Tag Archives: My Family and Other Animals

I Got Cancelled

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My sister stopped engaging with me several years ago. “My therapist thinks it’s better this way.” My brother decided the same this past Christmas. “You’re no fun to talk to.”

Linked as children by our sweaters. (Columbia Icefield, 1972)

I had never got along exceptionally well with either of them, but I did strive to maintain at least a superficial relationship, if not for anything else, to stay connected with my nephews and nieces. I haven’t seen my sister’s son since he was seven; he’s now finishing his undergraduate degree in Italy.

The final descent of my sister’s Iron Curtain was triggered after our mother’s death, the last of the preceding generation, meaning there was now no one to say no.

My mother in the backyard of my childhood home in Toronto

The odd thing about this is that we all share financial stability as well as similar social and political grounding. There are no real axes to grind, no addictions or houses burned down. The main point of contention stems from 2006 when I sublet my sister’s Manhattan apartment and a couple of curse-laden messages were left by my former girlfriend on her answering machine.

My sister arranged a group therapy session with my brother and I. The session foundered the moment the therapist instructed us to step back from our conflict and share a personal issue with which we struggled. I shared my regret about never having children. My brother offered that he could get frustrated with fund-raising issues at his linguistics lab. My sister’s answer was exceptionally terse. “There’s nothing.” “Nothing at all?” The therapist prodded. “Nothing at all.”

My penchant for getting buried began in Anna Maria Key, Florida

I should have seen the writing on the wall at that moment, but I also knew that her operating mechanism was to avoid emotions at all costs. Which of course leads to my cancellation, a choice that’s not actually surprising given our current cultural climate.

No matter the reason – difference of opinion or indifference – our odd world continues to devolve into a social media platform where faces are deleted, voices silenced with a tap on the screen. Different perspectives aren’t negotiated but blocked, the sphere ever smaller, down the worm hole with the AI avatars, where the friendliest and most wonderful perspective of all are offered, where friends and brothers are always compliant and understanding, where my sister is probably talking to her new AI brother now. That jerk.

Gerald Durrell’s “My Family and Other Animals”

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But the shyest and most self-effacing of the wall community were the most dangerous; you hardly ever saw one unless you looked for it, and yet there must have been several hundred living in the cracks of the wall. Slide a knife-blade carefully under a piece of the loose plaster and lever it gently away from the brick, and there, crouching beneath it, would be a little black scorpion an inch long, looking as though he were made of polished chocolate. They were weird looking things, with their flattened, oval bodies, their neat, crooked legs, the enormous crab-like claws, bulbous and jointed neatly as armor, and the tail like a string of brown beads ending in a sting like a rose thorn. The scorpion would lie quite quietly as you examined him, only raising his tail in an almost apologetic gesture of warning if you breathed too hard on him. If you kept him in the sun too long he would simply turn his back on you and walk away, and then slide slowly but firmly under another section of plaster. I grew very fond of these scorpions. I found them to be pleasant, unassuming creatures with, on the whole, the most charming habits. (153)