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MIGHTY WAYNE VS. THE SUPER BUGS — by Bruce



Joan's 80th Birthday tribute to Grammo
Wishing her love and best wishes!

Important Dates
04.16.05 — Hurray Day
04.17.05 — Clan Council
05.13.05 — Alyx Senior Show
05.14.05 — Ian Commencement
05.28.05 — Clayton Celebration
06.04.05 — Alyx Celebration
07.05.05 — Aunt Alma Funeral
07.16.05 — Seitz Reunion
07.24.05 — Clan Council



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Mighty Wayne vs. the Super Bugs — by Bruce

I was a weird kid. Maybe a weirder adult.
. . . It wasn't just the ubiquitous unhappy childhood: divorced parents, Dad disinterested, Mom always working, my sister into drugs and bad boys. Those are just details, not worth criticism or comments... they don't matter. I suppose we were all addicted to unhappiness in our own ways. Sometimes still are.
. . . The faeries took me long ago, maybe switched me at birth. I had dreams: faces would linger in the air, even after I woke screaming. I sold old newspapers, a nickel each. Everything was possible.
. . . I read a history of the Civil War by Bruce Catton at six. I remember begging for it. Dad never thought I'd read it. He was wrong. Seven hours straight I read, laying on the couch. He threw me off so he could watch TV.
. . . Secret of the Andes at seven. Mom and Dad telling us about the divorce. I just kept reading. It didn't matter.
. . . The Hobbit at nine. I heard the faery voices, calling from far away.
. . . People of the Black Circle and Hour of the Dragon at ten. Grandma brought them to me in the hospital. It's what they had in the gift shop, she thought I might like them. Lord help us, I did. Tom Sawyer, too, from my stepmom. I liked Conan better.
. . . Lord of the Rings at twelve. And every month thereafter for eight or nine years.
. . . War and Peace at thirteen. War and Peace? Come on. I guess I thought I should read it.
. . . Friends would come over. They left, the books stayed. Sometimes I got thrown out of the house. Sunshine, fresh air, all that.
. . . The reports came in.
. . . "Good student, but sometimes inattentive."
. . . "Bruce seems to spend much of his time in a fantasy world." This at six, mind you. Where the hell else would I be?
. . . "Space cadet." That was my father— and George's. No wonder we became friends. Though George was overbearing, if anything.
. . . I was quiet. Too quiet, they tell me. I still don't say much for the most part. What is there to say, anyway? Distant as I am, I sometimes think I'm closer to others than myself. It doesn't matter.
. . . As a teenager it was Dungeons & Dragons, Tolkein, sci-fi and fantasy novels by the cartload. In class, at home, in bed, always reading. Not in the car, I get sick. As an adult, I discovered serious literature. Also oriental medicine, chi-kung, psychic phenomena, talking to the dead. Anything's possible. Even in the car. I skipped school to read. I attended one day in five my senior year. My teachers thought I was into drugs, I'm sure. Wasn't interested in drugs, never was. My sister talked me into hitting a roach when I was fourteen. First toke, Mom pulls in the driveway. The roach went over the fence, my sister followed it like an Olympic vaulter. Half an hour stumbling around in the backyard pretending to look for the cat for me.
. . . Long time before I tried that again, five years probably. Not much then. Just makes me sleepy.
. . . Another time sis took me to a "party." She seventeen, I fifteen. Couple of her friends, an older brother, some dude that was way too old to have us in his home. They took downers. I watched TV and sipped orange Crush. They slept.
. . . Never did drugs.
. . . Didn't even get drunk till I was seventeen. Two beers. Me and George giggling like schoolgirls under a picnic table. Can't claim I didn't do that again. Girls? I was weird.
. . . But I'm writing this because of Wayne. Ivan really, but I didn't know that for years. Thought it was a nickname. They all have nicknames, my step-family. Mombo, Dadbo, Bimbo, Jimbo, Jeffron, Jerome who is Jaybo, Jay who is Bubba (two years to straighten that out), the Grils Jeannie and Joanie.
. . . I was fourteen when I met them all. Down in Kentucky, even though they were all from Ohio, like me. They'd bought a farm, a big farm, and that's where we'd meet. They liked me. I don't know why. They just did. The sunlight seemed different.
. . . And then there was Wayne. We recognized each other, me looking forward, him looking back in a way. We didn't look like each other, or act like each other. Not at all the same really, except for that one thing. Don't ask me to explain it. I could, but that still wouldn't be it. It doesn't matter.
