Steve and I go for a ride

Steve(in back) My sister, Kathy,
and me. This was taken a few years ago.

I'd only been in my hometown for a few hours. Since I'd arrived after hearing of my dad's death I'd already been to the hospital, the funeral home and the flower shop, helping take care of 'arrangements'.
We sat together and gave information about relatives and descendants, services, viewings and interment. We'd picked out a casket, a vault, and a flower arrangement. We delivered a suit to the funeral home.
All pretty grim stuff, but as my often-wise older brother said "At least it's keeping us busy."

More about Steve.
He's six years older than me. In our younger days that was a lot, that was a lifetime, it seemed. He was grown up and gone before I even got to high school. Since then we've never lived close enough for regular visits and only rarely ended up at our parent's home at the same time. We've always been amicable toward each other, but never really close.
He, like myself, has been married three times. He has two adult children and a small covey of grandchildren. Unlike me, he has been divorced three times, beating my own record by one.
The most recent divorce was about a year ago. I've only talked to him a few times since then. I never asked 'What happened?' because, like I said, we were never really close. I figure I'll take what he tells me and that anything else is none of my business. That's just the way we are.
He's moved into a nice apartment/condo (I don't recall which) and has set it up about like one might expect a single, middle aged man would. Big TV, excellent stereo, and probably a day's worth of molding food and a few condiments in the fridge.
He also has a new car. Well, new to him. He bought it from his son.
It's not what you think. He's always, especially since he came into some money then invested it very wisely, had a nice car. I recall  most recently the Volvo. I think his ex took that one. He also always had a 'work' car, a generic, high mileage commuter, a Taurus or something. He has to have something like that because of the neighborhoods he frequents, it's just prudent.
He's a Psychologist with a PHD. Thus the moniker I occasionally use for him, Dr. Steve.
He once told me that as a psychologist he never really wanted to sit around and, as he put it: "Listen to a bunch of blue haired women complain about their sex lives." He took another path. He set up an office to work with criminal children. Kids who have, in my understanding, already been convicted of rather serious offenses. Dr. Steve does followups and reports to the court system. This requires frequent home visits to some pretty ugly neighborhoods. Most of the kids are urban and live in gang, crime and/or drug traffic riddled areas of greater metropolitan Louisville. Living conditions are hardly splendorous, family situations are often damaged and volatile. Dr. Steve is one of the few PHD psychologists I've known that occasionally carried (legally) a gun (so I've heard). I don't blame him, he was often walking into a war zone with suspicious intentions.
So for that he had a commuter car.

Steve's Mercedes CLK 320, in front of his condo.

