I want to return to at least get one thing out of the way and to explain as best I can to my children the nature of my relationship with my brothers now that our parents have been deceased for several years.
     With Donnie, the relationship is basically unchanged.  We see each other on occasion and Nancy was there with me the day that Sarah had her operation.  I think that both Donnie and I are satisfied with the relationship as it is and I see no reason that it should change.  We are very different animals in the political and religion areas, but we are brothers first and I trust that we will both find ways to put those differences aside.
     Wayne?  Not so much.  To say that I put up with a lot of really awful things said about me by Wayne, during the time of our parents sickness, is putting it mildly.  I learned some things then that made me know that our relationship probably had come close to an end.  Wayne lives in a world that I neither respect nor feel is healthy.  While Donnie talks at his children too much and with them not enough, Wayne talks at everybody and with hardly anyone.  He is the classic dominant male who knows little more than what it takes to sate his desires, his wants, his needs, and most of all his prejudices.
     I tried to let Wayne know that after our parents were gone, the day of his entering my world with all his domination was over, and it had gone fairly until this past May. Then on my facebook page he burst forward with his childish attempt to make me look like some sort of babbling fool.  It really hurt because he did so by getting into a word battle with a fellow that I have tried very hard to befriend, an artistic fellow that I taught in high school forty years ago.  Bruce, his name, was backing up like crazy but Wayne, unaware of anything but his own need to show people how smart he is, kept coming at Bruce.
     That was the last straw as he had thoroughly insulted me in his own house at Christmas a couple of years ago by giving me some information about spontaneous generation of oil in the crudest way possible, as if he were teaching me how on the wrong track I was.  A couple of other events, also in his house, and you get the picture.  He only quit sending me anti-Obama e-mail junk when I told him that I just trashed it.  There is going to be no new relationship between us and so, it is better for both of us that it just end.
     This is a tough one.  I can truly say that there was no relationship that I had, outside of my immediate family, that could have meant more to me to be able to sustain that my relationship with Wayne.  There is not a day that goes by, and will not be until I die, that I do not completely regret that we could not find the common ground that could have led to our being friends.  But, he once told me that I could never be his friend and he listed his friends for me like a little child might to hurt another little child.
     Kevin?  I finally got tired of being ignored and used.  I, more than his mother, father, or anyone else, took care of him as a baby and small child.  Much of the animosity that Roger had for me when he was alive came as a result of my defending Kevin from him for years.  After I quit teaching and started working with our parents, I put up with his antics for a while.  I defended him from our father, when he tried to fight Kevin, who I so irritated that he got a handgun and told me that he would blow my brains out if I ever touched him again.
     I never tried harder with anyone, including my own children, to build a good working relationship, than I have tried with Kevin, but it is just never going to happen and at this time in my life, Sarah and her medical problems, two children living far away, three grandchildren that I want to see as often as possible, and just a lack of energy have made me say that if my relationship with Kevin is over, then it is over.  I love and wish he, Liz, and George all the best things in life, but I fear I will not be there to share them.
    I want everyone to know this.  I hold no animosity toward any of my extended family.  I do not feel that any of them have let me down or anything of the sort.  We grow, we experience, and we change.  I told Wayne that he was free to come to my house anytime, he did not have to call first.  If he comes, I will treat him with the same respect that I would treat anybody who comes in peace.  But, I will never enter his house again until the relationship is reset onto the basis of mutual respect.
    I have a thing about the true anti-Christ, Ayn Rand.  I have no respect for the world that she wanted men to follow her into.  Too many of our Christian churches today are really Ayn Rand temples and have little or nothing to do with the Bible that they profess to follow.  In the corporate world, it is hip to be an Ayn Rand apostle.  Our common humanity and common dependence are things of which I have always been proud to call myself a part.  I think that I have worked as hard as most men and been more independent that most who call themselves her apostles.  In the traditional and Biblical sense, I am confident that my life has been in tune with the classical traditions of humanity.  But, I certainly would not hold up my life as a model for anyone.
     The worst insult that I have sustained in my adult life was when Wayne tried to tell me that I should be like one of the Ayn Rand cone heads and do things like them.  That is roughly the equivalent of having two enemies over to dinner, slaying one and feeding him to the other to make him a better person.  I sort of knew at that moment that we had grown so far apart that there was little chance of our ever reconciling.  But, our parents final days were what was important, and then and many other times, I ceded to Wayne and went on.
    When I was letting him know that our relationship was over, I finally told him that he was a damned bully and that I spent years in mental fear of him because I really never wanted to fight him.  He did not get the message and so I called him a goddamn bully.  I think he got the message.
     I trust the reader to figure out that when two people have a falling out, two different stories will come forward as the reasons.  I make no apologies for the fact that this is coming from my point of view and that I have not been analytical of how I could have made things better.  If you want to know that, you will have to ask my brothers.