The False Ducks Blahg

     What a week we’ve had!  When I say we, I mean the global we.  Boston Bombings, explosions in West, Texas, thwarted terrorist plot to derail trains here in Canada, and that massive fight with my brother.   Oh, you didn’t hear about that last one?  Well, why would I want to rehash that here?  Because I can.  This is my blahg and I’ll comment on whatever I please.  Don’t worry, this won’t be all self-serving.  There will be a connection to larger things. 

     Let me start with that fight with my brother Tim.  The fight was so nasty and made me so angry that it inspired me for this blahg and put world events into perspective.  The photo below is the last picture taken of all 6 of my parents’ children. The occasion was the wedding of my brother Chris and his wife Valerie.  I don’t remember the date but I think it was 7 or 8 years ago.  In the back row, from left to right, are Todd (2nd oldest), Chris (the youngest and the groom), Wanda (4th oldest), and Tim (the oldest).  In the front row, again from left to right, are Dan (5th oldest) and yours truly, Scott (3rd oldest).  Dan was married for the second time to wonderful Deb about five years ago.  There was a photo taken at Dan’s wedding but Tim was in Afghanistan (I’ll explain about that later) so the family photo was short one brother; making the one at Chris’ wedding the last complete Henderson sibling picture. 

     Forgive me the side trip about the family photo.  As mentioned, Tim was in Afghanistan during Dan’s wedding so that requires a brief explanation.  Tim is skilled at boiler and furnace mechanics so he was employed by a private company to oversee the boiler systems on the Canadian base over there.  I am probably selling him short in this description because I don’t know exactly what he did there but Tim is very skilled and qualified.  At one point Dan, who is in the Canadian military was serving in Afghanistan at the same base as Tim.  They had the opportunity to spend some time together there.  Tim was still on a contract in Afghanistan at the time of Dan’s wedding.  Recently, Tim had a similar contract working in Northern Canada up at Canadian Forces Station Alert in Nunavut.  Maybe it wasn’t there and Tim will fault me for not knowing it but it was somewhere North and remote and he was there for two or three months. 

     While Tim was away, he parked his truck in my parents’ driveway facing toward the road.  My father’s truck was parked facing Tim’s truck.  The driveway is narrow and there is a large gazebo to the right of the driveway and a long hedge to left.  There is no way to get another vehicle along side of vehicles parked in the driveway.  Now, as I’ve mentioned, I’m really the only sibling who is in charge of checking in on my parents on a regular basis.  Dan lives an hour away, Chris lives in Cincinnati about 9 hours away, and Tim normally lives in Ottawa when he’s not off working somewhere in the world.  If you’re doing the math, that leaves two other siblings.  To be fair, both Todd and Wanda work but they certainly don’t do as much as I do even when they are not working.  No digs there.  So, to get back to the current story, my mother called me a couple of weeks ago to tell me that my father’s vehicle wouldn’t start.  I had my suspicions that it was a dead battery so when I went there, I found it was indeed a dead battery.  Sometimes when my parents go shopping they load groceries into the back of their Ford Escape and they don’t always close the hatch completely when they unload the groceries.  This was the case and the dome light stayed on and killed the battery. 

     As I mentioned, there is no way to get another vehicle along side of vehicles parked in the driveway.  This limited my options of boosting my father’s vehicle battery.  I had booster cables but couldn’t get my car near the front of his car.  The cables were not twenty feet long so the only option I had was to move Tim’s vehicle forward about five feet and to boost my father’s vehicle.  I’ve boosted a few vehicles in my time so I knew what I was doing.  The short version of this story is that I moved Tim’s truck five feet forward and boosted dad’s battery without incident.  End of story number one regarding Tim’s truck. 

     Now comes last week.  We had some high winds and a tree limb went down and landed at the rear of Tim’s truck.  My father asked me to bring in my chainsaw and cut up the limb before Tim flew home on Thursday.  So, I went in on Wednesday and found that a lot of tree debris had fallen into the bed of Tim’s truck.  I cut everything up and stacked the burnable size pieces off to one side.  That left a lot of the smaller debris and the stuff that was in Tim’s truck.  I decided the best thing to do would be to take it down to the yard waste depot around the corner from my parents’ house.  It is less than half a kilometer away so I took Tim’s truck and emptied it and swept it out.  I thought I was doing Tim and my father a favour.  All in all, with going to the yard waste depot and back and moving Tim’s truck five feet to boost my father’s vehicle, I put maybe one kilometer of mileage on Tim’s truck.  I should also add that when I boosted my father’s vehicle, Tim’s gas gauge was flashing empty.  That means it was empty when Tim parked it before leaving for up north.  That is significant to this story. 

     I stopped by my parents’ house again on Friday to check on them and asked if Tim had got in safely.  My father informed me that Tim was back and he was madder than a wet hen because someone had used his truck.  I really didn’t understand at that point what the big deal was.  I was soon to learn.  Tim and his girlfriend, Becky, stopped in about 15 minutes later with submarine sandwiches in hand.  (Nothing for anyone else I might add.  That’s an aside that I will touch on later.)  I told Tim that if he was angry that someone had used his truck that he should take it up with me because I was the one who had used the truck on both occasions.  I wasn’t trying to pick a fight but I might as well have put that forward as my intention.  Tim let forth a string of threats and insults that were unwarranted.  I tried to explain to him why I had used his vehicle but that only made him angrier.  Becky tried to restrain him but Tim was, in my opinion, out of control.  He threatened to hit me and other acts of violence.  I told him that if he laid one finger on me I would call the police.  I wasn’t going to play his game or feed into this violence.  To this, he called me “a girl” simply because I wouldn’t defend myself.  Craziness! 

