You probably think this story is going to be about some kid who has an immune deficiency and is forced to live life in a bubble with a doll, and you're wondering where I fit in. This is supposed to be my story. Well, it is.

The bubble boy is my seventy-one year old brother, and his immune system is just fine, other than the fact that he only has one lung and he had his first heart attack in his late forties.

The concept of living in a bubble is metaphorical -- I'm referring to people who never seem to fully understand the eye-opening pain of serious loss or what it's like to live paycheque to paycheque. Talk to my big brother, Dennis, about loss, and he will immediately launch into a long-winded speech about money and market losses that will have you gnawing on your keyboard out of boredom.

The doll I'll explain soon.
 
Yes, my brother is that focused on finances and he's that well-off. He's worth several million dollars and I live in a walk-up apartment, inner city, that's basically just a large bachelor pad. I'm stretched to buy all I need, and I can't at all afford what I have learned to want. Dennis and I are about as different as night is from day, but we're blood, and there's no closer bond. I can't relate my story without telling some of my family's story, and he is all the immediate family I have left.

To hear him tell it, my lifelong series of bad choices put me where I am. He has a point -- maybe if I had spent more time pursuing the almighty buck and less time spending it, I'd be the one hiring landscapers when I needed some simple gardening done. Instead, I travelled for years -- seven times in one year to Vancouver from Ontario, for example, and I owned many adult toys: sporty, gas-guzzling cars, scuba gear, motorcycle, speedboat, fancy cameras and equipment, guitars, jewelry...plus I loved fine dining and things that cost a lot of money to do.  The few times I tried to settle down, I bought and sold real estate properties without making a dime, or a very small profit if there was profit at all. The list is long of all the things I should regret, and all the things I didn't need, purchased and eventually gave away. Instead of saving for old age or that 'rainy day' I had to face a few short years later, I lived every moment like it was my last.

Do I regret it? Most days, no, I don't, because the memories are pretty fabulous. I've worked as a cook in the far reaches of Canada's Arctic, as a police dispatcher in Southwestern Ontario, I've sung in coffeehouses, modelled shoes, acted in plays, sold my art. But there are days I do regret my past. I've come to realize that money is, actually, of value, now that I can't work to earn it anymore. I spent a good portion of my life with a very hippie-like attitude towards money and material things, and as a result, I now lack many things that could make life much more pleasant and comfortable. 

 But I also know Dennis and I spent three weeks and more than a dozen phone calls discussing the Christmas present he was buying for me for the third year since about my eighth birthday, all because it might save him a few bucks.  It was an indoor antenna for the flat screen television he was sending me as part of my Christmas gift. He was having me try it out to be sure it was the best value-for-money buy. Trying to explain to him that I was happy with the channels it was receiving carried no weight -- he had received more channels when he tried it out before he shipped it to me. Even after all the hours we'd spent on the phone attempting different things to get more results, he wanted me to call the manufacturer. Bless his Scrooge-like heart; he could get me a different one that might work better if this one wasn't the best. That's my brother -- he wants champagne and caviar for bologna money, and I have to admit, he usually gets it. I, on the other hand, try hard not to eat lobster while living on peanut-butter money these days. The months get longer every year.

I wonder exactly how tasty cat food really is...
 
But this is me -- spending hour after hour trying to save a buck is just not my idea of a wise investment of time, and to get that across to my hard-headed brother when we were experimenting with my TV antenna caused me to be ostracized -- again. Yelling at me that he 'couldn't stand talking to me', he hung up on me. We've since re-connected, but steering clear of any discussion about my lack of financial sense is challenging. Dennis is just enough chauvinist to feel responsible for me, though he'd never admit it. He won't budge, and for the first time in our relationship, I won't either, without showing the emotion that always managed to make impossible any reasonable discussion. Life is short, and we're both getting closer to the end of it than we are the beginning. Stressing out over trivial matters such as something that won't be coming with us just doesn't make any sense to me.

We're trying to stay connected, but if it doesn't net him a dollar and cents profit, my brother believes it's a waste of time. He comes by it honestly, I guess. Growing up, we lived as paupers for many years because our musician father walked out on our mother. Dennis hasn't forgotten hustling at the town's local bowling alley and pool hall to make a few bucks to help our Mom out.
 
But at what point in life did his obsession with earning a living and saving a few pennies became a way to bully and intimidate everyone around him? That's what it feels like when the two of us go at it. In fact, throughout those weeks of trying to get better results with my antenna, he had me call on friends to help, since I'm so incapable. (I'm the youngest of the three siblings. It was great when I was a kid. It's not so great now that I'm beyond menapause.) Those two male companions of mine don't ever want to speak to my brother again. In a rather despicable act of desperation, I handed over the phone when Dennis was instructing me for the five hundredth time what to do with the aerial. Poor guys didn't know what they were in for and finally gave up trying to convince him they had any ability at all.

