I refuse to yield to it.
My brother was born at around this time on this day fifty-three years ago.
Happy Birthday baby brother.

When he was less than a year old, still bumping around the house in a little blue and white baby walker with spinable wheels he was in the garage with our dad, who was fixing a flat tire.

While my dad was hitting the metal rim of the tire with a ball peen hammer to break the seal or something the hammer head slipped off or broke off the hammer handle and flew through the air at great speed and hit my little brother in the left temple.

They were sure his brain was damaged and started treating him differently, but I watched him closely, nothing had changed. Unless it was a much delayed reaction: he told me at Christmas time a few years ago he didn't want to see or hear from me any more.

Well, it's my own damn fault, I suppose, because I did the same thing to my aunt and my eldest sister, though my reasons were not so small as the ones that seem to have given him to make such a stand.

Who knows? Was it my modelling that led to this end? Or was it shame that he felt because of what my aunt had done to me?

I am unable to forgive her the cruelty she showed me when I was a tot, and unwilling to forgive my older sister for her consistent displays of bald-faced disrespect toward me. Like shouting at her children when she was on the phone with me, without so much as taking the phone away from her lips. In effect screaming in my ear, shrieking at me as she used to when we were home and both coming up through the years. As I have said time after time: she never forgave me for being born on her third birthday.

How sad. Mom and Dad would be unhappy to see their children have come to such a pass.

Then last November when I took great pains to search out my younger sister's whereabouts then flew over Lake Superior, with my young puppy, rented a car and then drive out to see her, I was rebuffed for my efforts. Not at all what I had expected. What a stupidity. I ought to have noticed that she moved without giving me her new address. I deluded myself that she might have been curious as to whether I was able to track her down with no clues, perhaps even thought it sisterly fun to do so. Wrong again.

I seem to be an only child, now, but, even so, I refuse to yield to the forces that intend to break my heart.