SIBLINGS

My brother was five years older than I, but we were good friends. He was a very intelligent and talented boy. At the age of one year and nine months, he recited children’s Christmas poems at the community center. He would stand on a chair to recite, and the audience wouldn’t let him stop.

When I was three or four, every night, when we were in our beds, he would tell me a fairy tale that he probably heard from our uncle who had simply invented it. I’m sure that my brother’s imagination added a lot to the story, which never ended. Every night he would continue the story about an ice palace and the little people in it.

When he was nine or ten, he had a beautiful voice that enchanted the neighbors. He also had a fine ear for music. Then, when he was in high school, he became a good actor, but he was a bad student. I have never seen him doing his homework. He would come home after school, lie down on the sofa, and read. He was an avid reader and had a phenomenal memory. He educated himself mostly through reading. However, all these talents never had a chance to develop due to our move from our hometown in China to Brazil.

I, on the other hand,was almost the opposite. I was a very quiet child and was still lisping till the age of four. I must have had some talent for acting because I was selected to be in a couple of children’s plays – the first one at the age of five - and sang on school’s stage at the age of ten or eleven. I had not read much till I was in my teens, but I have always done my homework. All my life, I had to work hard to achieve my goals.

In Brazil, I worked as a clerk in an insurance company. It was boring, and I was always dreaming of gong to a university. After living in Brazil for almost four years, I moved to the U.S., and we have only seen each other two times during the past 40 years. His sudden death at the age of 68 was shocking. I still miss my dear brother.

TSE Assignment #11
10/30/07

Plight of Pigs
It was sad to see them die. They had done nothing wrong. Nothing to deserve this slow, painful death. Cholera. That’s what they had…cholera. I don’t know how they got it but it was a word that caused a silence when spoken in a gathering of farmers. It was a dreadful disease that could ruin a farmer’s livelihood. Once it was contracted it could spread quickly to other livestock and there wasn’t anything you could do except quarantines the animals.

I remember a particular summer when I was eleven years and my dad asked me to stand quietly outside the pig pen and keep an eye on one of the sows that was ready to give birth. Dad said that I had to be especially quiet and watch the sow so that after she had delivered the litter she didn’t get scared and start eating her young. I thought that was stupid but Dad said that if the sow though her piglets were in danger she would eat them to protect them. So I watched as the sow delivered a string of ten piglets! I must have made her comfortable as she didn’t eat any of them!

I also remember Dad bringing a small runt of the litter into the house and place it in a shoe box next to the stove. He would feed the piglet with a baby bottle hoping that by keeping it away from the rest of the litter until it grew stronger it would give it a chance of surviving with his brothers and sisters.

I was in charge of feeding all the pigs by making slop for them each day. I would carry five gallon pails filled with ground feed and then add water from the water tank, mix it into slop and pour it into their troughs. They were always hungry it seemed so they’d grunt and snort and run with their curly tails flying as they came to dine.

The summer when Dad explained to me that all the pigs had cholera and were going to die I asked, “What can we do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just keep them comfortable by pouring water over them as they lay hot and feverish all over the pig yard. The dirt they laid in eventually became holes of mud as I carried buckets and buckets of water and poured over their bodies. There they lay…mud baths for dying pigs. Not a pretty sight or a pleasant memory. My father lost all of his pigs to cholera and the land had to be left alone for at least a year before any other animals could be pastured there. The dreaded cholera needed time to be eradicated.

The sight of the pigs being hauled away to market is a mixture of joy and sadness. Sad because they had become pets and I had given them names and happy because I love pork chops! But when they hauled away the dead pigs, it was only sadness that I remember.

Baskets of dreams
Chests of memories
Buckets of pain
Cauldrons of could-have-been’s
Bounteous bandages
Covering life’s boo-boo’s
Bravely defending
Caring hearts
Bent knees
Cavernous cravings
Borrowed bindings
Caress the cuttings
Of life.

Bean Fields
Hot, muggy summer days
Tall, thick sunflowers
Needing removal
From the bean fields.
Harvest coming
Combines necessary for
Gathering of beans
Giant stringy sunflowers
Wreak havoc
With pricey machines.
Necessity to spend
Long, hot, humid days filled with flies and bugs
Of all sorts
Yanking and pulling those stubborn stalks of
Sunflowers out of the bean fields.
No gloves
No hats
No sun block
Just needed doing.
Not slave labor
Twenty-five cents an hour
As a farmer’s kid
Better than nothing.
The end of school didn’t leave me thinking of
Free time to frolic about, go swimming or on picnics, vacations or
Amusement parks.
Summers were a mixed blessing.
Stolen moments of daydreaming of being anywhere except
In that bean field!

The attraction was strong. I couldn’t take my eyes off the television. Dian Sawyer was interviewing a guy named Sammy Gravano aka Sammy, the Bull, who had turned in John Gotti, head mafia boss in New York. Sammy had been Gotti’s “under boss.” According to the interview, Sammy had killed nineteen men including his own brother-in-law!

Sammy had been given victim witness protection because of his testifying against Gotti. Sammy had also been offered plastic surgery to alter his appearance but said “if I can’t look like Robert Redford, I just want to be a younger Sammy.”

The interview was held on 20/20 two nights that week and after seeing the first night I couldn’t wait for the second segment. What was this attraction? They way he walked with a swagger, very confident carrying his trench coat over his shoulder. I thought about him for days and had this infatuation for him! Why? A cold-blooded murder! Yet he had me. What was it about Sammy, the Bull, Gravano that held me captive? The more I examined what I knew about him and the more I discussed this crazy attraction with my friends the less I understood.

Then it struck me. Fear. He has no fear. He is not afraid of death. He had made a pact with his “family” “being made” they call it and since this blood pact had taken place he no longer feared killing or being killed. That confident walk and way of talking and thinking without concern about what people thought of him was daring and exciting. He was a “strong arm” of a mighty body…Gotti’s body.

I was mesmerized by his whole persona. No fear. Raw masculinity, maleness at its highest level of testosterone. Yes, that was the attraction. Now it would be great if I would find someone with these male qualities who wasn’t a murderer!