. . . Wayne wasn't weird like me, not immediately detectable. He liked sci-fi, but I suppose it was a habit he acquired riding around in nuclear submarines. I still don't know what he did for Johnson Controls— electrical engineering, programming, systems analysis? Never mattered.
. . . Wayne liked my writing.
. . . That's another thing I always was, a writer. We wrote Halloween stories for Ms. Dilly in second grade. I wrote "Too Much Soup." I didn't want to eat the Mulagitawny soup the night before. I don't know what I wanted, but it wasn't that. So, being seven, I threw a fit.
. . . The doomed protagonist of that story died of a soup overload, forced on him by his cruel mother. People laughed at the story. I laughed at it. Something real, something unfair and horrible, was now laughable. Life wasn't so bad after all, at least after it was filtered through my pencil.
. . . My writing as a young adult wasn't great. Maybe it showed promise. I got a really nice rejection letter once. But it was so derivative. I mean all artists steal, but I could've been hung for unoriginality. I guess that's how it starts. Now I know I'll never come up with anything new. Maybe I can entertain.
. . . Wayne liked my writing. It didn't matter.
. . . Wayne liked me. I know because he was patient with me. He never lectured me, not once that I can recall. I was often an obnoxious kid. Hell, an obnoxious adult. Angry, disdainful, only seeing bad, except for Wayne and my stepfamily. I drank, I stole, I lied— well, that's all you need to know. I never killed anyone. I laughed at life, but I didn't like it. The only indication I gave of liking anyone was to heap sarcastic barbs upon them. Love hurts.
. . . Wayne took it. Maybe he'd done the same thing. Maybe he understood it. Maybe it didn't matter.
. . . I got him when he was on prednisone, though. David Letterman spent a summer making fun of that Atlanta Braves pitcher, the "tub of goo." I saw Wayne at a family gathering, he had a "Turb-O-Motion" tee on. Need I say more?
. . . Even then, tears in his eyes, he didn't yell at me, didn't explain, didn't complain. Just said my name. It was enough.
. . . I take prednisone now. People make comments. Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I bite back the anger. It doesn't matter. Karma.
. . . We got sick at the same time. Kidney failure for me, Hodgkin's for him. I'm still alive. Wayne went down. Not quick, but all of a sudden. He worked pretty much right up to the end. I wish he hadn't. Sometimes I think if he'd done some things different he'd still be around. Probably not. See paragraph three, sentence two.
. . . He's resting in the apple orchard now, next to Dadbo. It's peaceful there, on the hill, at the edge of the woods. I don't go there too often. It doesn't bother me, but it seems like he's closer away from there.
. . . Wayne was an anchor for me. He understood. I wouldn't hold a job, didn't want a job. I just wanted to live, listen to music, hang out with friends, write a little, sleep a lot. I hadn't read R. Buckminster Fuller, hadn't heard of him yet, but his words were stamped on my soul: "Man is the only creation of nature that has to earn a living." Something like that. I wanted to do what interested me. Not what anyone else said I had to do. Still pretty much insist on that. Wayne got that. "Life is an adventure, you've got to live it," he wrote me. I don't think he was telling me I had to do something: I think he was telling me I wanted to do something, but I had to have the discipline to do it. But Wayne was not presumptuous, not that I ever saw.
. . . I used to disappear from Dayton, just hop in my '76 Celica (I miss that car, too) and fly down to Kentucky. When life seemed empty, I went. Not that life was so cruel to me: I made most of my trouble. I just never liked it— living —that much.
. . . We were all from Ohio, but my step-grandparents had bought this spread in Kentucky. I didn't think I was an outdoors person, a country person.. But I don't like living in cities, never have, and I can walk in the woods all day. Not to hunt, not to explore. Just to see. And the hills on that farm, they're magic. Even now, when closeness has been partly replaced by business, those hills retain their glow. Nothing changes, not there.
. . . Today I thought about Wayne and the VW Beetles again. I still see a snapshot of his face at that moment regularly, mashed into my mind.
. . . Maybe I find it funny because it was so humiliating for him. My humor's always run that way. Was it Mel Brooks who said, "Tragedy is when I sneeze: comedy is when you fall in a ditch."? Something like that. Maybe he was quoting someone else.
