Speaking of my urchin brother, I called him this afternoon after lunch and he told me about how he wrote a really emotional 20-page epic for his Creative Writing class (for a 4-5 page assignment, mind you) and was supposed to have it workshopped in class but was too embarrassed to do so. The teacher gave him an extension and was understanding but he really bore the brunt of it on himself. Zack is in such an emotionally imcomprehensible situation for me right now, and when I talk to him I feel absolutely lost for what I can do for him. Maybe I simply need to step back and realize that this is a stage of his life where he's for the first time really experiencing the emotional rollercoaster of adolescence, which I think I took a ride on, but got over after my coming-out/ecstasy-spiritual sagas.
Later on, my mom called me before she was going to see The Little Mermaid on Broadway with my sister. She said Zack had called crying about grandma again and that she wanted me to try to talk to him. I ended up talking to him when I was in the library, trying to make sense of what he was saying through the mumbling/poor connection, all while talking about the type of personal stuff that people in the library don't want to hear (death in the family) and pacing around the place like the lunatic I am. Thirty-five minutes and hundreds of paces later, the girl sitting at the front desk knew me better than she probably wanted to, and I hopefully had gotten him onto the right track for thinking about his Creative Writing assignments. I can see a budding writer in him, but he's falling for all the amateur traps: excessive verbosity, overemotionalism, telling instead of showing the message, etc. I told him that he should try to write simply at first, avoiding the type of verbiage I've seen in some of his earlier work, and then add "richness" later. I'm glad he's taking the class, because I think our family is the shit at writing, but I think he still has a ways to go.
While we talked, my brother mentioned another aspect of his mischevious boyhood (the doll in the poopy toilet came up too) that makes me so endearingly dub him an "urchin," a word I recently discovered in Hart Crane's poem "Voyages." Crane's arcane vocabulary is really quite a gem, and you come away from the poem with both a sense of utter incomprehension as well as incomprehension's better sister: reverence. But I digress. My brother told me about how he used to play with a calcium deposit under my grandmother's skin on her hand in church instead of paying attention to the homily like a good boy. Moving it around her skin like some magical toy, he would look up to her face, haloed by the sunlight that beat down so passionately through the high and wide gymnasium windows, and grin. Later on in life, as she lay in a hospital bed on the East Side of Manhattan, he wondered if that calcium deposit was still there, or if it had dissolved somewhere into her ailing body and given her a sort of mystical sustenance. Now, he wonders if that deposit is somewhere among the sands and dunes of a sunny shore, a magical toy waiting for some new urchin to chance upon.
I'll leave you (whoever you are) with some words from the first section of Crane's poem:
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.
And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:
O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.
