Three Down, One to Go.

Just today I received notification for the last of the letter grades and credits of my summer graduate course work. Straight "A"s. I'm so proud I made the notification my profile picture at my social website. Ahhh. It feels so good to be done with that. Now I can kinda reap the benefits of the work: a financial boost up the pay scale and a greater feeling of job security since I've earned the CLAD certificate. Well, most of it. I've only got one more class to finish before I can say I'm done. That starts in October and ends in December. Then I'll really be finished with the superfluous course work.
I remember when I started in the summer I was not enthralled to be there. I was sacrificing the earnings I could have made teaching summer school and sacrificing the summer time I would have had for vacation. Either way, this was work for work's sake, and it was going to cost me a pretty penny in tuition. On top of that resolve, I found out that the off campus location for this course was going to be in Carson. CARSON! If you've never been to Carson, let me assure you that you aren't missing much. It's a pretty run-down industrial suburb, north by northwest of Long Beach. Far enough inland to be boring, and close enough to Terminal Island to be commercially depressing.
It was fifty miles from my home, and if you know me, you know how I dread any commute that takes more than twenty minutes. These classes were going to be in Carson (still feeling my stomach groan at mere mention of the town), five days a week, starting at five o'clock. It was the perfect time for summer rush hour. I decided to take the subway trains and a bus just to save my nerves, the wear and tear on my car, and the gas money. Sure it took me two and half hours, but I could still read, study, or sleep on my ride. Little did I realize the exciting entertainment venues that were offered on the wild public transportation we call "the subway". I saw gambling, pole dancing, and one time I was witness to a knife fight that started at the platform on West Washington and continued onto the train and the platform for Vernon. Fun times. Still, it was better than a hot drive in July. At night a classmate friend asked me to drive with her back to L.A. so that saved me half the time on the way back.
The course work was intense, but after a while I got used to it being a heavy load for a condensed course. Still, while I could pace myself at home and break up the projects or the long reading, at the class it was five hours of perpetual sitting. Even if there was a motivated begining at five o'clock, it usually died in the first two hours. There was just no way the classload of fifty-something professional adults could sit-out the whole time without showing signs of boredom. Though most of us did manage to suppress it well, I'll confess that there were plenty of times I would bring one of the texts from the other class so I could silently begin the other assignment in my lap under the table, or text any number of friends I needed to respond to (still done under the table and out of sight) or pass notes to a classmate next to me. We tried to stay respectful, but who plans on keeping us for five hours beating the same dead subject we've all read, learned, and professed our knowledge over, day after day after day? I remember I wrote this blog entry earlier this month when I was finishing the last of the elaborate final projects:

What seemed like for ever is finally over. I've just completed the last project for the last class of my Crosscultural Language and Academic Development certificate (CLAD). Well, almost "last class". Certainly the last class of this summer. Lemmie tell ya, it wasn't easy. I can't say that the courses were an academic challenge. In fact, they seemed pretty easy considering the courses I took when I was an undergrad English Lit major. The challenge of these courses was finding the time to write all the minutia that was required of the assignments; and the reading, oeuf! I've read texts that were poorly written. These were just dry and long-winded without practical application to any current public school I've ever taught at in the last fifteen years. Seriously, while every one of us graduates was already a teacher it was difficult to read a text that tells us the ideal setting and approach to teaching, starting with a classroom of no more than twenty students. "Twenty students"? I'm sorry, but I'm in Los Angeles, California. Where is there a public school room assigned only twenty students? The current level is usually closer to thirty-seven or forty, and at that cramped capacity it is all one can do to get any meaningful instruction done. Still, we endure.

Almost a month since I had to be in that boring repressive room in Carson, and all fifty train trips to and fro, all that writing and all that reading, after all that I can say that as much as I felt the torture of it all, I do have the relief, the hard earned "A"s and some sense of esteem from it being finished.