     There were other points of Tim’s anger that did not make sense.  I was accused of putting untold mileage on his truck and emptying it of gas.  I tried to explain about the gas gauge already being on empty and driving his truck less than a kilometer but Tim was not prepared to listen to anything I had to say.  I even apologized for using his truck but even that was not good enough.  He called me stupid and talked about how intelligent he was and how much his truck was worth more than anything I owned or was likely to ever own.  Rebuttal was useless.  I also tried to explain that it was me here taking care of mom and dad that made it possible for him to be away for long stretches of time.  It isn’t him that is taking care of business on the local front!  Finally, I just had to leave.  I had promised my friend Bryan, who lives with my parents, a ride to work.  Bryan witnessed all of this and when we got outside he asked me what that was all about.  I told him I honestly didn’t know.  All I knew was Tim was angry and I was even angrier at the way I was treated. 

     I had to stop off about an hour later at my parents’ house because I had to drop off something my mother had asked me to pick up at the pharmacy.  By that time, Tim was gone and the house was quiet.  My mother told me that Tim said to say he was sorry for earlier.  I was still angry about the whole affair and all I could think to say was a variation of the speech Aunt Em gives to Miss Gulch near the beginning of the Wizard of Oz: 

“For twenty-three years I’ve been dying to tell you what I thought of you, and now, well, being a Christian woman, I can’t say it.”  Of course it would have meant more if Tim had been there and I could have said it to his face.  He probably just would have laughed at me.  By the way, Abbie and I went to see The Wizard of Oz in the movie theater about two weeks ago and it still holds up after all these years.  But that’s another story and another blahg.

     The final piece of this is that Tim called me up at home three hours later.  I was a little curt with him because I was still angry.  I asked him what he wanted and he said he had called up to apologize.  I told him I wasn’t going to take this from him any longer and he could rub salt.  I then hung up on him.  I wasn’t specific about where he should rub the salt nor do I know what really is the meaning of that phrase.  That was five days ago and I haven’t heard from Tim since nor do know if he actually rubbed salt on something.  I don’t really care.  I just want to have my say and this blahg is the only forum I have to to speak without being interrupted. 

     The problem with having siblings is that you fight too much or you follow your brother down a path that only ends in tears.  Case in point is the two brothers who were allegedly behind the Boston bombings.  One is dead and the other will be in jail for the rest of his life if convicted.  What did they have to be angry about?  Why were they angry at the world?  I don’t know.  I can only talk about the conflict between my brother and I.  Tim might be smarter than me.  He certainly is stronger than me.  He’s probably in better shape than I am.  He might even be richer than I am when you are tallying up fortunes.  But that’s not important to me.  What is important is to be the better person and I think that’s what this blahg is really about. 

     Someone can try and tear you down and hurt you but you have to rise above that and not go down that same path.  I think I’m the better person.  I do many things for my parents and my personal life is affected by it.  I can’t have a regular job because I have to run errands for my parents and take them to medical appointments.  They could probably go by themselves but, as I have learned, they don’t always hear or understand what the Doctor tells them.   That’s another bone of contention by the way.  I hate when one of my siblings tries to diagnose my mother or father.  They have never been to any of my parents’ medical appointments and cannot comment on what they do not know.  I’ve been there and I’ve heard the diagnosies and recommendations.  I’m no Doctor and have had no medical training so even I won’t comment on anyone’s medical health unless I hear it directly from the source. 

     It’s important for me to be the better person.  I won’t get anything for it.  There’s no trophy or reward but I suspect some of my siblings think that I’ll be the first to line up with my hand out when my parents’ will is read.  I don’t care about that.  I want my mom and dad to be around for a while.  That’s what is important.  That’s why I do the things I do.  I also don’t show up at my parents’ house with food or coffee in hand without bringing them something or phoning ahead to see if they want or need something.  My sister is notorious for that.  So was Tim with his submarine sandwich.  I guess I just get it quicker than my siblings.  Let them take what they want when my parents are gone.  I’ll take away the satisfaction that I was the better child and the better person and was there for them when they were alive. 

     I want to close this piece by drawing it all together to world events.  The bombings in Boston were a terrible thing committed by terrible people.  There were, however, great acts of heroism and compassion performed by total strangers toward the victims.  Let’s not forget about that.  The world is not full of all angry people wanting to tear us down.  There are better people out there.  Let’s celebrate that.  Let’s all try to be the better person. 

     I’ll close with a poem I wrote back on June 24th, 1985.  Forgive the strange alignment of sentences and that fact that I don’t know what the inspiration was for this poem but the words in it have never been more fitting:

                                                                       ADVICE TO US KILLERS

Instead of slicing

                     others  open

          when you get mad

                    – just put a small hole

                                       into yourself

                              and let the steam out –

-boil some heavy water

                                      over your open wound –

                   – make a potent cup of tea-

              – chew dandelions like dogs do –

                  – then throw down

                 your silly ideas

                                     of self-help