It escapes me how my older brother can claim he's 'not that smart' and still think he's the only one who can do anything. In all fairness, though, his IQ is far above average. But I'm stymied, not only because there are eight years separating us, so he'd already left home when I was still a kid, but because it was years before we spoke after our last falling out. Wouldn't that tend to make one accepting when one's sister enthused over the channels the darned thing was receiving?
 
It's nothing new. I have spent most of my life without my brother and sister. Mom was the glue that held our family together, and when she died, all the crap our biological father passed on through environmental influence and genes came to life. That crap mostly landed on Dennis and Daneill because they grew up with him -- I was the lucky one -- I missed most of his influence because he was out the door by the time I was two, having deserted us for the neighbour's wife.
 
Of course that didn't help the bond between Daneill and me because this was the nineteen-fifties -- our mother now had to raise three kids on whatever salary she could manage to bring in, which meant my older sister got stuck with a lot of my care. I still remember the arguments about who would have to babysit, and which one of my siblings would stay home to look after me.
 
Dennis, naturally, believed it should be my sister's job because after all, she was a girl, and he was the man in the family.
 
As the youngest, I was still living at home when my sister left for her first job. I remember it was as a Bell Canada operator in the big city, and I was so proud of her. I'd looked up to her all through my childhood -- all through the time she secretly resented me because she missed out on so much of what the average teenager got to enjoy. I don't blame her for that, not one iota -- I can look back now and see how it all happened. As a daddy's girl, it broke her heart when our father left and it was downhill from there. I can still see the bitter tears the night she wanted to go to a high school dance and Mom insisted there was a basket of laundry that needed ironing before she could go. Even as a little kid, my heart went out to her, and where was Dennis? In his room doing whatever big men of the family did, which rarely, if ever, included any of the household chores -- woman's work.
 
Don't misunderstand -- I love my brother -- but I no longer wear rose-coloured glasses when it comes to my siblings. Daneill passed away from breast cancer several years ago, after telling her children not to let me know she was dying. You see, I've said it before -- I am demonstrative and passionate, and I've got a big mouth when it comes to truth. I've never been very good at the stiff-upper-lip, pretend everything is hunky-dory family dynamic. I believe in airing all the issues when it's among loved ones. I'm very private with strangers about my personal affairs, but open communication is the only way to be sure there are no misunderstandings. Who, more than family, do we want to understand us?  Back in those 'hippie' days, I tended to 'let it all hang out', much more than I do now. I pushed too hard, and family remembers us as we were.

My sister thought I wouldn't be able to handle her dying. I think she was afraid I would be too emotional, too outspoken, show too much sorrow. Gritting her teeth and bearing down was how Daneill had coped with all that had fallen on her shoulders when we were growing up. Both Dennis and Daneill were about as uptight as British spinsters raised in the nineteenth century. I think the reason there is and was such a big difference among us is our mother was able to devote more time and attention to her youngest. By the time my brother and sister left home, things were much improved, and Mom was at home a lot more, which meant I grew up with all the love and affection they'd missed. In fact, I was probably more than a little spoiled.
 
I only wish I could have been as understanding when my sister and I last met. One of my biggest regrets is that I pushed her too hard, and I'll live with it until I die. She was so conservative, and we were distanced in those last years. I never got to say goodbye to her.
 
Stubbornness is a family trait, and Munro mulishness is legendary. But as I said about Dennis, we come by it honestly. Being of Irish and Scottish descent, we've the temperment of the typical Irishman and the stubbornness of the Scotsman (no offense intended to those who may be of similar ancestry.)

I think that explains a lot, and I think Dennis has forgotten his roots, lives in a protective bubble a lot. We are like oil and water most of the time. I can't fault him for that though -- instead, I understand. I'm that llittle crinoline-wearing, ringlet adorned, Eaton Beauty Doll when it comes to managing money, and it drives him crazy. That was what our Mom used to call me. In the nineteen-fifties, the Eaton's Company Department Store brought out a doll every little girl wanted because it was so pretty. (See -- I was spoiled!) 

But my Mom also told me many times about a boy who proudly pushed a baby carriage around town when most boys his age would be embarrassed by such a thing. Guess who was inside that pram.

Dennis and I sat silently holding hands at my sister's funeral. It was several years ago, but I can still feel the hand of my six foot tall brother gripping mine that day until his knuckles turned white.

 That's my story. That's who I am -- a failure by society's standards probably. But if I don't lose them all, I've sure got a bulging book of wonderful memories, and I'm well loved. What else matters in the grand scheme of things?
~~~

 WORD COUNT: 2,219