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brother bothers Polish people at the lake
Saturday, August 23 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Back in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s when I used to live with (or near) my brother Don, his psychological issues were hard not to notice. He used to spend hours of the day jumping up and down and muttering (or occasionally shouting) about whatever demons were tormenting him. These demons were often memories from his childhood, often combined somehow with grand historical themes involving dictators fighting wars or disposing of enemies. Don seems to have mellowed significantly in recent decades, though he still frequently mutters to himself, often while gesticulating with his hands, furrowing his brow, and looking, well, insane. For the past two nights he'd also awakened in the night and begun to loudly mutter to himself. The night before last the dogs barked at him and he stopped, but last night he kept getting louder and louder until I stormed down to his room and rhetorically demanded to know why he was loudly jabbering when there were other people in the cabin who needed to sleep. He didn't say anything, but this seemed to shut him down for the night. If I'd done this to anyone else, they would've been embarrassed, but I don't get the feeling that Don can be embarrassed in the normal sense of the word. It's more that he absorbs the embarrassing information and piles it atop the messy mental heap of accumulated frustrations, where the whole horrible heap festers and composts until it forces him to jabber again.
We had a gorgeous morning at the cabin. It was a little cool, but that mostly just suppressed the mosquitoes, and the sun shone out of a perfect blue sky. At some point Don announced he was going for a walk, which for him is a huge production because of his insistence on always wearing laced-up sneakers when walking outdoors. (I offered him my Crocs, but he found them "too big to run in.") When Don did finally start, he turned it into yet another harkening back to his glory days (or perhaps those of his famous marathon-running grandfather). He positioned himself next to the car with his feet together, but then decided he wasn't starting far enough back. So he inched both his feet backwards. He did this over a dozen times until he'd added a foot or two to what was to become a run. And then he was off, a thick man with a refrigerator-like body waddling like a running toddler as he headed down the driveway, though I'm sure in his mind was the image of a lithe athlete. Gretchen took advantage of one of his jogs to make both of us smoothies; I suspect her calculus was that a smoothie which is simply gulped down in seconds with nary a word of appreciation is not worth making.
Don was gone for awhile, and when he returned, he told of having jogged and hiked left out of our driveway (that is, westward) and gone all the way to the old building he'd seen yesterday across the lake. There he encountered an enormous doberman pinscher who regarded him with suspicion. Then some people showed up who told the dog to leave Don alone. At that point Don decided he should go. "Oh," I said, "that's Pyotr's dog." I said. Don was puzzled by that name, so I explained that it is the Polish form of "Peter." I suppose I should've been more concerned when Don then came up with a memory aid to help him remember "Pyotor," which to him sounded like "motor".
When Don came back from a second walk, he said he'd again gone down to Pyotr's parcel, and again the suspicious doberman appeared, as did a few people. "I asked for Pyotr," Don said, at which point I let out a groan, exclaiming, "Oh Don! You don't do that!" I couldn't believe how thoroughly he lacked basic common sense when it comes to interacting with other people. But Gretchen wanted to know what happened next. Apparently it hadn't gone well, with them telling Don this time that he was on private property and warning him about the dogs. I asked Don what we would do if some random stranger looking like him showed up at our door asking for me by name. "But what if you knew him?" He asked. "They didn't know you, Don," I replied. Don ended up beating a retreat, but he hadn't made it far before some woman rolled up behind him on an ATV. (Don didn't use that word, but we could tell what he meant by his description of the vehicle.) According to Don, she offered him a ride, which seemed a little far-fetched, but perhaps this actually happened. I don't know if he actually accepted the ride, but he and the woman got to talking, starting with Don asking her if she was Polish. ("Oh Don!" I groaned again.) It turned out she was Polish, and she and Don got to talking about one of his favorite subjects to lecture about: Joseph Stalin. After Don talked about the people Stalin had killed, the woman (who, it was now clear, must be Pyotr's wife, perhaps feeling her family had responded too harshly to someone with obvious psychological problems) responded that a lot of the people killed had been teachers and scientists. Don eventually revealed that he was at the lake visiting his brother Gus, so it was clear who he was: a deeply mentally-ill brother of a legitimate lake land owner. The woman did want to know from Don if we actually wanted Pyotr to come over, and Don apparently had the sense enough to say that he didn't think we did. I'd told Don a day or two ago that there are no dandelions in the Adirondacks (he'd been thinking he could pick dandelion greens), but he'd found a flower that looked to him like a dandelion along Woodworth Lake Road. He showed it to Pyotr's wife and said he'd proved his brother wrong, there are dandelions in the Adirondacks. But Pyotr's wife looked at the flower and said she didn't think t was a dandelion. When Don showed the flower to me I didn't think it was a dandelion either.
