The Greatest Week ... With My Brother

Hey Rick! What Ike? Something BIG just went flying. What? I don’t know, but it was BIG!!

Ike with Bandito & Molly

September 2010 was a time of the greatest … in the midst of sad times. As had been our custom for the previous 15 years, over Labor Day weekend we found ourselves attending ‘Family Camp’ in Rockaway Beach, Oregon, at Twin Rocks Camp. Typically, when we return home from trip, be it week or six, we’ll have perhaps a couple messages on the phone. Returning that Monday, we had some nine messages. Strange, it was! The first was from my dad, who lived in Mexico over his last thirteen years, in whom I had not spoken to for more than eight months. Here's that message below...

Ike, unlikely giving Debbie a hard time

The next eight messages were those of urgency. In all honesty, I thought that something went awry with my sister’s surgery, which dad explained was the reason for his travel to California. I would come to find out that is wasn’t Tammy, no, in fact later that Saturday afternoon Dad had a cardiac arrest and died.

The ensuing days provided much emotion as would be expected. One of the primary duties that lay before us, his children, was travel to Lake Chapala (south of Guadalajara, Mexico) in order to attend to dads estate. Initially we had decided that the four of us would make the journey. But shortly after our arrival to Long Beach, California (the most logical place to gather together, due to the proximity of most of the family, as well as dad’s favorite U.S. location of Manhattan Beach) our sisters Traci and Terrie had decided that this should be a boys trip. Their logic, growing up we had never enjoyed a true ‘bonding’ time.

Being the oldest of all of my siblings, biological and step, I had moved out of our mother’s house after my sophomore year of High School to live with our father. I was almost sixteen and Ike had just turned nine. Though I loved my baby brother a bunch, the fact of our nearly seven years age difference meant that most my time as a teenager was spent with my buddies, rather than this little squirt. So, when this opportunity happened, well let’s just say, we made

Ike with Debbie & Charlie Brown

the most of it.

“So, what do you think it was?” “I don’t know, perhaps a cockroach. All I know is that I saw some long antenna-like things peaking over the bed post. I reached my hand back and sent it flying. Where, who knows?”

It had been raining the proverbial ‘cats n dogs’ there in Chapala, such that water was dripping down the wall through the windows. It had taken me a minute or two trying to figure out how to close the windows through the security bars that were on the inside. I had just figured it out, turned off the light and was closing my eyes sometime after 1 AM, when I heard Ike muttering to himself trying to figure out how to do the same. I got up saying, “I got this one” 😊 I showed him what I had discovered and then we both turned off our lights. No sooner had our heads hit the pillow when he let out with his little girl bellow! “Hey Rick!”

Unable to find any death-defying creature, we determined that perhaps it had landed into his clothes duffel bag. We picked it up and carried the bag into the garage. Now remember we’re two gringos, it’s well after 1 AM, in Lake Chapala Mexico. The rain has now been pouring for over two hours, and … we’re in our boxers. We walked into the garage, opened the garage door and began gently pulling out his clothes. Definitely we were being ‘little girls’ (no offense ladies) as we slowly sorted through his bag. We just about had the bag emptied when we heard the door from the garage into the kitchen close. Oh, it not only closed, no, it locked us out of the house. Did I say that we’re two gringos, in Mexico, in our boxers, it’s pouring and we’re still searching for Godzilla? All we could think of was the headlines in the ‘Lake Chapala News’ that would be the last that our families would read about us. “Gringos Imprisoned While Running through Chapala in their Boxers”!

Well, fortunately we did not find ourselves in a Mexican prison. Instead, we found ‘Godzilla’, a 3 inch cucaracha, broke back into the house and fell fast asleep for about four hours before beginning our next day in Chapala, Mexico.

Saying goodbye to the puppies...

After five extremely full and long days of sorting, breaking into dads computers (through a computer geek, not ourselves I’ll have you know), giving or selling most of his household goods, and most importantly finding homes for his two wonderful dogs Molly, a Doberman Pinscher and Bandito, a Pit bull … we finally had an afternoon of rest.

Ike would often say during that week, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I'm not much help, you’re doing all the work.” First, that was not exactly true. But most important, our sisters were extremely correct … it was ‘the greatest week’ of bonding with my baby brother. He kept us in stitches throughout the week. We walked the dogs until we had to give them up to a beautiful new home. We met several of dads’ friends, not the least were Cynthia, plus Debbie and … wait for it … Charlie Brown. We were treated like royalty. And, we accomplished so much together, that would have been impossible without the other. And our last full day … just happened to be the 16^th of September 2010. To most, nothing special. But for Mexico, it was their 200^th anniversary. A second bicentennial for us to celebrate. How cool is that?

So, I write this blog to my baby brother. ‘Harold Ike’, I love you man!

Note: One of the apps on my smart phone is called ‘Notes’. Within the several ‘notes’ is one that I call ‘Blog Thoughts’. They’re sudden inspirations of blog ideas. At press time there are likely twenty various ideas and/or titles. One within I called, ‘The Greatest Week With My Brother! Lago de Chapala’.

So the idea has been waiting to be written for several months. And is often the case, there was another ‘and then’. Well, and then my baby brother found himself in the hospital a couple days prior to the New Year. Currently he finds himself recovering. Thankfully! But I did not want to wait one more day to tell him just how much that week, in September 2010 meant to me. And thank you sistahs! Pretty smart you are 😊