my brother-in-law’s keeper
I’ve been vacationing recently to various mental illness get-aways. Some on the South End, some further afield. For some reason, unfathomable to the rock solid foundations of my own worrisome mind, I’m helping friends and relatives deal with sisters and brothers who have journeyed past the signposts, not only of normality, but possibly even the Twilight Zone — and I don’t mean Forks, WA. Maybe it’s the recession or maybe it’s the intensity of solar flares or, well, who really knows? These folks aren’t sure and if they were, you wouldn’t believe them anyway.
As I write this I’m in the Brown County Courthouse in Green Bay, Wisconsin where my brother’s brother-in-law is trying to get released to personal recognizance if he will agree to drug monitoring and many other requirements in return for a guilty plea to reckless endangerment and resisting arrest for destroying eight automobiles and leading the Green Bay Packer Police Dep’t on a 120 mph chase through downtown 3 months ago. Like the Blues Brothers he was on a ‘mission from God’ to root out Satan. Lots to do, not much time to do it, apparently. Now fully medicated, he is way less evangelical and far more contrite. In a day or so we’ll see if the judge agrees.
Being a South Ender, I witness mental instability on a near daily basis, even discounting my bathroom mirror. Art may very well be a 2nd cousin of incipient insanity in my case, but I suspect we all have an artistic streak or two and none of us is more than a warm day or two from going through the thinning ice of what we blithely refer to as reality. Or normality. Or sanctioned behavior. Beaver Cleaver never lived in anything firmer than the warm fiction of an electronic TV womb. June Cleaver took to her bed when Ward lost his job in the recessions of those days and Wally died in a Viet Nam rice paddy from friendly fire. If the Beave lost his moorings a few blocks from a perfect Norman Rockwell suburban two story Cape Cod, we might hope for a touch of compassion from an enlightened justice system. After all, we are our brother’s keeper in a world where reality may not be what it’s cracked up to be.
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