Sick Pilgrim
On October 25th, the Natural History Museum in New York closed the doors of its Hall of Gems and Minerals to renovate. The old room was a weird shape, almost like the cylindrical crystals of a beryl, with staggered steps up and down into viewing areas covered with plexiglass. The room was dim, the labels of some gems difficult to read, and the organization seemingly random–by color, maybe, until you realized that cut specimens were arranged in special anterooms, patterned like the rays of the sun. The Hall of Gems and Minerals is my favorite part of any museum, but losing this specific place chokes me up because of my brother Michael.
I’ve always felt close to my brother, who was born the year I was 11. When we were children, I liked to pretend that he was my baby. Michael has Down Syndrome, so he did everything late–sitting, walking, speaking. He signed before he talked; when he got his tonsils out, he signed “bird” to me while lying in his hospital bed. Even later, he didn’t talk much. He would cry out “There he is!” whenever Vanna White turned the letters during Wheel of Fortune, his favorite TV show. If you did something curious, he could clearly say “what are you doing?” The first time I heard him say “excuse me;” I had already graduated from college. “Did he just say excuse me?” I asked my brother David, who responded, “Yeah, he says that now,” as if it was normal. Michael used to say all of our names, but he hasn’t addressed us that way in years. As he grew up, he learned other words and phrases, but how much he understands, I don’t know. If he sees a dead deer by the side of the road, he’ll say “Oh dear,” but whether he thinks he’s saying “Oh deer,” nobody can tell.
When I moved in with my husband, Michael began to visit us in New York. His favorite movies are set here–Ghostbusters, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, The Muppets Take Manhattan. He gets wide-eyed at the Plaza hotel, and he’s equally excited by an underpass in Central Park. When we took him to see the Statue of Liberty on the ferry, he spent the whole day shouting “There he is!” and waved madly from the car window at a group of police officers he saw downtown, who, I am dead certain, he recognized from Ghostbusters. It may have been the greatest day of his life.
The day I took him to the museum, we looked at dinosaurs, at taxidermied bears. We walked to the room where the Gems and Minerals were hidden. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I might be able to get him to talk there, since once, in a dressing room, he saw me put on a sequined sweater and shouted “Green!” in delight. So I held his hand and we walked around the room, with me pointing at stones and him responding. Malachite: “Mike, what’s this one?” “Green!” A big topaz: “Mike, can you say blue?” “Boo!” Tourmaline: “What color is this one, Michael?” “Peenk!” Ruby: “Mike, can you say red?” “Boo!”
Eventually, fatigued, we sat near a giant amethyst. I was buzzing with the excitement of hearing him say so many words. He was excited too, and in a few minutes he would get so wound up that he started running around and around a cylindrical case, laughing, with me in pursuit. Eventually he ran into a middle-aged lady. She let out a yelp, and that was the end of our fun in the Hall of Gems and Minerals.
But for that minute, when we sat holding hands, with our heads together, I knew that somehow, the dark room and the trip to New York and the beautiful stones had given me access to something my brother was keeping hidden. All people are a little unknowable, but with my brother, I usually had to accept his physical ways of expression–pointing, gesturing, his habit of biting his ring finger to indicate excitement. But on that day, for whatever reason–call it fate, call it luck, call it karma–he had decided, for a few minutes, to grant me a wish–in which our love for each other could actually do the unexpected, and my brother agreed to talk to me.
Susan L. Miller is the author of Communion of Saints: Poems (Paraclete Press.) She has published poetry and reviews in Image, Iowa Review, Meridian, Commonweal, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, and other journals, and in the anthologies St. Peter’s B-List: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints (Ave Maria) and Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry.) She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
“Approaching Mystery” is a weekly feature on Sick Pilgrim curated by Joanna Penn Cooper in which we post vignettes that dwell on the mystery of the everyday, that hang in an unresolved (and unresolvable) space of wonder and unknowability.
Read more of “Approaching Mystery” at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/sickpilgrim/2017/07/approaching-mystery-timekeeping/#25ffBLsikCcEjKBZ.99
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