My brother Jim was 10 years old when I was born we couldn’t have been more different one of the photos from my childhood is Jimmy and me he is shirtless lying on the grass I’m standing behind him dressed in Mama’s skirt wearing a little hat with a
Pocketbook over my arm I was perhaps three and he 13 that pretty much says it all Jim died at 72 I learned that he died when my husband and I were on a boat into pomac With Friends the sun was setting a gentle breeze brushed the water creating a slight
Chill I thought at the time how fitting it was that I should be on a boat when I in my heart said goodbye to Jim many of my memories are memories of Jim in the water Jim surfed when it was discharged from the Marines he set out from California and a
Light blue 48 I think Ford with a surfboard strapped to the top of it he entered the Marines when he finished high school and he wound up lifeguarding that summer at Myrtle Beach he carefully would wax that surfboard borrowed some of my oil paints to paint a little logo picture of a
Beach and a palm tree on the front end of it his was the first surfboard that many people had ever seen so odd a thing it was to have on an Atlantic Beach he loved surfing was it because he liked the water the thrill of Surfing or just
Showing off I doubt that the two were even separable in his mind Jim told me how to swim I’d made it to the age of 12 without knowing how to swim and he was lifeguarding that summer he took me out in the water over my head and told me to
Swim to the buoy throw a buoy that was tied to his arm and I would do the overhand crawl about 10 or 15 yards to the buoy and just as I was about to reach to grab it he would Jerk it away and cast it another 10 or 20 yards from
Me and say swim for the buoy well he did it time and time again and I tired after a few times and just nearly sobbing begged him to stop and he let me beg on for a few few minutes before he said well stand up then and I stood up in
Water up to my knees we came back to the Lifeguard stand and he allowed me to rent the floats 50 cents an hour it was an umbrellas for a dollar for a couple of hours and $5 a day I think sometimes when he’d take a break and leave the Lifeguard stand he’d leave
Me in charge now it’s a very good thing that no nobody needed a lifeguard any of those times when I was in charge of the Lifeguard stand but I’d sit in that high chair and and have a purview of the beach and look at all the the chairs and
Umbrellas that we had rented and and look at my clipboard and try to figure out how much money we’ made during the day and I jumped down when somebody came up to rent another one and one time I near to kill myself falling out of that
Eye that uh lifeguard chair but my golly an ex-marine football player hero giving me that that uh responsibility was worth every float in the water and every umbrella on the Strand years later when my two little girls and their mom and I would vacation down on the beach um Jim owned a shrimp
Boat and it served as a main element in his social life at the time well he would take us out on that shm shrimp Bo sometimes we go U deep sea fishing sometimes shrimping out in the in the Atlantic and sometimes uh in the inlet and sometimes down the walal river um
And I have great many memories of that I never went with him to the Caribbean but he would take that shrimp boat and go down there sometimes and so after retiring from his law practice and his position as a state solicitor he’d go down to the ocean and
Visit seagulls and to him it was an act of friendship to take some breadcrumbs and toss them on the Strand so they’d flock to him there wasn’t any arguing with him that feeding the wildlife was not a great idea he’d simply collect more and more stale bread for the
GS I dream about him he was larger than life he wasn’t the least bit interested in conforming to most social standards not until the last decade of his life did he be have any use for God talk and then he became quite spiritually alert and aware and and deep
If he related to any archetype it was that of the pirate there was a restaurant somewhere near where he lived called drunken Jacks and I think he he thought of himself as drunken Jack the pirate he went through something like eight marriage and ot’s marriages and
Was a disaster in his family life but in the courtroom he was a star almost never ever losing a case that he prosecuted one of those cases was was a celebrated case of of a double murder and um it was made into a movie that starred William
Conrad as Jim duny they could not have picked somebody that looked less like or acted less like Jim Dunn to play that role few years before he died I’d go to the beach to visit our parents and Jim who lived not too far away and I would
Would go to one of his favorite haunts called the Blue mark which was a nightclub that had live music and it was a favorite hangout of the locals and he danced and glad-handed everybody and was at that point in his life as handsome a 68y old as he had
Ever been when he was like 28 relatively speaking of course his cold black hair never turned gray he was and still is a legend I Live Now a continent away from where Jim and I were born where he rode me to Sunday school on his motorbike
Believe it or not where in high school he worked on cars where he humiliated me when I was about 4 he 14 when I made some smart ass comment and he took a handful of stewed squash on the dinner table and just rubbed it into my face because I pissed him
Off he’s buried in the sandy soil of Lakeside Cemetery in Conway and he is alive in my soul a piece of me that I have at times found amusing sometimes confusing somewhere in this mix lie some clues about Brotherhood brotherly love sounds so idealistic so abstract so aspirational not at all pragmatic or
Realistic Brothers fight struggle grow apart sometimes are alienated from each other and yet there are times when differences actually strengthen the bonds of Brotherhood and like Doo’s famed Brothers karamat off fraternity constellates a part of itself in each brother bearing some fragment of the wholeness that together they all share
And so it was with Jim and me I was in high school when he was in law school he was my mentor my model in so many ways once when I was pouring out my adolescent heart to him and telling him about my problems and so forth his
Response was you are a solution looking for a problem his words grabbed me essentially daring me to get on with being who I was and I had no idea at the time what that might be these decades later I realize perhaps what he didn’t we already are
What we must become we already have everything we need now when I’m near the seashore or a lake or a river or Ling about in our pool I’ll remember the floats and Umbrellas of 1957 and hear a voice commanding swim to the buoy swim to the buoy and I press
On toward something that is always just beyond my Reach
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