Otter Ranch

WE’VE NEVER MET, AND STILL I MISS YOU
A Letter to Iceland
By Wayne Roemhildt

Dear Iceland,

We’ve never met,
and still I miss you.

I don’t know how that happens.

Maybe it's your black earth
beneath all that white.

The fire you keep under your feet.

The waterfalls.
The impossible blue of your ice.
Those little birds with sunsets in their mouths
standing at the edge of the world.

I've looked at you from very far away
for a very long time.

But lately, Iceland,
I feel some urgency.

There are men loose in the world
who look at a mountain and see what can be taken from it,
who look at a river and wonder what its worth,
who can stand before something ancient and beautiful
and think only of owning it.

So I shouldn't wait too long.

I want to see you while you're still yourself.

Save me some wind.

Save me a lonely road,
a warm pool beneath a cold sky,
and somewhere near the sea
where I can stand and say:

So, there you are.

I will come find you, Iceland.

Always,
—Wayne

SPEAKING OF WILLMAR, AND POTENTIAL GREATNESS...

I’ve been playin around with the Uptown Willmar mall in my head since I moved here five years.

The place holds nostalgia for a lotta people around here.

But boy, it’s creepy walking through it now.

You can almost see the ghosts of smokers doin laps around the mall in the ’80s. Teenagers killin an afternoon. Old guys on benches. Mothers draggin kids through stores. Christmas decorations hangin from the ceiling.

And walking right alongside them now are the ghosts of retail itself.

There’s something sad about it.

But there’s something else, too.

Space.

An enormous amount of it.

Maybe that’s where we’ve been looking at Uptown wrong.

Stop tryin'da figure out how to make it a better mall.

It doesnt need to be a mall at all.

Food hall? Check.

Maker space? Double check.

Indoor farmers markets and food-truck festivals—in Minnesota...inFebruary? Holy s**t. Check.

Small-business incubators. Commercial kitchens. Artists and craftspeople. Workforce training. Youth programs. Senior programs. Indoor recreation. Community health resources. Performance space. Meeting rooms and STUDIOS. Indoor walking.

Hell YES, an indoor pool and water park.

Resources upon resources under one roof.

And not just a bunch of s**t sharing an address.

Build the place so all of it runs into everything else.

The person learning a trade walks past the bakery. The retired couple walking laps passes a bunch of kids building something in the maker space. The family headed for the pool walks through the market. The cook trying to turn a recipe into a business suddenly has thousands of potential customers walking past the kitchen.

That’s the opportunity.

Take a building that was designed almost entirely around consumption and rebuild it around participation.

Make something.

Learn something.

Sell something.

Eat something.

Exercise. Perform. Start a business. Get some help. Meet somebody you wouldn’t otherwise meet.

Belong somewhere.

Kandiyohi County Economic Development has already spent months investigating the property, talking with investors and agencies, looking at redevelopment possibilities, and considering everything from stormwater and parking-lot reconstruction to different uses for the property. Uptown is reportedly about 60 percent empty.

And now KCED has hit an impasse with the owner over price.

Fine.

Don’t overpay for it.

But for God’s sake, don’t stop imagining it.

Because the bones are sitting there.

A dying shopping mall doesn’t have to remain a dying shopping mall.

And those ghosts walking around Uptown might remind us of something important:

Once upon a time, everybody came here.

Maybe they could again.

Not because we resurrected the mall.

Because we built something better in its place.

Something useful. Something ambitious. Something distinctly ours.

A place where farmers, cooks, artists, kids, old folks, entrepreneurs, immigrants, tradespeople, families and somebody who just wants a goddamn cup of coffee all have a reason to walk through the same doors.

Something other communities eventually come to Willmar to see and ask:

How the hell did you guys do this?

Cousin, If I were mayor of Willmar, this would be my opus.

Not saving a mall.

Building the town square we forgot how to build.

I’ve got a pocket full of ideas.

So, if youve got 7 million bucks layin around, or yer a badass grant writer... Lemme know when you wanna get serious about making Willmar and Kandiyohi County an even more sought-after place in Minnesota to hunker down, build something, raise a family, start a business, make some art, eat something wonderful, and belong somewhere.

The building is already sittin there.

Let’s quit mourning what it was and start imagining what it could be.

THE TOWN THEY SAY IS GONE — On Willmar, Fear & the Community Right in Front of Us
By Wayne Stephen

Two young men were shot to death in Willmar Monday night. Another was critically wounded.

