My Brother and This Writing

 My brother is proofing my writing for this website, this digital “publication.”  As children of an editor we fuss over the written word, even if it is on a screen – with its lowered expectations. 

After all, who cares, really?  Who reads that closely anymore?  

Still we persist, bringing Gutenbergian considerations of how the comma goes inside the quotes, but the semicolon does not.  At a certain point we recognize our focused concentration on commas and quotation marks as amusing; that we both give a damn.  But we do and in that we recognize, too, that we are confirming this quality of giving a damn in one another.  A weaving of connection over what matters.  Grammar is our excuse.

Afterwards I realize I feel joy.  Since our father died, my brother and I have been less with one other, less easy, each of us left standing aside an absence.  Now I understand it was our father who allowed and encouraged the spread of this familial intellectual webbery between us, was the reason.

A number of times we speak our father’s name, evoke his memory.  “HP” we call him.  “I’m channeling HP,” my brother says or, “I keep feeling HP over my shoulder saying, ‘Don’t be a pedant, Geoff!’” 

I tell Geoff one of the last grammatical conversations I’d had with dad was about that comma inside the quotation marks.  “It just doesn’t look right to me, Annie,” he’d said, “that comma hanging outside the quotes, between the phrases.”  This was his civilized and typically empathetic way of saying I’d done it wrong in my haste to get the idea down: a recognized pattern in my writing.  HP knew all the rules.  How lucky for his children he knew the human heart just as well.

And most certainly HP knew the work of writing.  The ever imperfect grasping to cram or dance this amorphous, changeling self into a code of marks on a tablet or codex or printed page or screen.  Written language, our mortal track to trap fleeting meaning.  And that conception a try at transformation.  The very thought of it…

And so the writing and the fussing over the how of the writing brought the presence of HP to my brother and me.  We’d found ourselves in the midst of  a conjure: an honoring, a remembrance by practicing what our father gave his life to…this written word.