape to do the things he did, which was sit in the patio and puff on his cigar.

     If they could see you, they'd laugh at that wussy surgery you're having.

     "How did you hurt yourself?" our father might ask.

     "I fell when I took my grandson to the park."

     "Son, if there's anything I tried to teach you, it was to NEVER do anything with your kids. Doing things with your kids just snags away the time you could be chasing after women. As for your grandkids, if you can't do it sitting on the couch, then it's not worth doing."

     Speaking of dad, he's doing the same. When you left on Saturday, he said, "It was nice of your brother to come visit me."

     "Yes, pop," I said. "It was."

     "He looks OLD," he said."Older than ME. "
     I just agreed.
     Who am I to tell him that he's wrong, especially when he isn't?

     Our sister told me that during those few days you stayed with her, her daughter saw a big-headed ghost that would wander the house in the middle of the night, searching through their underwear drawers, under their beds, and in their closets. And then the ghost would drift out the kitchen door leading to the backyard.

     "Are you sure it's not your daughter's medical marijuana that's causing her to see that ghost?" I asked.

     "No," our sister said, "because, when we checked the backyard the next day, there were FOOTPRINTS all over the backyard where the storage shed is. We went into the storage shed and everything was moved around, like the ghost was searching for something. Actually, they ghost left the storage shed in better condition than it was originally in."

     As I thought about our sister's story, I remembered how you left town so quickly.

     Hmm...

     "By the way," I asked her, "do you still have that hallow bomb shell of pop's from World War Two? The one our brother always wanted?"

     "Heck," she said, "my ex-husband sold that for the copper years ago."
 
 

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