Too Big

I can't write anymore at quality. My life has become too blurry for me to be able to break out the lessons into the bite-size pieces that illustrate something.

Firefly comes to stay with me more and more often, and a lot of people ask if she's going to stay for good, including her. She's 15 now. Primary struggles of a 15-year-old seem to be wanting to be taken seriously as an adult while being terrified of the actual responsibility when it is given to her, and having excellent reasoning capacity with almost no common sense. She was terrified of the concept of going to the airport, but has randomly driven her friend's car with no training, experience, or permit. She's done way more dangerous stuff too, but I wouldn't care to embarrass her here.

Mostly, she seems overwhelmed by how big the world is sometimes, and she shuts down and acts stupidly.

***

"You left another job?" I can hear Circles judging me.

"I can't handle this, I need a break!"

"I hear you talking about a lot of bad shit happening, but I don't see you taking a lot of responsibility for it."

"Are you saying this is my fault?"

***

"You still need to go to school" I feel awful repeating myself, but at the same time I really want her to get this.

"I just want to go someplace else and start again," Firefly whines.

"Well, you can't. This is the hand you drew, and it's shitty, but that isn't going to excuse you if you play it poorly."

"I can't handle this, I need a break!"

Those words wouldn't bother me nearly so much if I didn't say them too.

***

Mamoritai got in trouble with his girlfriend for staying up late talking Firefly out of trying to take care of every troubled person she comes across. Lambda really pissed me off by going overboard yelling at Rosie for being persistently obnoxious and not taking a hint.

Truth is, the reason I get so mad at her is that it pains me to watch her make my mistakes. I've got no idea how to life my life and so I mess up and bad things happen sometimes. I'm alright with that, but it pains me to watch the same things happen to her when I love her so much. The world is so massive and complicated that I have no idea how to navigate it, let alone how to guide another.

She'll probably be ok though, since I guess nobody really knew how to lead me either.

Sibling Lessons in Game Theory

The last slice of cake, the last slice of pie, the ice cream served in one bowl: at first, the ability to allocate my portions from theirs was part of their divine rights of parents, and I more or less accepted this. At five, my parents began permitting me to choose which dish was mine. The slices of cake were always disappointingly similarly sized, so this didn't change a lot, but I enjoyed the power.

I distinctly remember my dad sitting me down on the floor with a slice of cake and two plates. "Today's your turn to divide the cake, and I choose." I set a very small portion on one plate, and left 70% of the cake on another for myself. He began reaching, very slowly, for the larger plate, eyes locked on it, wordlessly explaining in no uncertain terms what was about to happen. I scowled, "Let me try again."

When Isaac was three and old enough to express his interest in cake, it was my duty as the six-year-old to divide the cake and let him select. Isaac was not the same sort of opponent as my parents. At first he could be tricked by putting the smaller portion near him, and after a few rounds of that he could be tricked by my pretending to hide the smaller portion from him and acting like it was somehow better. Just as they later did when the addition of Firefly lead to kickback and collusion dynamics, the divider was severely punished for such dishonest play. Rules emerged: plates had to be equally presented, divisions were final once the first person took a plate, choosers could only select a plate for themselves, and all games were discrete instances: debts incurred in one game couldn't be repaid in another.

It was a long while before Issac was ready to play as the divider, but one day my parents informed me he was. A long bar of brownies was placed on a plate, and my brother pulled off a small square from the end and put it on the second one. I grinned and reached for the larger one as my brothers face scrunched up in a scowl.

"That's not fair."

"It's the rules."

Isaac sighed, annoyed, "You're suppose to want the little one!"

Real

"Pika," she asked, "Tell me a story about my life."

I am always amazed at how the very old and the very young are similar. Firefly use to ask the same things, "Tell me about when I came from China," "Tell me about when I was little and we drove to the beach."

Grandma is dying of Alzheimer's, but she has an usual variety. She can remember recent events well, but her early life has become a blur over the years.

"You were a total badass Grandma!" I exclaimed, "You went to Rice at 14 for mathematics. It was completely unheard of! Then you kept getting all the A's in the classes until the professors told you you were ruining the curve for boys who needed those A's for their career, so you got a degree to be a schoolteacher."

Grandma smiled.

"So then World War II happened, so you became a spy in the Navy. Not like a secret agent, but you listened in to tapped phones to see if anybody in Hawaii was conspiring against America. That is where you met grandpa. He was working in the army as a Rabbi.

Gramdpa was an amazing man. I never met him, but I wish I had. He was a Rabbi who did not believe in God, but his family had put him in rabbinical school when he was quite young and so that became his profession. He came to terms with it by decided that even if God did not exist, that belief in God was an amazing and powerful positive influence in people's lives, and that by helping other people believe in God he could make people's lives better. They say he died 5-10 years early because he kept sneaking out of his hospital bed to do last rites for other patients."