They were nineteen, nineteen and twenty.

That's young enough that I've got trouble calling them men without first seeing the kids in them.

It happened at Rau Park, beside Foot Lake. Police have said the shooting appears to have been isolated and not random, and that they don't think there's an ongoing threat to the public. The rest, remains under investigation.

Oh, but that didn't stop Facebook.

Nothing stops Facebook.

Before we knew much of anything, people knew everything. "Willmar is a dump.", "Willmar's garbage.", and "Willmar's gone to hell!" If you live around here, you've heard versions of it for years, but after the shooting it came pouring out again.

And underneath most of it was somethin uglier.

I'm not in'erested in pretending every older white person worried about crime is secretly Bull Connor. That's bulls**t and intellectually lazy. But I'm also not in'erested in pretending I can't recognize racism when I see it. There was pure, uncut racism in those comments. Fear of immigrants. Fear of people who look different. Fear of a changing town dressed up as nostalgia for the one that supposedly disappeared.

The shooting became evidence.

"See? Look what Willmar has become!"

I've carried a Willmar around in my head before.

I grew up despising the place from afar.

Fearing it, actually.

When yer a kid growing up in the system, adults learn where your fear buttons are. Back then, one of 'em had a name.

Willmar. Willmar State Hospital.

"You better shape up or they'll send you to WILLMAR!"

Willmar wasn't a city to me. It wasn't a lake or a library or a downtown. It wasn't people.

It was where they sent you.

Larry was the youngest kid in the boys home, about my age. He got into a fight and was sent to Willmar. He never came back. Later my foster brother Jason ended up there too.

That'll build a mythology in a kid's head.

Then, through one of life's better jokes, at 50 years old, I eventually wound up living just down the road from the place.

I had to confront the Willmar I'd carried since childhood with the Willmar that actually existed.
And slowly, almost against my will, I fell in love with it. Especially, with what it COULD be.

Not because Willmar needed me to.

I've written this before and it bears repeating: Willmar doesn't need my fu***ng validation.

Neither does any other city.

I'm one guy who showed up late carrying a lotta baggage.

But my mind changed.

And it wasn't the lakes that did it.

People will tell you about the lakes when they're sellin you on a Minnesota town. Fine. It's Minnesota. I can find a fu***ng lake. Give me the water and prairie and a Minnesota sky, sure. Mother Nature has been showing off around here since long before any of us arrived.

But show me the people.

The Willmar Public Library became one of my favorite places. Intuition Brewing became another. I found artists and musicians and immigrant entrepreneurs and librarians and firefighters, teachers and progressive thinkers and stubborn civic people who believe a town isn't some finished thing handed down from yer grandparents.

There's an army of people around Willmar doing the slow work of making this place better while it changes.

Mother Nature can make a place beautiful.

People make it a community.

Which brings me back to nine days before the shooting, when I was standing downtown looking at what Willmar has become.

There were somethin like sixty different flags represented. Food. Kids. Music. Dancing. Languages bouncin around the street. It was Willmar's Welcoming Week celebration, built around a pretty simple proposition:

Come downtown and meet your neighbors.

And that s**t moved me.

Not Hallmark-card diversity. Not the corporate poster with six smiling faces carefully selected by somebody in Human Resources.

Pride.

My friend Nicole was performing Latin dance. She's a redheaded woman from Marshall, Minnesota, fer Chri'sake. She also married to John, who is from Chile. Alma Andina (St. Paul, MN) played, led by another Chilean, and my god were they good. Pan flutes. That remarkable triple-flute contraption. Folk rolling into jazz and funk and salsa and flamenco until I quit tryin to figure out what the hell to call it because the band was cookin!

Food and music will do that. They're two of the oldest olive branches human beings have.

Here. Eat this. Listen to this.

We'll work out the rest later.

My friend Christina was there. Her daughters hail from Haiti. Christina spends a good amount of herself trying to improve the lives of people around her. I asked her why a day like this mattered.

She told me about her own people.

Dutch.

Her family came here only a few generations ago seeking religious freedom and security. They maintained their language and culture at first. Eventually they became part of the larger American culture.

Then Christina said something I've been carrying around since.

“My culture's story is similar to every culture that shows up hoping for the same.”

Boom!...There it is.

The people who became us were once them.

She noticed something else. The kids seemed perfectly comfortable carrying both worlds—the culture their families came from and the community they live in now. Christina thought they seemed to get along with one another better than the adults do.

Well, f**k, there it is too.

