Corie Writes

I’m not especially environmentally friendly. I do some good things, like I don’t litter (+1), and I use the backside of printouts for scrap paper (+1). But I also don’t recycle on a regular basis (-1) and if I need to go somewhere more than 8 blocks from my house I drive (-1).  I have reusable bags for groceries (+1), but I usually forget to take them with me (-1). I add up to 0.

I have been called a tree hugger a few times in my life. If that literally meant that I had hugged a tree sometime during my 26 years I would willfully submit to the slangy nickname. But it usually just means an environmentalist, and as evidenced by the above calculations I’m no tree hugger. I may touch one every now and then (figuratively), but no hugs.

Last Friday I wound up in an unorthodox position—hugging a tree. Actually sort of dangling from it, upside down with arms and legs wrapped around a branch as thick as my torso. It started out simply enough. Like most of my ideas it seemed brilliant when it surfaced in my mind, but when I tried to execute it the concept became less like an Olympic diver’s plunge into the water and more like a 500-pound-man’s belly flop off the high board.

In this analogy, Tony was the diver, and I am the fat man. Tony was an adventurous kid (and adult for that matter). I was my brother’s follower. He jumped, I jumped. He ran, I ran. He climbed, I climbed. And we did a lot of climbing.

We were lucky enough to grow up in a house on a corner lot with tons of yard space and several good climbing trees. The tree next to 5^th street required you to leap into the air and catch whatever you could before shimming up to where the branches shot out. The redwood in the middle of the yard didn’t let you get too high, and you had to be careful of the brittle branches. The maple riding the curb on Archer was perfect. The wide trunk opened close to the ground and offered a nice place to rest before climbing into the thick, steady branches.

This tree was the source of much of the happiness in my childhood.  There was a tire swing hanging from one of the sturdiest branches. When the chain would get caught on a knot, I watched as Tony lithely scaled the tree and freed the swing. One autumn my brother and I spent hours raking the leaves in the yard into a pile below the tree just so we could swing from a smooth branch, parallel to the ground and land butt, back or belly first in the crunchy padding of leaves. 

One summer Tony bought his own hammock and hooked it to the tree so he could lounge six feet in the air. The hammock was his oasis. This is where my brain gets a little foggy. This is where my story about climbing trees could go in two directions. If I turned to the left I could tell you about how annoyed my brother was by me, how for the first week he wouldn’t even let me touch his hammock. How when I climbed into it and he caught me, I found myself pushed onto the ground, my backbone grinding into the dry soil, his knees pinning my shoulders down while he tickled me, simultaneously dangling a stream of spit inches from my open mouth. His preferred means of torture.

If I venture to the right in this story I find myself telling about how after a week of having the hammock he let me use it too. How he shared it with me and called it our hammock. How he would flip it to the side, landing feet first on the ground when he saw me climb up into the palm of the tree with a book so that I could have a chance to read up there with no disturbances.

This is when it gets hard—when my mind starts wondering which side of this story is correct? If Tony was still here, I would just ask him how he remembered it. Was he only cruel to me because it was his right as the older brother and not because he hated me? Was he only nice to me because he was bored with the hammock or that being nice took less effort than torture?

Death does something to your brain. It shuts down the rational part that lets you see the good and bad in the person who died and makes you choose a side. Remember only the good or only the bad. My brain shut off the part that let me remember the bad.

And as I dangled upside down on Friday in an attempt to unleash my inner Tonyness, I thought about this. I pulled hard with my right arm, bringing myself halfway around the tree branch. Tony wasn’t a saint. There were times when he hurt my feelings and made me cry. There were times when he punched my arm just a little too hard and left a bruise. There were times when he made me so angry that I thought I would never speak to him again.

I thrust my right leg the rest of the way around the branch and pushed myself into a sitting position. I looked around me, taking in the view from a few feet higher than usual. Weird how very different the back yard looked from just a slightly different perspective. I realized this was a perspective I never would have seen if it wasn’t for Tony. I probably wouldn’t have climbed trees so much as a child, and I never would have climbed this tree today if it wasn’t for him.

What does it matter if I only remember the good?

I count—all of the time.  It’s a quirk I’ve had since childhood that I have given up on being embarrassed about.  I count stairs as I walk down them.  Steps from the parking garage to my office.  Tiles in the ceiling.  To 50 before I get out of bed every morning.  But the most important counting of the day comes when I look up at the clock and realize that it is after 5:00.  This is when the countdown to 5:30 begins, minute by minute.

I don’t hate my job.  In fact, the majority of the time I like it.  For a social person like myself it gives me a chance to mingle with a variety of people on a daily basis.  I get the haughty professor who believes that the collection of highlighters neatly arranged on my desk for his personal use, and that he need not put them back where he found them.  For him I am always equipped with an icy glare and a monotone “Good morning.”  But then there are the riotous public patrons who glide into the building and say things that lead me to believe they bathed that morning in a tub of creepiness.  “Let me see your shoes,” from windbreaker man who I now believe that in addition to having a thing for underage girls also has a foot fetish.  But they make for great stories when I get home. 