Once Don was done relating his story, Gretchen and I explained that we come to the lake to be alone with nature, not to bother other people. We told him he was forbidden ever going down to Pyotr's parcel or talking to any more strangers. Gretchen then sent an email to Pyotr explaining that Gus' "profoundly autistic" brother was visiting, that we'd told him who the dobermanns belong to, and that was the information he had that for some reason had him asking for Pyotr. She also apologized for his two awkward intrusions and said he wouldn't be coming back.
Soon thereafter, Gretchen headed down to the dock while I started working on a software development project: adding two-way messaging between people with clipboars in my WebClipboard system. The changes I was making were so dramatic, though, that I decided they needed a new repository: webclipboard_2. The biggest new change was that the list of posts is no longer rendered entirely on the backend but is instead delivered Web 2.0 style, as JSON, that is then rendered on the frontend. There is now a polling system to make new posts appear without any refresh necessary, though the JSON to display posts as they appear only represent the new posts, not the older posts. The reason I was suddenly so motivated to work on this was that I wanted to get it done while my brother Don was still around so that I could install a progressive web-app version of this system on his phone. If it was dead-simple, that is, if all he had to do was tap on the app icon to bring up the latest posts I'd sent to his account, it would be a way for me to send him photographs and perhaps even messages short enough for him to make the effort to read. In the past I'd tried setting him up with email, but the familiar-to-most-people model of going between a list of emails and individual emails was too complex for him to wrap his brain around. (Though it's possible that if I could have managed to keep him from staring off into space thinking about Neanderthal knee joints or a book he wanted to buy, I could've trained him to use Gmail.) I made great progress on all these features, and by this evening even had a functioning progressive web app to try installing on my phone.
Periodically, though, I'd take breaks to do other things, such as making Don a sandwich. I was still so upset by the stunt he'd pulled this morning at Pyotr's place that I was done beng nice to him, either from my position as a brotherly host or from any feelings of pity for his being a pathetic failure as a human. "You are by far the worst guest we've ever had," I assured him, adding, "All you do is wolf down our food and quickly turn it into shit without ever saying thanks. And then you just leave your plate, expecting us to clean up after you. All you do is take, take, take, and you offer nothing in return. Not only that, but you're the world's worst listener. You demand people listen to what you have to say but stare off into space and provide nothing when anyone says anything to you. This makes you absolutely no fun to be around!" Don defended himself by pointing out that he'd hauled and even split some unprocessed wood we'd had in our driveway back in Hurley. But then I pointed out that this had taken him less than fifteen minutes, and he certainly hadn't done all of the work that was available for him to do. I even told him something Gretchen had said about his terrible listening when they'd both been down at the dock, not even caring if he later told Gretchen that I'd told him this [which of course he later did].
When I got to a nice stopping place on my web clipboard web app, I grabbed a beer and went down to the dock. This time I didn't go in the water ot take any watercraft out. Instead I just sat on the dock and chatted with Gretchen. The chief topic was Don, of course, though she also told me the plot of a book she'd been reading called The Boy In the Striped Pajamas, about the unlikely friendship between the son of a director of a Nazi death camp and one of its inmates around his same age.
At some point this afternoon, I set up a laptop in the basement with a bluetooth speaker for Don to watch movies on while relaxing on the basement couch. (The environment down there is cluttered but comfortable; I'd say it's more pleasant than the inside of his trailer back in Virginia.) By this point he no longer wanted to watch Her and was now excited about a movie called Ex Machina I'd been telling him about. But he only watched it for about five minutes before realizing he'd seen it before. So he came back up the stairs, where he resumed his lurking if not more annoying activities like watching Rodney Dangerfield standup routines (ugh!) and the "Dream Weaver" video on his phone. Due to the weak cellphone signal, he could only use his phone in the balcony area, though it still worked so badly that he soon gave up. Of course I never told him that there was a WiFi hotspot he could connect to because I didn't want him shitting away our limited bandwidth like he was shitting away all our food.
This evening Gretchen made spaghetti with an improvised red sauce, since we'd run completely out of Rao's (which is all she would normally use). She made a whole box of pasta of course and even toasted up some faux chicken patties. It ended up being a great meal. But after Don had wolfed down his enormous portion, he asked the very gauche question of when I would be making him the BLTs I'd promised. True, I'd said I'd be making BLTs. But that was before I knew Gretchen was making spaghetti. That Don was expecting a second dinner after all that amazing spaghetti he'd just eaten (and was soon to shit out) threw me into another rage. As Gretchen and I had already said several times during Don's visit, the only good thing that would be coming out of this experience would be the appreciation it would be giving us for how great our life is without Don in it.
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