Chris Radel was around, of course. That dude is so relentlessly involved in Willmar somebody oughta make him the unofficial official mayor and get it over with. Liz and Micah are doin their part downtown with Intuition. There are Mexican and Asian markets, halal shops, restaurants and businesses filled with people whose grandparents weren't necessarily born in Kandiyohi County.

That's Willmar.

And so is the shooting.

I don't wanna write one of those syrupy pieces where diversity is beautiful and everybody holds hands and crime disappears because somebody played a pan flute. Two kids are dead. Another young man was critically wounded. Families are living through something terrible. A beautiful Saturday downtown doesn't bring anybody's son home.

And a terrible Monday night sure doesn't erase what I saw downtown Saturday.

We oughta be grown-up enough to understand that.

Tom Wolfe looked around in 1976 and called it the "Me Decade." The boomers were coming of age and millions of Americans were asking a question their grandparents hadn't always had the luxury of asking:

What do I want?

Therapy. Divorce. S*x. Religion. Career. Your parents could go screw themselves. Your church could too.

It's my life.

There was liberation in that. Plenty of it was overdue. Christopher Lasch later took a darker look at the same cultural turn in "The Culture of Narcissism."

I've been wondering what happens when a generation that demanded autonomy becomes the authority.

Because their children inherited the sentence too.

It's my life.

My marriage. My religion. My body. My boundaries. My identity. My family. My America.

Autonomy looks a helluva lot different from the other side of the dinner table.

This badass psychoanalyst, Karen Horney, she had a term called "vindictive triumph." She was describing individuals, not generations or political parties. She was in'erested in what can happen when humiliation or diminished status becomes a need to restore superiority....to win back the high ground.

Writer Lucas Bean recently applied Horney's idea to some MAGA parents who lose authority over their adult children and seek political restoration of it.

I think the dude takes it a little too far. We can't put seventy million people on Karen Horney's couch. MAGA isn't even exclusively old.

But Bean scratched somethin I can't stop itching.

Loss.

The stranger kind.

You wake up and the country doesn't look quite like the country in your head. The music sounds strange. Families don't look the same. Half the technology makes you feel like an idiot. Younger people don't seem especially in'erested in asking your permission.

Some people roll with it. Some start wanting the old world back.

And that's where AGAIN starts doing an awful lotta work.

Make America Great Again.

Again requires a before: a remembered America, a remembered neighborhood, a remembered family, a remembered Willmar.

Memory is a wacky editor. It keeps the parade and cuts the fistfight. It remembers the unlocked front door and forgets who wasn't welcome through it.

I know somethin about carrying around a remembered Willmar.

Mine wasn't nostalgic. Mine was terrifying.
But eventually I had to let the actual place challenge it.

That's why I need days like Welcoming Week. I need Christina. Nicole and John. Liz and Micah. I need some Chilean musicians to blow the dust outta my f**kin head with a pan flute.

Because I can get trapped inside my own stories too.

I've grown to love Willmar as a second home, and I still critique the hell out of it. Partly because I want it better and partly because I enjoy needling Chris Radel.

Radel has so much go'damned civic pride in Cardinal Country that I can't complain about the urinal smell in the downtown Kwik Trip bathroom without him jumping down my ass in defense of Willmar.

I dig that about him.

Mostly.

Also, get yer s**t together, downtown Kwik Trip.

But, I participate here. I go downtown. I sit at Intuition. I go to the library and the events. I meet people. I eat their food. I listen to their music. I let 'em surprise me.

I need the town to correct me occasionally.

There's a contradiction I've noticed among some people mourning what Willmar, and America, used to be. We've lost community, they say. Nobody knows their neighbors. Downtown is dead.

And I wonder....'where the hell they've been??'

Because the neighbors are here.

The community is here.

It just doesn't look like it did in 1983.

So when somebody tells me Willmar has gone to hell, I wanna ask:

When was the last time you went lookin for Willmar?

Not on Facebook. Not on Fox.

Outside.

Holy s**t, Facebook can be a lousy town square. A shooting travels fast there. A Somali family going to work doesn't. A crime gets shared. A kid graduating doesn't. A fight becomes evidence. A Honduran cook opening his restaurant becomes lunch.

Fear has a distribution system.

Ordinary decency mostly has Tuesdays.

And if you consume enough catastrophe, eventually catastrophe becomes your census.
Some people mourning community are eating themselves.