Grandma chuckled a little bit, "Oh Pika, you don't need to make up things like that to make me feel good. Why don't you tell me a real story?"

***

"I wasn't always old you know."

"Of course not Grandma!" I said, "Everybody was young once, and you were so cool too!"

Grandma smiled that smile which says she thinks I am humoring her again. I suppose some people can not be convinced...

"Tell us a story grandma!" I said. Grandma never brings up being young unless she remembers something.

"I use to ride horses. I use to gallop across the fields..."

"That's wonderful!" I said, "English or Western?"

Grandma tapped her hearing aid, "What?"

"I said English or Western riding?"

"What?"

"Did you jump?"

"What?"

"Did you ride the horse over jumps?"

"No."

The room gets quiet as the debris of my attempt at polite conversation settle. Grandma looks ashamed at having to ask me to repeat myself so many times.

***

Three years after my attempts to tell Grandma about Rice, Grandma barely ate in front of us anymore. She had trouble using a fork to put food in her mouth, and she was very ashamed of it.

"Nathan liked this," she says as she passed time rearranging the food on her plate with the tines of her fork.

I catch the cue and ask loudly, "Tell us about Grandpa!"

Grandma smiled, "Well, Nathan was a very interesting man. He proposed to me on the very first date."

"No!" I say. Grandma finds it easier when I talk more in emotions than words, and with very few words at a time.

"Yes, yes he did." She smiles one of the first genuine smiles I have seen in a while, "He really did." She paused and then laughed, "I thought he was crazy."

"Well," Mom asked like you might ask a small child, "What did you do?"

"I went home to my father and told him about it."

"And what did he do?"

"He said that sometimes in life you just have to take a chance."

"And you were happily married until he died!" Mom finished.

Grandma nodded.

"That's beautiful Grandma," I said, but Grandma was done talking. I could tell she was having problems with the subtleties of what Mom had said, but she didn't want to go into a "what" cycle again. I'm never sure if Grandma can catch the horrendously condescending tones of voice Mom uses on her, or if perhaps I'm just sensitive to her because I have seen a great deal of her interactions with very small children.

If our culture had stories like The Fox and the Bear, maybe they would tell us that old people lose their hearing but not their speaking because they don't need to hear as much anymore, and because it is their turn to be heard instead.

I wonder if I was to tell her this story again later if she would not believe this one was real either.

***

"But it’s the truth even if it didn't happen."

I'm awkwardly balancing my books on the little L which forms the armrest of my seat, unable to move my feet very far because I'll kick the person in front of me. High school and air travel both sometimes seem to be the fine art of getting people to accept being treated like cattle.

"What did Ken Kesey mean by that?" My American Literature teacher is pacing the front of the room.

"Wasn't he high all the time?" one girl asked, twirling a chunk of her hair in her fingertips, "Maybe it is just nonsense."

Junior year of highschool meant I had already had several experiences of hallucinating from the medication I was being fed. Perhaps that is why this book was probably the only piece of literature I was forced to read that year that I liked.

"Maybe," I said, "These things seemed so real that they impacted him and had effects on him as if they were real things."

"Ah," the teacher asked, "So that makes them real?"

"Of course not," I said, "Real things are real, fake things are not, all I'm saying is it doesn't have to be real to be important." I'm sure at the time I was nowhere near as eloquent.

"Yeah," another student said, "Otherwise real things could be fake if everybody forgot them."

Fireflies

My sister has adopted her peer's habit of attempting to use youtube as her own personal music library. She's a legitimate thirteen year-old teenager now, complete with a smart phone grafted to her hand, horrendous spelling, and the belief that capitalizing every other letter makes her cooler. We've settled upon some music we can both enjoy, and now the computer screen is filled with a man at his keyboard and a series of whirring mechanical toys.

	Owl City - Fireflies
	Found at skreemr.com

I smile. Before I left I had trouble enough grasping that she was eight, my clearest memories of her are when she was closer to five or six, before I got sick.

You would not believe your eyes
If 10 million fireflies
Lit up the world as I fell asleep

Cuz they'd fill the open air
And leave teardrops everywhere
You'd think me rude
But I would just stand and stare

I can remember running through fields at that age where long grass licked my ankles and tugged at my bare feet, chasing fireflies. My grandmother brought me a jar from the kitchen and we tapped holes in the tin lid with the point of a Phillips screwdriver. I remember the sheer joy of seeing them hovering in the twilight over the quad at college for the first time, that fantastic feeling of coming home to something familiar.