The last time I saw my brother was at a funeral for a great aunt. It seems like these are the only events we don't miss. It was another hot, long, September day at Inglewood Park Cemetery. She was a good woman, and there were many people draped in mourning black, crammed into the chapel too small for the traditionally long and meditative Catholic sacrament. Stand up, sit down, call and response, kneel, stand, sing, pray and count the rosary. It's a perfunctory performance that, when you've been raised Catholic, becomes a routine you could do in your sleep. If you're smart, like my brother and I were, you choose a pew in the far back. It's usually cooler in the back with the ventilation from the vestibule. Also, you get to see a better view of everything in front of you and any late-comers that try to sneak in. Trust me, at a three hour service you'll watch anything to keep yourself from causing distractions or disrespect.

Usually after this there's the recessional line past the coffin and the grieving family, the condolences, the long walk to the graveside where more prayers continue, and if you're really a glutton for prolonged and morose melancholy, you can go to the wake.

It was during the long walk to the graveside that my brother caught my sleeve and asked me "how have you been?" as an introduction to talking about himself, his wife, his children, and so many other details that I'd already heard a thousand times before today. My brother is kinda like that. He's the type that can sometimes take up all the valuable oxygen in a room. He knew he had my attention, although trying to get anyone else's was going to be another story. Sometimes he just can't help himself. I've known him longer, and I can handle it. In fact, it occurs to me that I've known him longer than any other living person in this cemetery. Good Lord, how much longer is he going to go on talking to me? The hearse left long ago and we're still walking over acres of lawn, passing row upon row of tombstones. It must be nervous prattle. He's either feeling guilty that we haven't spoken for a long time, or that he hasn't visited Aunt Eugenia since Easter, or maybe he's feeling some kind of affliction for not going to a mass in God-knows-how-long. I have no idea.

He looks pretty, though. Maybe he's feeling bad about that. No really, it affects him sometimes. Why does a handsome blond man in a black suit always look out of place at a funeral? He looks like he should be picking up his wife for an anniversary party. Me, I'm the darker one. I look suspiciously like I may have had something to do with the turn of events that brought us here. But that's the way it is and here we are now: two brothers walking side by side to an open grave.

I can't even hear him now; did he stop talking? Oh wait, no he's just getting his second wind. Well, we will soon be at the crowd gathered around the stone. He'll have to be quiet then.

Then there's more praying, more responses. It's funny , but outside here I can hear more people taking a deep breath before they begin to cry. In the chapel I could only tell someone was crying if I saw a handkerchief or the back of someone's shoulders shaking. We pass into another line releasing "dust to dust" into the grave. Some people have been tense and their clenched handful of dirt goes down in a clump, thud! Weaker hands let the pebbles and sand sift through their loose grip like an hourglass. After they pass, some people hug and some of the distant relatives tell others how to get back to the house and the wake. After I pass the line my brother comes up from behind me and asks me if I know the way.

"No, I don't" and I start to think of the long walk over the grass back to my car by the gates.
"How are you going to get there?" he asks me.
"I don't think I'm going to go" I tell him. I can feel the Mass cards I put in my jacket pocket earlier today and they're all I really want to keep from this day.
"What?! How can you not? It's family." Most of the family has wandered off to their various cars and we're standing in a graveyard next to an open grave. The last door of a black limousine slams shut. It turns and joins a long line of cars driving away in the same direction a few people are walking, over a small hill. I watch them all walking away and decide to hang back awhile to be unnoticed. Why doesn't my brother just follow them?

He changes his tone and says nicely, "I thought we could talk when we got there."

No way. Trapped in a house full of bereaved mourners, some crying, some drinking off their sadness, some in embarrassing stages of both, no. This isn't how I want to remember anyone. It certainly isn't the way I want to remember seeing my brother. "We can talk here, if you want to talk." I remember I meant it sincerely, and it came out right. Usually if I had to say those exact same words it would come out all wrong or sound sarcastic; and although he looked a little uncomfortable, my brother walked with me over to someone's granite vault. An old cypress had grown tall and provided the right amount of shade to keep the stonework cool. I dusted off some of the nettles and my brother did the same before we both sat down.

