The beat goes on

While my brother and I spent the week with our sister in Indianapolis, she started and nearly finished a long-planned project -- a long hallway wall filled with family pictures. There are three rows of them three or four frames deep, starting with a great-grandfather on our mother's side and ending at near-present time. There are several groups of three featuring my siblings and me at various stages of our life: barely out of infancy, grade school, high school graduation, adulthood. We posed for several photos taken by my brother's wife on the last day of vacation, and I'm sure one of them will end up on the wall, too: The Morrises approach dotage.

Toni Morrison has a wonderful observation about family in her "Song of Solomon" foreword. Writing about her father, she says: "He had a flattering view of me as someone interesting, capable, witty, smart, high-spirited. I did not share that view of myself, and wondered why he held it. But it was the death of that girl -- the one who lived in his head -- that I mourned when he died. Even more than I mourned him, I suffered the loss of the person he thought I was." It has become an awful cliche to say that, when someone dies, they still live as long as we remember them. But it is also true that we live in other people's minds -- we are all the people others see us as -- and those pieces of us die when they die. Walking down my sister's hallway of photos is a way to briefly glimpse those lost pieces. "Family" is the best way I know to grab some order out of the chaos of time we are destined to wander through.

We went out of our way to not pay attention to the news last week, but some of it seeped in, like rain through a leaky roof.

• The deaf teenage girl in Indianapolis "deliberately" hit with a car last month died during the week. Deliberate is a tricky word to use in this case, since the man driving the car was a schizophrenic who hadn't been taking his medication and "saw something evil" during the resulting psychotic episode. The lame attack the halt, and the masses cluck with horror.
• A 15-year-old boy whose younger brother had just been arrested was severely beaten in his encounter with Indianapolis police. Officials fired one officer, and the attorney for the family, which wants all five of them fired, says it's only natural for police to circle their wagons, which is the family's way of circling the wagons. But the head of the police union says the firing of even that one officer will be fought as an overreaction. Each side is circling its wagons. We spend a lot of time in our lives doing that, don't we? Whether wagon circling is a good or bad thing depends on whose wagons are being circled.
• The World Cup opened, and the TV announcers all told us that soccer being big in this country is Just! Around! The! Corner! because, you see, all our kids are just nuts about it, and they're gonna drag us old fogy football and baseball fans kicking and screaming into the modern era. I heard the same thing 10 years ago. And 20 years ago. And 30. Hasn't happened, never will. Americans are never going to go for a game in which the players spend a day and a half getting brusied and batttered on a field for a final score of 1-0. We like points, damn it! Lots and lots of points. So many points that President OBama would probably say we have too many points. Maybe we should redistribute some of our football points to the soccer people. Maybe their fans wouldn't riot so much then.
• The oil spill news just went on and on, though there really wasn't much new that I could tell. How often can it possibly keep getting "worse that we were originally told"? The most interesting thing about it now is how many of the Bush-blew-Katrina bashers are defending Obama and how many of the What-else-could-Bush-have-done supporters are bashing Obama. I didn't read any blogs last week, so I wasn't able to sort out which group was the most right or wrong.
•  Good grief, Obama wants another $50 billion in stimulus spending! How these profligate clowns and their fawning sycophants in the press can keep prattling on about that awful "party of no" with a straight face is beyond me. In case they haven't noticed, the whole country has all but risen up to say, "Hell, no!"

That last one, which happened on Saturday, had me running around the house screaming and drooling spittle, a sure sign that the vacation was over. Family is much more fun than the rest of the world.

There are still some photos missing from my sister's wall -- the next generation, represented by my brother's daughters' children. It's startling to wake up one morning and realize you're a great uncle (well, a pretty good one anyway). How did such a thing come to pass? When the kids' pictures go up, I pledge to look at them and think of my great nieces and nephews in startling and surprisingly pleasant ways. It's my duty, after all, and some day they will walk down that hall and keep a part of me alive a little bit.