"You remember fireflies," I ask her, "from our old house?"

She doesn't hear me, she's absorbed in her texting. I go back to stirring the rice pudding on the stove.

***

Even at 9 I had known something very big, and probably very bad was happening when my mother had taken me to my favourite restaurant for "special time together." I could normally count the times we ate out on one hand in a year.

"Pika," my mother said gently, "I have some very big news."

I dug into some ice cream with a spoon. If mom was going to spring bad news on me I was going to at least get a chance to eat desert first out of it.

"Our family is going to be a little bit bigger soon."

"You're pregnant?"

"We might adopt a little girl from China who hasn't got a family."

I remember being overwhelmed by two thoughts. The first was that at the point where my mother was telling me this there wasn't really any actual "might" involved here at all. The second was that my mother was in her mid-fourties and dad was scraping fifty. I couldn't think of anybody that age with a newborn child, and couldn't figure out why that was.

"We're going to be about 10 years apart?"

"Yes."

"Are you...expecting me to help raise her?"

"Only as a sister."

I took another scoop of ice cream, thoroughly unconvinced.

***

By mid-high school my sister was calling me "Mom" by mistake more often than I was comfortable with. I remember doing the same thing in early elementary school with my Waldorf teacher, first calling her mom once by accident and then repeating the "mistake" because a part of my head really liked that idea.

***

My memories of being sick are blurry, but I distinctly remember finding and watching Grave of the Fireflies. More friends than I could count had told me I would bawl like a child at the end, but instead I couldn't remember being more enraged at a film. The boy had an obligation to his sister before his personal pride, and no matter how wretched his aunt was being I felt he should have stayed there until the food stopped, in order to try to provide for his sister. At 10 years apart he needed to care for her and put her above all else, as she'd never be able to look after herself at that age. Just looking at that little tin of candies in the grocery store made me mad for months.

***

Leave my door open just a crack
(Please take me away from here)
Because I feel like such an insomniac
(Please take me away from here)

***

I went to college more resentful of my parents than you'd believe, and every time I thought about them I worried for my sister. Issac and I were too close in age for me to protect, and my mother had always gotten along very well with him, but my sister I could do something about. All I had to do was graduate well-decorated, land a steady reputable high-paying job in a very good school district and get a chance to take care of her during her high school years. This desire stemmed from very simple logic: either my parents were not as bad as I thought they were, or I would be a terrible person to leave my sister to the same fate when I had the capacity to do something about it.

***

But I'll know where several are
If my dreams get real bizarre
'Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar

***

"Why don't they light up?" a six-year-old me asked, shaking the newly-re-purposed peanut butter jar.

The jar was hastily steadied by my grandma, "Don't shake it, you'll hurt them. I guess they just don't feel like lighting up right now."

My cousin Tom taught me how to kill the bugs when they lit up and smear their color on the pavement, but this was not what I wanted. I wanted a living, breathing nightlight which I could care for and in return could light my room.

Leaves, sticks, more air vents, I even once opened the jar after mom tucked me in to let them roam my whole room, but the results were always exactly the same. The next morning I had nothing but dead fireflies.

"Well, maybe they are just fragile," Mom offered.

Almost fifteen years later I am standing in the Torii lobby asking out of the blue if anybody ever mastered this.

"I just don't think they survive the night," Jen offered, "they are probably short-lived..."

I sighed, "I just probably never knew how to care for them."

***

There are curling irons mixed in with the rockband controllers. She's fooling with the wires and a little upset.

"There was a man outside when I was walking the dog," she informs me. "He was smoking and drinking."

I smiled a little bit. My sister was still untangling the cords.

"He asked if he could pet the dog and I was scared, so I said no because she bites and came back."

Thirteen. What does a good parent of a thirteen year old do? Certainly no drinking, no hardcore partying, limited going out late, having to stay out of trouble, and forget doing any serious dating... I'd essentially skip the lifestyle of my early 20's for four years, followed by another four years of being careful and financially stable to provide her a good college education. I'd need to move into an apartment with space for her and shift my work hours so I could be with her. Would the company feed her like they feed me? Otherwise I also need to make meals for her...

Even if I could do all that, could I provide her a good home? Would it be any more realistic or do her any more good than the stick and some leaves in a jar with air holes did for the fireflies? Single working parents have to be nearly heroic to raise children well...and here I've barely figured out all the stuff I have to not do, let alone be sure to do.

"Shit," she says, tugging on the cords.

"You're getting a little gratuitous with the swearing." I add, "It doesn't mean a lot if it's every fourth word."

She looks up at me with an expression I cannot quite fully read, but it definitely says "but you swear."

I'm not sure I can do this.