. . . It wasn't much really. Wayne took me with him to log a tree or two, get some firewood. Chain saws and everything. I'd never used one: I didn't want to go, knowing I'd come back missing an appendage or two. But he insisted. He had a reason, I'm sure, but I don't know what. It doesn't matter.
. . . So we're cutting down this tree maybe ten feet up the slope, just off the road near the old barn halfway to the back. Or Wayne is. I stand there, waiting to finish it when it's down.
. . . I had at least seen trees cut down before, and I can't help but notice that Wayne's notching the tree on the downslope side. The tree's leaning uphill, but I'm pretty sure that the gap he's making is going to make it fall opposite the direction Wayne's apparently expecting.
. . . "Isn't that going to hit the barn?" I shout over the chain saw and muffed helmets we're both wearing.
. . . Wayne gives me a furled brow look and shakes his head. What do I know?
. . . Well, Wayne was right. The tree didn't hit the barn. Not hard enough to do any damage, anyway. Can't say the same for the four VW's parked along it, Beetle carcasses waiting for salvage. We could only watch as the tree fell toward them, slow motion, almost a surprise when glass shattered and metal crumpled.
. . . Nothing's funnier than someone's expression when they realize they've just done something stupid. Wayne's face at that moment was the archetype of that expression, Plato's ideal.
. . . I laughed till he was irritated. It didn't matter.
. . . Wayne's dead ten years now. I still get that picture in my head pretty often. I didn't cry until after his funeral service. I managed to ignore the thing until the night before, when I found I couldn't sleep: but I didn't feel like crying. I tried, but I couldn't. But walking away from his grave, my knees buckled. I can imagine Cliff's face while I clung to his knees, sobbing, this ungodly buzzing passing through my body.
. . . A couple of years later, I was at that point again. I mean, I was moving ahead, getting through college, taking care of myself. But I wasn't happy, so I prayed. I prayed to Wayne, I don't know why. Nobody told me you could do that. I told him I was struggling, I didn't know what he could do, but if he could open some doors for me, I'd appreciate it.
. . . Two weeks later, I was in Norfolk visiting an ex-girlfriend. I should say my exgirlfriend. I never dated much.
. . . For a lark, she took me to a psychic spiritualist church. I was open to it, and when the service leader asked me in turn if I desired a "reading," a communication from those beyond, I said yes.
. . . Her physical description threw me off. I didn't know Wayne had always worn a moustache until just before I met him. But then she described his personality, and I began to think, even though I'd never thought of him the way she described him: quiet, sad, humorous.
. . . Then she said, "He wants you to know he's opening some doors for you." It was a couple of years later I started to feel the voices. I wasn't trying, it just happened, like someone knocking on the door. Think of it what you will: it doesn't matter.
. . . I've talked to Wayne a lot since then. I suppose it's going to take me quite a while to work off the debt I owe him.
. . . This is for you, Wayne. I can't pretend to understand where you are. But I know you're here now, and if you can't read this, you can feel it, buzzing through my body.
. . . This is for all the stories I started that neither of us finished. This is for you and our circle of friends. I can only repay you by doing what I told you I would.
. . . I still want to see you, the way a soldier overseas wants to reach through the phone and touch his wife. I know it won't be so long till I'm home, but it's hard to imagine now. I worry that you won't be there, off on your next assignment.
. . . This is your reward. You were right.
. . . About everything.
. . . Not that it matters.

The 9/11 Sports Talk — by Nic


A Parent's Letter — by Joan

. . .



When Family counts. . .
. . . I have never felt so “privileged” to be a part of this Clan. Your affection and support throughout the worst part of Bruce's hospitalization has been felt every day. I look forward to the day when he can come back and experience the “clean and green” of the Valley he loves.
. . . If you have some time, check out my daily log and read the many entries I’ve made about my stouthearted son. Now I know how much I love him. It shouldn’t have to work that way, but often does.
. . . Thank you for your prayers.
. . . Love,

. . . John A
. . . Web Editor

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