They hunger for belonging but fear the people belonging has come to include. So they withdraw. The people they don't know remain people they don't know, which makes 'em easier to fear. Pretty soon you're standing outside a community you've stopped participating in and mourning its disappearance.

You're starving for community while refusing dinner... *face palm*

I don't say that from some mountaintop.

Set another chair for me.

S**t, I need reminding too.

That's why this isn't ultimately an essay about stupid boomers and righteous progressives. I've met young fools and old people whose curiosity could run circles around mine. I don't think every person who votes differently from me secretly hates the family buying groceries beside them.

I carried my own Willmar around for decades.

The kid in me wasn't entirely wrong. There was real history behind that fear. Real kids. Real institutions. Real damage.

I didn't have to pretend any of it away to discover something else.

I just had to keep meeting Willmar.

Nine days before blood was spilled at Rau Park, people stood downtown beneath sixty flags. Nobody solved America that afternoon. Nobody solved immigration or racism or Willmar. They ate. Played music. Danced. Talked. Showed one another where they came from.

Then Monday night came.

Both belong to this place.

The lie begins when we decide only one of 'em tells us what Willmar is.

And maybe that's what bothers me most about "Willmar has gone to hell."

Gone where, fer f**k’s sake?

The community those people say they miss was downtown.

It just didn't look exactly like the community they remembered.

A redheaded woman from Marshall was dancin Latin dance. A Dutch-American woman raising daughters from Haiti was tellin me her family's story wasn't so different from the families arriving now. A Salsa band was crushin it while kids moved through the crowd carrying pieces of several worlds at once.

Maybe the old Willmar ain't comin back.

I mean.... I don't particularly want it to.

I want this Willmar to get better. I want it safer. I want us to call bulls**t when it deserves to be called bulls**t and fix what needs fixing. But I don't wanna become so go'damned practiced at finding what's wrong with this place that I can't recognize it when somethin beautiful is happening right in front of me.

We can't love a community from memory.

We HAVE to keep meeting it.

Those sixty flags weren't evidence that a community had disappeared.

They were evidence that it was standin right in front of me.

I just had to leave the house to see it.

OTTER RANCH: LATE NIGHT BREAKFAST MENU
Well, here it is.

This is the opening Late Night Breakfast menu and the menu we'll be submitting to the inspector this week:

*CROQUE MADAME*
Ham · Gruyere · Bechamel · Fried Egg

*SHAKSHUKA*
Tomato · Peppers · Warm Spices · Eggs Poached in the Sauce · Bread

*BODEGA EGG & CHEESE*
Egg ‐ Sausage Patty · American Cheese · Soft Roll

*OTTER RANCH HASH BROWNS*
Crispy Shredded Russets · Bacon · Caramelized Onion · Original Red Tabasco

*STRAWBERRY-GINGER CREPE*
Strawberries · Ginger

*SHIBUYA HONEY TOAST*
Japanese Milk Bread · Butter · Honey · Ice Cream · Pandan-Infused Milk

*SEASONAL FRUIT*

*FRESH-SQUEEZED ORANGE JUICE*

*VIETNAMESE COFFEE*
Strong Coffee · Pandan-Infused Sweetened Milk

Breakfast....At night.

Because, why not?? And its cravable.

THE BOWL
By Wayne Stephen

“Hot soup on a cold day, cold soup on a hot day, and the smell of soup simmering in the kitchen are fundamental… pleasures and solaces.”
— Julia Child & Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II

Soup might be the sexiest go'ddamn thing we cook.

Fire. Water. Salt. Time.

Take the cheapest, humblest s**t in the kitchen—beans, onions, cabbage, potatoes, lentils, yesterday's vegetables—and give it some attention. Roast somethin. Char somethin. Bloom the spices in fat. Build a stock. Throw in some acid at the end. Put somethin cold against somethin hot, somethin crunchy against somethin soft....

Now give somebody a big bowl.

That's dinner, baby.

Soup doesn't need a steak sitting beside it to justify itself. It doesn't need to be the opening act or share billing with half a samich. Done properly, soup has everything a meal needs. It can be rich and bright, creamy and crunchy, loaded with vegetables or beans or meat—or all of the above. It can comfort you and STILL surprise the hell outta you.

And soup is one of the few foods that doesn't have to choose what it wants to be. It can be cheap as f**k or elegant enough for a dinner party. It can be somethin your grandma made from whatever was left in the fridge, or somethin so go'ddamn gorgeous that you hesitate for a second before putting a spoon in it.

Soup can soothe you, revive you, surprise the hell outta you and, when you get right down to it, simply feed you.

