All Alone Amnesia
03.10.2013

I called my family last Friday. My first phone call in five years. My uncle Brad answered and we talked the whole thirty minutes. (O.K., twenty-five minutes. The line went dead at the end there. Again with the "downs/towers/fences". Must overlook the bullshit.)

But he says elk are being introduced all over my hometown. To habitats much lower, out of the mountains, than previously. He says my aunt's house, his ex-wife's who O-Ded, Shanna, sits empty because the bank foreclosed on it 0 but they're planning on buying once it clears.

I told him I wanted to just go stand atop "Three Pole Hill" (a hill with three power poles. All the rest got only two) and just look upon the land. He says there are houses up there now.

My dad gets out on parole next month. Him and Uncle Brad both have come to prison and paroled three times each since I been locked up. (On this charge in 2006.) And my brother Jesse two times.

Uncle Brad's brother, my uncle Randy, still spends his days drinking beer listening to oldies in our house's breezeway. He's the only one who's never been in jail. And we call HIM crazy!

Randy is 300 lbs. After he was diagnosed with diabetes ten years ago he ballooned. My grandfather Wendall was diagnosed with high blood pressure and shrunk. They exchanged body fat straight across, my uncle says.

But it's not what we said. (I'm crying) It's that we talked. His voice still rings in my ears. His laugh. The way he said that it's good to talk to me.

I've heard it before all over the fucking place: "Family is all that matters." "Ya ya", I'd think. Trite, banal, bullshit. But...

Try being away from your family. The ones whose voices you grew up listening, talking to; spend five years in the hole solitary not even knowing if anyone's even alive anymore; and then talk to your favorite uncle and tell me nothing; tell me family doesn't matter!!! - I'd forgotten who I was...