Tuesday, February 10, 2004

LIFE OF BRIAN 2: Before the beginning... I wish I had some photos. Old birthday cards. Cherished toys. I wish I had anything from his childhood to provide some clues, to help me know my brother better. But when he arrived at my home in 1982 at the age of 14 he came with no past--only a scrap of paper that said "Wanders away. Scratches self." Mrs. Brown from the Brown Group Home in Inglewood had driven him the 600 miles north from L.A. to my little house in Chico, where I lived with my second husband Gary and my two sons, age 7 and 10, from before that marriage. How my brother got to that group home and how I finally located him there is certainly a story worth telling. I'll include a little of it here, as I can. In the spring of 1967 my mother and I lived in a small furnished apartment on Tower Drive, near the intersection of Wilshire and San Vicente boulevards in Los Angeles. I attended eighth grade at Horace Mann school and Mom worked downtown--during the day as an assistant stock purchaser at United California Bank and at night as hostess at the Chez Edouard Restaurant. It was at the restaurant that she met and fell in love with an ex-boxer from the Bronx named Jimmy Flood. He was smart, funny, and kind, and soon Mom quit her jobs and the three of us moved together into a new, larger furnished apartment on Normandy Avenue. Jimmy seemed to have simply materialized, suddenly, having arrived on a Greyhound bus from New York (he said) with just a few clothes and his most precious possessions--his white rubber mouth guard in a red plastic case and a tattered old copy of Ring magazine--in a duffel bag. He was there to make a new start, he told us. During the day he trained at the Olympic gym and at night he worked as a bouncer. He was going to make a comeback, as a welterweight. And he'd been offered a job training Robert Conrad on the set of The Wild Wild West. None of this was true, as it turned out, except that he really had been a middleweight contender in the late 1940s and '50s, and he really was a bouncer at a local nightclub most nights. The truth has taken me a long time to track down, and it will make a pretty exciting story when I get it all on paper. What's relevant to my brother's life, though, is that Jimmy made Mom and me very happy, and when, in November 1967, he vanished without a trace, Mom was four-and-a-half months pregnant. 1:09:00 PM    say something if you feel like it []

LIFE OF BRIAN This is a scan of an old photo of my brother, Brian Flood. Brian, who has Down syndrome, has lived with me since 1982. In eight days he will turn 36. To honor this event, and to make up a little for past birthdays never particularly honored, I will include a paragraph and a photo here every day up to and including February 18 to celebrate his life. The first installment will appear later today. He's had kind of an interesting life, as you'll learn. My little brother is my hero, my teacher, my family. 9:00:54 AM    say something if you feel like it []

© Copyright 2004 Sam Mills. Last update: 2/18/04; 8:14:25 AM.