Jason Murray
Auntie Daphne and Jason’s Really Excellent Adventure
My mother and my father had two children; my brother Keith and myself. We were both born before my mother even turned twenty two, Keith following our parents marriage by about seven months at a healthy eight pounds six ounces and I thirteen months later at seven pounds six ounces. Keith was at a disadvantage at the start. Mother became pregnant around the same time as her sister in law, her older brother’s wife. Since Tommy was her favorite sibling and she had looked up to him from a very young age mother was thrilled. This was short lived because my uncle always walking the fine line between mania and severe depression took his life in a fairly dramatic fashion in the backseat of a Seattle taxicab while seated next to his pregnant wife. She miscarried my cousin a short time later while my mother continued to carry and eventually give birth to my brother. He represented loss. Whenever she looked at him she could see her brother and imagine her niece or nephew she should have had as well. She saw the loss of a sister in law since she and mother shared the same intense pain over the death of Tommy.
Then I came along. I was a new start. There was no stigma, no reminder in my eyes. My happiness invaded her heart and she shut my older brother out even more, eventually leaving he and my father behind and going to St. Louis with Jeremy Landsman, a man I called father. My real father meanwhile stayed with friends, leaving my brother with his sister, my aunt Anne while he continued drumming with his jazz trio, working a day job and playing in smoky bars at night. He didn’t let the fact that he had type one diabetes keep him from his music. One night, while his friends went out, he stayed home with a bad cold. He didn’t have a gig so he thought he’d stay home and try to get over “this bad cough.” When his friends got up the next morning they couldn’t rouse father. He died a couple of days later from pneumonia. He was only twenty seven. Keith was only two, I was only one. Mother and I came home for the funeral and the two brothers were together again, but this was short lived. Aunt Anne offered to keep the both of us, and my mother agreed to let Keith stay with her but took me back to St. Louis.
Six years later, in 1973, mother and I shared a house with her sister, my aunt Daphne, and a friend of theirs, Barbara Aftergut on Bainbridge Island, just a 35 minute ferry ride from Seattle. One Saturday, shortly before my seventh birthday mother took me down to the docks in Winslow. This wasn’t uncommon because we knew many people who owned boats, such as the Wild Turkey, a light racing day sailer with a cabin and a mounted bottle of Wild Turkey whiskey, but we weren’t visiting any boat I already knew, we were visiting a small fishing boat. My mother introduced me to its captain, a middle aged Norwegian named Jerry. My mother announced that she was going to spend the summer in Alaska, on this same small boat, fishing for Salmon. I was to stay with my Aunt Daphne, something that didn’t bother me because she was like a second mother anyway.
Mother left with little fanfare, sailing away on the small plain fishing boat, a gillnetter that would be home to she and Jerry for the next two months. Daphne and I watched them go and went home where Daphne packed my little backpack with a few things for me and a larger bag with a few things for herself. Sitting in our little living room Daphne then explained that we were leaving as well. No boat for us, not even a car. It was 1973 and neither Daphne or I were unfamiliar with how to get around without a car. We got a ride as far as the Winslow Ferry and from there hitched our way to the interstate, relatively new having only been installed 11 years earlier in time for the Seattle World’s Fair. Thumbs out Daphne and I were on our way to introduce me to a brother whom I didn’t remember.
The trip to California was without incident. I remember riding in a station wagon with a family, being told that if I swallowed my gum it would build up in my stomach and never go away. While riding with the family we drove through an area with beautiful views and bridges. The person I remember most of all though was the trucker that picked us up shortly after Daphne got written up for being too close the freeway. Apparently we were allowed to hitchhike but needed to stand on the other side of the swale built along the side of the freeway. Dave the trucker is how I remember him now. A long nose Freightliner with a small bed behind the two front seats was the tractor he drove and I sat in that little bed watching out the front window and listening to him talk on the CB.
Dave drove us all the way to Berkeley and to the apartment that my recently divorced Aunt shared with her child, my brother, now eight. Now I was thrilled to suddenly have a brother. I followed him everywhere and instead of using his name I addressed him as brother, a fact he pointed out to me on a later visit I made to him on slightly more normal transportation. Keith and I had little in common since he had been adopted into a pretty normal household with his new mother, our aunt Anne, and his new father, her husband Dave Brubacher, while I was raised by our mother but also an aunt, and a friend as well as a couple of different “daddies” at different times. Despite this we seemed remarkably similar.
For me it was a great summer. In spite of missing my mother I had gone on a great adventure and met a brother I didn’t realize I had. The adventure wasn’t over yet. Dave the trucker was making a return trip that went North all the way to Seattle and didn’t want Daphne and I back on the side of the freeway. He lived in Los Angeles and felt the easiest way for him to get us was to fly us down to LA. Daphne and Anne realizing we’d be in LA decided that we should all go and make a stop at Disneyland. I remember getting to the little park in Anaheim. Keith and I each got one book of tickets, realizing pretty quickly that there were only two E-tickets and a bunch of A-tickets. E-tickets got you on the Pirates of the Caribbean, A-tickets the dumbo ride. But that was Ok because I got to eat lunch at the Blue Bayou where you watched all the boats bobbing past on their way to the drop into the pirate’s cave.
That summer was the type you want to be able to write about when the teacher asks you to write about your summer vacation. While my mother fished for steelhead and cut eight foot sharks out of the net while they bobbed below her mouth gaping open I ate a birthday cake shaped like a tugboat. While Nixon tried to stop the Watergate scandal from awaking the American public to his misdeeds, I had clam chowder at the Blue Bayou and drank glasses of Coca Cola. America was reeling from the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights battles of the sixties and I was reeling from the excitement of learning about my brother Keith.
