He's a man you don't meet every day

This morning my brother called. He called to tell me that I'm a good mother, that he'd watched my interactions with my daughter for a couple of hours during our recent visit to Utah and that yes indeed, I'm a good mother, despite and perhaps because of comments about my daughter being a book s-l-u-t (of course I always spell it, what kind of a mother do you think I am?). Book s-l-u-t because of the way in which she sidles up to ANYBODY, ANYWHERE who is reading a book aloud. He was sincerely touched by Aidan's intense desire to be present, right next to him, while he read with his theatrical flair Manners Can Be Fun by Munro Leaf, a book that my grandmother read to us in childhood. If you haven't read it I recommend getting yourself to the nearest computer (perhaps the one in front of you) and ordering up a copy if only for the section on "whineys" and "me firsts," and to see the large lump in the whiney's throat and the sad state of the "me first" who "wore his arms off grabbing things first and wore his legs off pushing in every place first..." Smash, Rip and Ruin, Touchey The Snoopers, and Yawner are also very funny and worth the $15 the book might cost.

This call may not sound like a big deal, but it is and here's why. I never know what my brother is going to do until he does it--which--in spite of my love for whims--is not a joy. I've spent too much not-well-spent time waiting for a return call to one of 10 that I've made, or for him to show up for a lunch date or a wedding. I've wondered, more often than I thought possible, whether he's alive or dead. And most of the early morning calls I receive from him are desperate pleas to be plucked from misery--so that talking to him for 45 minutes this morning, delightfully lucid, about parenting, Mormon homophobia, and the Netherlands’s Black Peter celebrations, made my day. It fucking made my holiday, my Kwanzaa, my Hanukkah, my winter solstice, my Christmas, my New Year's and all of the holidays that come before, after and in between.