And then there are the students.  Because there are so many of them, the students run the gamut.  The super-nice guy, who comes in every day at the same time and always stops to chat, helps me get through the drowsy mid-day.  The haughty girl who snaps at me as though I am her personal secretary and I just handed her a cup of cold coffee, has no clue that book she really needs isn’t checked out, I just refuse to give it to her.  If she was nicer I would probably not only check it out to her, but let her have it for an extra hour or two.  In essence, the library lets me play out my cattiness when appropriate but also gives me an arsenal of excellent people to talk to.

But even if I like it, come 5:30, I’m ready to go home.  Most days there is some force that prevents me from leaving at 5:30 on the dot, a quick check-in with a colleague who is headed out of town or a few books that should be run up to offices before the end of the day.  There is one day in recent history that I walked out the door at 5:30: Halloween Day.

Halloween was always a favorite holiday for both my brother and I.  As kids, we relished in selecting the perfect costumes and cleverly constructing them.  The year Tony went as a mummy he started the night covered in a complete layer of 2-ply bathroom tissue.  But as the evening came to a close he arrived at home with an overloaded bag of candy and only a few scraps of toilet paper clung to him.

Last year I didn’t do anything for Halloween.  The day was simply too close to when he had died, and there was too much of a connection between him and this particular holiday.  This year I decided nothing was going to prevent me from dressing up, and I had selected the perfect costume: a sock monkey.  Anyone out there that knew Tony knew that he loved monkeys.  He always had a plethora of monkey paraphernalia decorating whatever apartment or house he happened to be living in at the time. 

The monkey costume was recycled—I wore it two years ago to work.  But I remember when I told Tony what I had dressed up as that year, the excitement in his voice was palpable, and I knew he was jealous he hadn’t thought of it first.  I assumed if anyone would approve of re-wearing this costume, it would be Tony.

When I walked out the doors of the library at 5:30 on Halloween, the only thing I was thinking of was that costume.  I walked to the parking garage thinking about how I would do my monkey hair.  I pulled out of the garage thinking about if people would know what I was dressed as.  As I stopped at the stoplight waiting to turn onto Grand I was thinking about how I wished I had taken a picture of my costume before so my brother could have seen it.

Thinking still, I looked out my window to the left to see if I could turn right and spotted a little boy sitting in the backseat of the car next to me, his window parallel with mine.  The weather was unseasonably warm for the last day of October and both of our windows were down.  This little boy, probably only two or so, had yet to learn the hard lesson from his parents that staring at strangers is not a socially acceptable thing to do.  He was staring at me.  And then he smiled, and stretched his arm out the window as far as he could, wiggling his fingers at me. 

Right there, in the middle of the street, I reached out my arm too.  And wiggling my fingers, I stretched as far as I could toward him.  My fingers grazed the palm of his hand, settled on the soft innocence of his skin, and just as his mother pulled forward to make her left turn he giggled.

As I counted one…two…three…seconds that my hand touched to his, I realized I didn’t have to get out of my car to play in the street.  I just had to find the innocence Tony and I once possessed and touch it again.

Like most people, I spend most of my summer trying to avoid bugs. When outside, I hose down my entire body with bug spray. I light citronella candles, and I have no problems swatting the brave mosquito that dares to land on my bare arm.

When bugs decide that my home should be their home, I wage an all out war. I bombed the fleas in the basement, and when that didn’t annihilate them completely, I poured bleach over them and swept them down the drain. The many silverfish that decided the folds of my shower curtain were an ideal habitat got smashed with a shampoo bottle or the handle of a used razor. The spider that made his web from my ceiling fan quickly found out how dangerous a slipper could be. And if a bug is lucky enough to enter my home and still avoid my gaze, Fatty (my cat), will undoubtedly hunt him down, bat the creature around with her paws, and then just as the bug raises the white flag of surrender, she will eat it.

Needless to say, bugs aren’t my thing.

So, I was quite taken aback the other night when I found myself with the urge to catch a bug…and not kill it. I was sitting on my back porch (really just a cement slab outside the door with wooden stairs leading to the sidewalk). It was a typical June evening, the air not too hot but having that sticky consistency that signaled impending rain. I saw them. Fireflies. There were about half a dozen of them circling the back yard, flashing their neon light into the thick sky. Blip. Blip.

I wanted to catch one. I hadn’t felt this urge for a long time.

I could remember very vividly the summer evenings of my childhood. Tony and I would meet up with the other kids in the neighborhood, both of us clutching mayonnaise jars tightly to our chests. The flicker of lights in the early evening sky was enough to throw us into a harried frenzy. Some kids ran in circles, wildly chasing the glowing bugs. Some reached their cupped hands toward anything that moved. I preferred the select and conquer method. I would pick out one firefly and chase it until I could finally capture it in the palm of my hand and then quickly deposit it in my glass jar.

Tony was more patient. He would stand still and wait for the bugs to come to him. Eventually they would choose to rest for a beat on his head or shoulder or shoe, and he would gingerly scoop them up and place them in the jar. We would later count to see who had collected the most and Mom would help us punch holes in the metal lids with the can opener so they could breathe and we could keep them as our pets for the night.

