Brothers

Happy Birthday to my brothers!  Anthony is the little dark haired cute one and Laurence is the blond cherubic looking one.  Anthony is 51 today and Laurence died on the operating table when he was 4  from an operation to fix a hole in his heart.  I guess you could say we carry that hole part around with us to this day.  The part that's missing but still kind of there.  My brother has a cat for his facebook picture and I have an embroidered Bluebird so you can kind of separate the three of us but there are things that keep us together even though we are all planted in different places.

The lower picture is a picture of Anthony and I  with our cousins(who we saw so often as children they were kind of siblings).  We were all incredibly close and this was my communion day.   If you look closely at the picture you will see the Anthony I remember. He is wearing my communion cape and has a huge space in the middle of his bangs because he cut his own hair.  He was always doing silly things like that.  Anthony is  one of those boys who actually put a bobby pin in a light socket and I dropped a lit match on the couch once.  Birds of a feather and all.  And Anthony is the kind of guy who has all these humorous cats and gizmos that he makes people laugh with on his Facebook page and well myself if you know me well enough you know I will say just about anything to make someone laugh.  I think that is where I will leave my brothers  for today.

Which brings me to my obsession with the Black Keys.  Sometimes even a somewhat spiritually evolved person can be listening but not really hearing.  I thought my obsession was of the god's gift to menopausal women kind(Listen to When The Lights Go Out, it is gods gift to menopausal women, growling and pleading and word lingering swoon).  But actually my first CD by them was Brothers.  I listen to all of their CD's for different reasons and I just kind of missed the linkage.  I was 6 after all.  It is the most beautiful soulful cd I have ever owned.  It just goes right into my ears, swims around a bit and then goes right into my soul.  There is even a song called Unknown Brother which was written because
Dan Auerbach's wife lost her brother also and the song is about her brother.  Even then I was kind of too dense or maybe the pain was just so deep I couldn't find the meaning.  It was easier to laugh about my craziness, then to think about my craziness.  I've been in therapy for a long time and even then I was so bottled up and the pain was so deep nothing penetrated it.  My therapist has become sort of a friend therapist and finally the walls started coming down.  One day while leaving her office I saw a magazine that discussed childhood trauma, I brought it home and realized that I was normal, for a child who lost her brother when she was 6.  We become creative searchers who can never find the missing piece.  Also on that day my beloved son downloaded the first of my secondary Black Keys cds which clearly muddled up the spiritual awakening and healing that was going on.  But you know what it made me happy, it made me laugh, it made me sing to my  dog and laugh, it made me question the way I was living.  Did I want to be happy or did I want to just live the same dreary muddied existence?  I chose the happy route and I will continue to say anything that comes to my head to make people laugh.  Certainly not enough laughter in the world, not enough music in the world and not enough joy in the world.  So I guess you could say all of the therapy and all of the art and all of the wonderful people I've met on my life journey have healed me and that oh so sexy voice is just the icing on the cake or that Wicked Messenger(in case he ever happens to read this)!!

And yes my unknown brother(for the most part) gave me a gift on his birthday.  An epiphany(a real one for my friends who know what that means to make them laugh)!