All You Have to Do is to Listen. Louis Shalako.

Returned a suit, told a funny little story...#psychology

Louis Shalako

I returned my brother's suit, which I had borrowed.

And I know he’s been kind of suffering lately.

All you have to do is to listen—

I set up a lead-in, asking if the one boy has been laid off...yes. The other one still doesn't have a job, apparently staying up all night on the computer. I told my brother that he was suffering from depression. 

"All the signs are there," I told him. 

I went on to tell him the story. Big Frank was in the union. He knew what a layoff is. Yet when I was laid off from Fibreglas Canada, he was fucking fit to be tied. To him, it was a cop-out of some sort on my part--Frank wasn't a bad father, merely typical. He didn't have a real high opinion of his oldest son, who was, quite frankly, eighteen years old. He'd also co-signed a loan so I could buy an MGB for $1,500.00. That must have been a factor as well. So, after a couple of weeks or so, I started at Holmes Insulation. And it was terrible. It was a thousand times worse than Fibreglas, with the soft, sticky white wool floating in the air. Supposedly a twelve-hour shift, I walked out after four hours, or about the time when, (literally), for break-time, guys walked twenty feet to a picnic table right beside the effing production line. To eat a simple ham sandwich was to crunch on rock wool, ladies and gentlemen.

I cleaned myself up and went downtown to the federal building and talked to a recruiter for the Canadian Armed Forces. I told the man all about Big Frank. I told him the army would teach me some discipline--I told him it would 'make a man out of me', feeding him all the same bullshit that well-meaning folks dish out all the time. I told him I would get my teeth fixed in the army...I told the man they'd buy my clothes, my boots and feed me, give me a bed. Get my Grade 12, all of that sort of thing. The man suggested I come back in a week. If I still felt the same way, they'd sign me up. I got home about two-thirty p.m., within a few minutes, the phone rings. Fibreglas wants me back, for seven a.m. the next day. 

Big Frank usually arrived home a little after three. I played him real good--I told him I had to quit at Holmes, of course his face starts to redden and the mouth starts to open...I told him I had gone down to the recruiter, and they wouldn't have me...some kind of maturity problem, I told Frank frankly...poor old Frank was working himself into a fine lather by this point, and then I told him I was going back to work the next morning. And it was just a routine layoff, Big Frank: get over it, it happens, as he should damned well have known. But my old man was never so scared as when contract time rolled around, there was talk of a strike and he had all those useless mouths and a mortgage to feed. It's not that we didn't understand--it's not like he hadn't lectured us enough on the subject.

When my brother was 17, he and Big Frank were at such loggerheads, he threw a few things into the ’67 VW Beetle and took off for Windsor to live with our mother for a while. Even then, I had patience—I could sort of sit there and take it, (what with having an actual job, not to mention that fucking MGB), but The Duke was cast in a slightly different mold. It’s not like I didn’t leave home a few times—and come back, too. Quite frankly, I didn’t really grow up until some time in my late thirties, possibly early forties. I told him that too—my brother, I mean.

This is about when you look around you and realize that some of your friends aren’t even trying, while you, try as you might, seem to fail miserably about as often as you succeed at anything of any great import. There are clearly some lessons to be learned here. And some of those old friends still haven't really tried, anything at all.

The problem, is that you have three stubborn males, money is tight, and Dad is on a small disability pension. They’re also in affordable, geared-to-income housing, and subject to some rules…no matter where you are, or what you are paying, there’s going to be some rules, but one would think the three of them could figure a way to keep a roof over their heads and quite frankly, no one person has to do all the work and provide all the money for their sustenance. And neither nephew seems to be trying all that hard, but they’re young and they have their whole lives ahead of them.

They will get tired of having the old man all over their back. It's just a question of time.

As for myself, I may be practising psychiatry without a license, but it’s family after all.

Let’s hope we can plant a few seeds here and there.

 

#Louis

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