Outside, just as quickly as the masses of glowing creatures appeared, they would disappear. Fireflies were like magic to us. What makes them glow? Are they talking to each other with their flashes, like sign language? Where do they go during the day? Why don’t they stay out all night?

This was long before we knew what the internet was. Before we had a computer in our home. Before finding the answer to a question was as simple as typing it in Google. Now, with a mass of information at my fingertips, I never let things remain a mystery to me. When I think of a question I want answered, I Google it. But the other evening as I watched the fireflies in their beautiful dance through my backyard, like slow motion fireworks, I realized that I had never tried to uncover the secrets of the firefly. They still remained a mystery to me.

I stepped in my backyard as an adult this time. The thick air had turned into a fine mist. I took a few steps down the now damp path, my bare feet soaking up the warmth of the sidewalk, feeling the grainy texture and the bits of soil and sticks. I reached my hands into the air and then stood still. On the palm of my hand I felt the gentle landing of tiny insect feet. I cupped my hands together carefully and brought them to my face. As I parted my thumbs I saw the bright flash of the firefly. I opened my palms and let him fly away.

The firefly is the one mystery I never want to solve. It is the one bug I will never kill. It is one connection I still have to Tony that can never be taken away.

I am not a fisher(wo)man.  I never have been.  My first fishing expedition as a child was rather exciting, but primarily for unforeseen reasons.  I had a tiny Minnie Mouse pole that bounced up and down with such panache when I had my first catch that I practically let it slip out of my hands.  But the thrill kept me holding on, praying for a huge fish.  Unfortunately, my first catch was a water moccasin.  Its slippery body flew out of the water and glided back in as I began reeling slowly (as instructed).  The story is not worth rehashing (mostly because it makes my skin crawl thinking about it), but it will suffice to say that the Minnie’s line had to be burned, and I watched my captured snake slither back into the water.

Since then my luck with fishing has not improved much.  Though I haven’t caught any more snakes, I have caught a lot of sticks, trees, moss and general rubbish.  I decided to give it another shot last summer during a trip to the lake.  Tony loved fishing-something I have never been able to find solace in.  I am far too impatient to simply cast out a line and wait.  But I tried. 

At this point I must make a confession.  This is not the first time I fished since I made this list of Tony tasks to complete.  Over Memorial Weekend I flung out pole a few times, but with no bites immediately, I gave up.  This trip I decided to have another go at it.  After I had Caleb prep the pole (I have no clue how to do this, but am still certain that I could have figured it out on my own if necessary), I followed him to a prime spot on the shore near a grove of trees.  I watched him cast out the line and mimicked his movements casting mine out away from his to avoid a tangled mess.  While his soared out gracefully about 40 feet, mine landed with a plunk ten feet in front of me.  I reeled in the line.  I tossed it out again. 

Nothing. 

And then Caleb pointed to the mucky waters below, “You wanna see a really big gar?”  No response was even required on my part; I just assumed a gar was a fish that I would want to see.  I followed the invisible line from his finger to the water a saw a very, very large fish.  I am no good at translating size into comprehensible figures such as inches or pounds, so it will just have to be sufficient to say the fish was large. 

My mind immediately drafted an image of me holding this huge fish as it dangled begrudgingly from my pole.  A photo would be taken of me with this large catch, a photo that I would have e-mailed my brother to prove to him that I could do something just as well or better than him.  (This is something I have been doing since I challenged him to a tree climbing contest in elementary school.)  I started to dangle my worm in the warm, shallow water in front of the gar’s long, slender nose/snout/bill/whatever.

“You don’t want to catch that,” Caleb nonchalantly decreed.  “Gar have teeth.”  And then just for good measure, “You really don’t want to catch that.”

“What would happen if I did?”  I still couldn’t erase the image of me holding my prized catch.

“We’d have to cut the line.  You can’t reach into a mouth of razor sharp teeth to pull the hook out.”

I knew the feeling of cutting the line.  Disappointment.  Disappointment that the catch was somehow unacceptable.  Disappointment that you were the reason that some creature was swimming around to this day with a hook imbedded in its lip.  I didn’t want to cut the line again.  So I reeled in one final time, carefully maneuvering past the gar so he wouldn’t bite at my worm.  I packed in my pole and went back to something I know I was good at: floating around in the gar filled water and reading some bit of deliciously embarrassing chick lit.

I think about Tony every day, but in the past few weeks I have been thinking about him a lot more.  I thought I had moved past the crying phase, but I’m not quite sure it is ever going to completely subside.  I think about the weather and what Tony would do with his days.  If I watch a movie inside with the air conditioner on at full blast I feel guilty.  I am still alive and able to enjoy this day.  Tony isn’t.  Sometimes it motivates me to get my ass off the couch and do something, sometimes it makes me want to crawl even deeper into a little hole and close myself off from the world. 

I don’t have to love everything he loved.  I can’t imagine him enjoying cracking open the latest Laurie Notaro and reading with an iced sweet tea in hand.  And I still can’t picture myself a fisherman.  I guess the point of this whole exercise in Tonyness was to get out of my comfort zone and try something new and adventurous.  Adventure here I come.