"So how have you been?" he asks, cheerfully. Let me emphasize that, cheerfully. For a second I wonder if he forgot where we are. My brows furrow, my eyes roll a little, and I reach for my cigarettes. I reall don't smoke much anymore, but when my family's around so are all my worst habits.
"You mind if I smoke?" I half-ask, half-tell him. He looks a little startled. "I checked with everyone," gesturing to millions of engraved markers "they're all okay with it."
"You still smoke? I thought you quit."
"It happens sometimes. Maybe I'll quit again."
"Well you look good" he nods reassuringly. "How have you been? I haven't seen you in so long. Are you seeing anyone?"
I can tell he's nervous. It would have been easier for him to hide that in a crowded room. Each sentence he speaks is a little softer than the next and less cheerful.
"Are you married?" He looks up at me. "I heard you can be married now. Have you thought about it?"
"Yea" I exhale. "I've thought about it."
"Is there anyone significant you've thought about?" He almost wishes he hadn't asked when he says it because he didn't want to seem like he's prying.
"Not right now, but I've thought about it."
"Oh, well... that's good. Keep your options open."
"I think about some of the guys from the past and the recently past before I answer, "Yes, "open", but I think they closed their options. At least, they closed them to me."
"I'm sorry to hear that." He cast his eyes down for a moment and then asked, "Was he very important?"
"He was to me" I hesitate. "At least I thought he was."
"What was it about him that you liked?"
Now my eyes are really rolling because I don't know where to begin. Am I really telling him this? And for how long will he remember? A moment? An hour? Forever and until he sees me agin? And the question, "what was it about him that you liked?" -good grief! What was it about him that I didn't like? I liked everything about him, his looks, his height, his manners, his heart... I like the clumsy way he bumped into a heavy glass door when we first met, and gave himself a huge lump. I liked the way he texted every morning before I got up or heard the alarm clock. I like his accent and the way he mispronounced my last name for almost a month. When I was with him I was warmed by everything about him that I could hear, see, or absorb into my heart; and without him my time was spent tempering my own patience to see him again.
I broke away from my own distraction and saw my own bother looking at me surprised, but I'm not sure if he was surprised at the outpouring of so much raw emotion or the depth of a passion he had not seen experienced by anyone else.
"Wow!" was the only response he could gasp, and then after a long pause he said, "I'm sorry he lost you."
I took a second to ease up a bit, put my chin back up. "What's done 's done. We move on." In a few moments we should be walking away from this. So I give him a short warm smile, "It was good of you to ask." I was just getting up from the granite vault when he grabbed the end of my jacket and stopped me.
For the first time that afternoon he turned and looked me directly in the eyes with that sense of conviction and determination rarely seen or shared in our family. "Listen to me," he says "You're really smart and really nice, and finding a guy like that is not going to be easy."
I'm already giving him a look like I've heard this prelude a million times, usually right before I get dumped.
Unrelenting, he continues, "I mean, being really nice is easy to find all the time; but being smart... that's hard. Hard to find." He looks at me as if he isn't convinced I understand, so he reasserts, "and you are really smart."
I might have been a little angry when I replied, "I never said the guy had to be smarter than me; and being "really smart" hasn't been a problem for me."
"No" he agreed, "but you have to think: maybe it's a problem for them."
Pause. My own brother has me thinking. He has a point, and I hadn't thought of that first. Curse him and his moment of logic. Oh, and now he can see it on my face that it's the first time this clarity has occurred to me. Ugh, a moment of defeat! And he's smiling again. Oh, no. I snap back at him, "well, again I say: how is their problem a problem for me?" But it's too late, he's already on his feet and laughing at me. He knows I know he's right, and I've been bested. I'm not completely aggravated; in fact, I'm enlightened.
We both walk toward our cars and he continues talking and joking. "You know, you aren't always very nice. Maybe you can build on that. Find a guy that likes that about you."
"It's had to imagine what you say is true," I answer back "but on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of those guys, either. Maybe I can settle for some guy to split the difference."
I don't remember very much of anything said after that. Nothing as serious or as funny, anyway. I just remember that it was a long drive home. It was a long time to think, a long time to forget, and enough time to remember that I was content with this day and the way it turned out. I think my brother was content, too.