Still no word from my older sister. I woke up a bit before noon, maybe 11, and lay in bed thinking about the situation. When I was a young adult out on my own in Hawaii, I could talk with her, and hang out with her a bit in her small jewelry shop at the top of Kapahulu Avenue, but if I'd suddenly become homeless or broke a leg or something I'm not sure if she would have helped.
I wonder if in her older years now she's become like my Aunt Mary, really my father's aunt, who would not help any of us because she'd given money to my older brother for something, and he'd spent it on a bicycle instead. A bicycle! A meaningless thing, it was a few hundred bucks, and maybe the bicycle did more for him than the junior college class or whatever it was, and he went off and joined the Navy anyway.
Ol' Aunt Mary, as my father said, never had anything good to say about anyone. She gave me $500 but there was no message on what I was supposed to use it for, or whether it had to be paid back. You could live for a month on that quite well. I was making around $350 a month. When my pay inched up a bit, I gave the $500 back.
Later, in the late 80s, one of my younger sisters wanted to move from Hawaii to the mainland, so my older sister bought a plane ticket for her; it was around $200. And the younger sister backed out. My older sister was extremely angered by this. As in, Never Help Any Family Ever Again angry. Over $200, which even back then was some money but not *that* much money.
It's a culture of endless tit-for-tat, resentments that are cherished and savored for decades on end. This is pure American culture. And since I've not made bags of money, I'm certainly not going to American Heaven.
Knowing and working for Ken has been a revelation. He doesn't nurse resentments like that, and the first time visiting his house and meeting his family and watching them interact, on my ride back with Ken, I said, "They don't fight over anything, not even food". And they really don't. Thus the difference between Catholics and Calvinists.
With my older sister I may have committed the unforgivable anyway: Being smarter than she is and not hiding it. The guy who owned the place I lived on in Gilroy was OK with everyone as long as it was understood that he was the coolest, the smartest, the most able, etc. I made the mistake of mentioning how I'd taken the Mensa test when I was a hungry 18 year old because a neighbor paid the $10 fee for me and I thought it would help me get a job somehow. I'd passed, and he hadn't when he'd taken it, a few times.
This opened a rift between us that now that I think about it, is about the time he started accusing me of the weirdest things like pulling up all of these or those plants in the garden, feeding rhubarb leaves to the sheep, etc. I'd broken a cardinal rule: No One Is Smarter Than Him.
As for the craziness: A guy lit himself on fire and his manifesto is online. The surprising thing is it's not a right-wing one or a pro-Hamas one. It seems to criticize capitalism and our oligarchy themselves and is actually fairly sensible except for one glaring fact: No one's that much in charge or able to make things run that smoothly. Conspiracy theories contain a nugget of reassurance, in the idea that someone really is in charge. The scary reality is that no one is.
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