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three sandwiches and vegetables
Sunday, August 17 2025
location: the couch in the Shaque, Stingy Hollow Road, rural Augusta County, VA
I was up and about in the Shaque around 8:00am. To make the most of the faux turkey (which hadn't been in a refrigerator since I'd bought it yesterday), I made three sandwiches using those white bread buns whose fragrance now had unpleasant associations with scenes in the movie Vesper. Then I crossed the road to see what my brother Don was up to. Today the plan was for me to drive back to Hurley with him, a plan hatched some time ago by our cousin Kent. Don will then spend a week with me before Kent picks him up and drives him back to Virginia.
The last time Don had traveled out of state was when he was in his early 20s back in the late 1980s, so he had no sense of what he needed when traveling. Initially he planned to take something like four or five pairs of shoes, all of them similar-seeming tennis shoes, claiming it would be better for his feet to have more shoes to switch between. This seemed absurd to me, and I told him how I'd just spent two and a half weeks in Sri Lanka with just one pair of flip-flops. In the end I convinced Don (on pain of not being able to go) to only bring one or two pairs of shoes in addition to the one on his feet. I also got him to only bring one box of books (initially he'd wanted to bring three or four, each about a cubic foot in size). As for how he would carry all his stuff, he seemed to think he would be using a suitcase, simply because that was what had been modeled to him. And maybe people actually used suitcases back when he last traveled. I suggested he put his stuff in a backpack instead. Since his backpacks are so small, he opted to bring two of them.
While Don was spending a surprisingly long time packing his stuff, I was installing tracking software on his phone so I can see where he is when he inevitably gets lost. (It's very common for Don to go charging off when he is in unfamiliar places, oblivious to his need to be able to retrace his steps. So I figured I could solve this problem with technology, in this case an app called Family360. It has an infuriating interface, as all apps now seem to.)
And then there we were, on a road trip, just like Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. It wasn't long before Don was hungry, so I told him to help himself to a sandwich and some cherries. I also gave him a cloth dog bowl to put the pits and stems in.
As I drove, I pointed out the various milestones along the way, including our crossing out of Augusta County, something Don hadn't done in years. Of bigger consequences were the state boundaries: first West Virginia, then Maryland, then Pennsylvania, where we spent most of the drive.
I half-expected the drive to be a tedious series of lectures, with my borther Donsplaining many things to me that I am already fully aware of, since that is largely what he does when he calls me. But with over seven hours together, there was no way to have that much Donsplaining. Sometimes he fell asleep for a time. Sometimes he even listened to things I talked about, such as the terrible drivers weaving through traffic or wearing out their brakes by tailgating.
At some point I used a peanut jar so I could piss without stopping, and Don mentioned that this is something our friend Josh (who worked for many years as a truck driver) also does. Don himself thought he had an overactive bladder, but he only pissed once on the drive, at the station where I eventually stopped to get gas north of Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
This morning before we'd set out, I'd mixed myself a boozy cocktail of vodka and orange "drink." (Don buys most of his groceries at the Dollar Tree, where real orange juice isn't a thing.) The idea here was to be able to drink on the road without drawing attention to it. If instead I'd had a road beer (which is what I would've done had I been driving alone), Don would've noticed, and he's absolutely terrible at keeping secrets. It's not that I care if people know I drink road beers, but with some stories covered by the Don Olin Mueller News, the headlines can blare the same tiresome thing for days. (My mother was also like this as what we would later realize was dementia began to become noticeable in the naughties.) I didn't take my first sip until we'd reached milepost 120 on I-81, which is almost exactly half way through Pennsylvania (though more than half way through the drive). I soon realized it was too boozy to drink much of (at least while driving), and the "orange" component wasn't really agreeing with me. So I put it aside, not picking it up again until we were well into New York.
By this point in the drive, Don was asking me every five miles or so about how many more miles we had left to drive. That number had just fallen below 200 and would continue to fall until we were climbing Hurley Mountain on Dug Hill Road and I answered the question by saying "less than a mile."
The dogs were happy to see me when we arrived but didn't quite know what to make of Don. (Most creatures seem to sense that there is something off about him; I remember as a Kid back in Lanham, Maryland, there was a mockingbird who used to ruthlessly attack him while leaving all other humans alone.) Neville did that thing where he barks viciously and seems like he might bark, so I had to keep telling Don to pet him on the head so Neville would know that he wasn't a threat. Meanwhile Gretchen was still off tabling for New York Abortion Fund in Woodstock.
Don is a restless person and often doesn't seem to know what to do with himself other than to move. He initially announced he would go jog down the road, but I insisted that he not, as I hadn't completed setting up the tracker on his phone and didn't want him getting lost just yet. Instead I had him go on a walk with Charlotte and me down the Stick Trail. It had recently rained, so I found a red eft to show him (he likes that sort of thing). But otherwise he just marched in silence, moving like an awkward overgrown four-year-old over the uneven ground. I'd point things out to him, but he either ignored or didn't hear me, and I despaired slightly that my brother, my closest living relative, is not fully human. Here was the life I'd made for myself and he didn't seem to care or notice. It turned out that he didn't have it in him to go for a proper walk; when he finally said something it was to ask to turn around less than a quarter mile down the trail. Instead I had us cut over to the Farm Road after climbing the escarpment via a cove eroded into its side. I looked for fossils along the way to show him, since he's interested in those, but I didn't find even a single brachiopod.
Back in the yard, Don was still restless and wanted to pick up bags of mulch and use them as exercise equipment. This reminded me that Gretchen had asked me recently to move them, so I had him carry them over to the garden. I told him he could do the same with some salvaged firewood needing to be carried to the woodshed for processing.
By this point I desperately needed some time to myself, as it was unlikely I had ever before spent such a long unbroken time with my brother in my entire life. So I retreated into the upstairs bedroom with the remains of my acrid road beverage. But Don kept needing things: a towel, later another towel, and soap. Then there was something he characterized as "an emergency": we'd opened the window in his basement guestroom (the old Gunther Room that had also been Powerful's room) to let in some fresh (if extremely humid) air, and it had immediately condensed into water streaming down the cold recently-dehumidified walls. Then he complained that he was hungry, and it wasn't enough to give him the last of three sandwiches I'd made in the Shaque this morning; he also wanted "vegetables." Fortunately, he likes to eat broccoli raw.
Only then could I take a much-deserved bath, which was where I was when Gretchen got home at around 9:00pm. But this week she happened to be volunteering as a NYAF manager, and one of the people she manages had flaked out on her, so she was frazzled by all the things she suddenly had to do at her computer and on the phone.
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