He's always liked good cars. One of the first he drove was our grandmother's '56 Chevy Bel Air. A pretty cool car even in the late 60's. It was plain-Jane, no frills, very low mileage. He of course, wrecked it. He ran off the road and into the front of the Good-Nite Motel in Cadiz. That meant I never got to drive it. By the time I was finally licensed I got to drive Grandma's newer car, a yellow, 1970 Maverick. Not quite the same thing.
Then later, he had a 2-door, second generation Chevy II or Nova. It's the car he took to college. After that he had a Cougar. I did drive that one around a parking lot once or twice.
Then I lost touch, or interest, and don't know what he drove up until I recall the Volvo. He also had a huge pickup truck with all the trimmings, to pull a camping trailer across this great land of ours, something he did often.
This time he pulled up in a shiny black Baby Benz Convertible. No mid-life crisis here, obviously an overpriced, overpowered, precision-tuned, pop-top is perfectly practical for a man of his esteem and standing. He parked it behind my  130,000 mile, road-rashed, 2004 Cavalier. (♫ One of these things is NOT like the other! ♫)
I'm not jealous, I'm just really not into cars and the upkeep that the fancy, expensive ones require. Besides, I commute eighty-plus miles per workday and would ruin a good car in that meat grinder that is I-270 in St. Louis. Better for me to have something with a little bit less emotional / financial investment.
Mom tasked us with urgency to go pick up dad's belongings at the nursing home. Dad had spent the last few weeks of his life there as he required 24/7 care. He couldn't do anything on his own, even if he remembered to do it.
Neither of us looked forward to this dreary task. I've been to nursing homes before. This one in particular houses extreme cases of dementia, etc. But mom was adamant that it needed to be done. So we went.
Of course, we took Steve's car.
He was proud of it, I could tell. He made a point to show me that it didn't have a key, per se, it was more like a USB thumb drive. He didn't even have to shove it into the ignition, he just needed to have the fob in the car. There was a 'start' button on the shifter.
A soft rumbling came from the back. Small doors opened, motors whirred, levers shifted. The roof unlatched itself and lifted up and back smoothly. I was about to get the full  topless experience.
The car leaped out of the driveway in the quiet, tiny town. There was no traffic, not even the ubiquitous Amish buggies that frequent the road. Steve gave me a demonstration of the power, handling and superiority of German engineering. Granted it was quieter, stronger, faster and infinitely more comfortable than my Cavalier, the extra money didn't exactly get you nothing.
I was at peace with the ride. I'd only found out about my father's death seven or eight hours earlier and could use a little quiet, cruising, think time. Steve had other ideas though, he plugged his digital music device into and turned on the stereo. All fifty seven (or whatever) speakers started bouncing out heavy rock. By heavy rock, specifically I mean Credence Clearwater Revival, which is heavy rock if you're a little older than me. I knew CCR as a kid, it flooded the A.M. stations, the only stations available in rural areas at the time.
"Born on the Bayou", I believe it was, most of their songs sound pretty much the same to me, not bad, just not special. I'm not a car guy, I'm not much of a rock music guy either. I most often prefer information, or quiet. I made a compilation CD once, all the songs I could ever recall liking enough to listen to frequently. I couldn't fill the disc. Now I've misplaced the CD, well, I misplaced it five years ago or more and just haven't bothered burning a new one. It's not like poetry, which I abhor, with music, I'm  merely apathetic about it. An MP3 player? No, I don't think so. My phone can hold and play hundreds of songs, it contains two or three, I don't recall what they are.
So there we were, two salt and pepper-haired middle aged men on a hot summer day, flying down a three digit highway in rural southwestern Kentucky, with CCR blasting out the open top of a sleek, expensive German sports convertible.
We were on the way to a nursing home, to pick up dad's razor, slippers, pajamas and his dentures.
Yeah, magic moments, good times.
The home was dreary and depressing. The cumulative age of the few dozen residents would take you back to the renaissance era. Most of those that were healthy and able enough to be out and about were scattered around in wheel chairs. They didn't talk much, they just sat there. Some of them watched us come and go, others did not even seem to be aware. One gentleman was sitting, facing a corner. There was nothing in that corner, but he faced it anyway, uncomplaining, unaware.
 Neither Steve nor I want to end up as helpless and doomed as these folks, those totally unaware of their own existence, much less that of anyone else. They can't control their bodies, their minds or their destinies. Most cannot even clean themselves or even come up with reason to do so. We three brothers know this about each other, we may not know much else, but this we do know. We'd talked about it even before dad, who also didn't want to be a burden on his loved ones, began to fail in exactly the same way as those poor souls around us at the home.
"Save one frag. . ." Steve said to me as we left the building with our trash bag filled with Dad's stuff.  I knew this to be a reference to Viet Nam era dark humor. In that context it meant to always save one grenade for yourself because being captured by the enemy there was about as slow and gruesome as could be imagined. Yeah, he's a psychologist, but I got it, and I agreed. Though suicide is not currently anywhere near my active playlist, in the face of the certain imminence of such an existence as is experienced by so many dementia-plagued geriatrics, which I find even more disturbing, cruel and unsettling, I can't say for sure that it never will be.
In the car Steve sighed. "You in a hurry to get back?"
"I've got nowhere to be."
So rather than turn north toward Cerulean, we turned south and headed to Cadiz. It only took a couple of minutes to tour that town. He stopped at Casey's General Store and bought himself a pop and a bottle of flavored water for me, even though I'd said I didn't need anything. We headed east from there, about halfway to Hopkinsville. We then turned off on a forgettable, roughly paved, back road. I couldn't recall the road exactly, but that didn't mean I'd never been on it. There's a lot of these roads there, leading from farm to farm, to the occasional small church, all eventually ending up on a state highway within ten or so miles.
As we roared down the macadam I lost myself in the noise of the wind rushing by and the fat tires biting tar-covered gravel. The view was green, very green, the whole county seemed to be about to burst from the intensity and volume of the green. The corn was plentiful and taller than in some years. Where there was no corn there were strong, ancient stands of oak. Even the sporadic yards were high green. The roar of those tires and the rush of the wind covered the repetitious noise from the stereo. I let myself get lost in the powerful sensory blast.
Will my own sons, age-diverse and geographically scattered, come together for such a pure moment when my clock runs out? It would be a waste if they did not, but I hold no such demands over them. By then I will be gone, so to me, it won't matter.
We didn't really bond, Steve and I, on that small road trip. We merely shared a quiet moment. It could have happened before, it could even happen again. There was nothing especially spiritual for me about it, I'm not really wired that way. It was just an overwhelming sense of peace and calm and the being of somewhere, some-when, else.
Our dad was gone forever. At rest, some say, no longer in pain, to be sure. There was some peace in that, no longer suffering, never to suffer again. It was just enough to quash the grief I'd been wrestling with all day.
I have happy places that I recall in troubling times, standing on a hilltop on a hot day catching a cooling breeze, arms raised, miles from anything and anyone. A dog on my lap, anytime, any where. Angel's subtle, yet complex smile filled at once with passion, glee and mischief.
I added a new one that week in Steve's car. Sailing down a narrow rough road in a fine German coupe, top down, CCR struggling to cut through the roar, surrounded by hundreds of acres of tall, dark green corn under a bright summer sky. Thinking about life, death and the meaning of everything and understanding all of it and none of it at the same time.
We talked off and on during the visit and the various funereal events, he even did that thing with the eulogy and the book. But what I really treasure is the quiet time we spent just riding along with no place to go, nowhere to be.
Near the end of our cruise we came upon a produce stand that I immediately recognized. He twisted the car, almost Tokyo-drift style, into the loose gravel, tossing up pebbles and clouds of dust. We were too late, the place had closed. We could see a bonnet-ed head inside bobbing busily about. But the door was closed.
Steve turned up the stereo and hit the gas, throwing another shower of gravel in his wake.
"You're just screwing with the Amish now, aren't you?"
He grinned, ear to ear.
____________________________

Steve and I are different. He has quirks and standards and a lifestyle that I do not share. I've been told that I also fit that very description. None of this essay was intended to show my brother to be  damaged or abnormal. Yes, I have used him as a springboard for my humor in places, but it is intended only in the nicest, most respectful way. I love my brother even if I don't know him all that well. I'm perfectly comfortable with our differences. I see him as neither a fool or an idiot. He is a very smart man with a good heart, he's just a little different from me, his life, his wants and needs, dreams and passions are just different from mine. No need to measure, grade, weigh or even dwell on those differences, they're just differences, not flaws.