Maybe that's 'cause soup begins with one of the oldest ideas in cooking: put good things together and give 'em some f**kin time.

But don't confuse simplicity with boring. That's where we've f**ked soup up. Healthy doesn't mean subtraction. It doesn't mean removing the butter, salt, pleasure and personality until yer left staring into a bowl of beige punishment.

Go the other direction.

Bloom the cumin. Char the poblano. Roast the garlic. Toast the seeds. Tear in the herbs. Hit the broth with lime. Let turmeric stain it gold and chile oil bleed across the surface. Put somethin cool against somethin hot, crunchy against creamy, bitter against sweet.

Make the thing beautiful.

Because a bowl of soup can contain almost everything cooking is supposed to do. It turns scraps into abundance and inexpensive ingredients into luxury. Beans turn creamy. Cabbage gets sweet. Bones and water become something you suddenly want to drink straight outta the pot. Yesterday's vegetables get another life.

And there's my third mother, Julia, again. She once pointed out that even the great sauces and stocks descended from peasant soups. Of course they did. Before all the white tablecloths, brigade cooking systems and fancy French names, somebody had a pot, some water and whatever they could find to put in it. The poor man's necessity eventually became the rich man's cuisine.

Motherfuc....

And soup understands hospitality better than almost anything we cook. You make it before anybody arrives. It waits for you. Usually gets better while it waits. Then somebody walks through the door hungry and all you have to do is put the pot back on the stove.

That's prolly why soup doesn't really recognize borders. Nearly every culture figured out some version of the same magnificent trick: water, fire, ingredients, time.

Pho. Pozole. Gumbo. Dal. Miso. Chowder. Borscht. Harira. Caldo. Tom yum....

Different histories, climates, spices and people arriving at their own answers to the same fundamental question:

How do we turn what we have into enough for everybody?

That's why I don't particularly give a s**t about calling soup healthy food.

It's human food.

There is somethin unusually intimate about handing another person a warm bowl. You can spend three days making some elaborate dinner and knock the hell outta everybody at the table. Fine. I love that s**t, too.

But soup says somethin else.

"Here, eat this. I made enough for you, too."

There may be fancier ways to feed another human being.

I'm not convinced there are many better ones.

LITTLE BROTHER
On Finding My Brother’s Words Again
By Wayne Stephen

Several months ago, my old friend Kelly from Mankato sent me a packet in the mail. Inside was something I hadn't seen in decades: a copy of a collection of poems my brother Jay wrote when he was sixteen years old.

I lost my copy around 30 years ago.

Some of Jay's poems have lingered and drifted in and out of my mind over the years, to be sure. But I forgot most of them. The packet sat around the house for months before I finally mustered up the nerve to open it and actually read what was in it. Not glance through it. Not admire the artifact. Read it.

And this time I was reading sixteen-year-old Jay as 55-year-old Wayne.

I got about halfway through the collection when I saw the title.

LITTLE BROTHER.

My gut took a shot.

Jesus. I knew this one.

It all came rushing back in an instant. Somewhere along the way I'd forgotten that Jay had written a poem specifically to me. Maybe I blocked it out of my mind, or some s**t. Maybe forty years simply buried it underneath everything that came afterward. I dunno.

Breathe, Wayne.

"I'm sorry, little brother, for what I have done."

Then:

"It's my fault you have no feeling."

Then:

"I'm sorry, little brother, for my cruel beating."

F**k.

At fourteen, I didn't know what the hell any of this meant. Jay was just Jay. He was my big brother. He could be cruel to me. He could hurt me. And he loved me ferociously. Somehow all of those things were true at the same time.

But I'm not fourteen anymore.

At 55, I'm looking at the other kid now, too.

Jay.

Damn, Jay, you were sixteen years old.

That's what kept going through my head as I read. Sixteen. And there he is taking responsibility not merely for hurting me, but apparently for what he believed he'd done to me as a person.

"It's my fault you have no feeling."

That's a helluva thing for a sixteen-year-old kid to believe about himself.

And then:

"You know it's about time that I get mine."

That's not just remorse. That's punishment. He's not just saying, I did something wrong. There's something heavier sitting underneath it. Something about deserving whatever might be coming back around.

And I know what happened two years later.

Jay killed himself at eighteen.

So now, at 55, there's no way for me to read "You know it's about time that I get mine" without hearing it differently. But I've gotta be careful here. I don't wanna take a poem written by a sixteen-year-old kid and turn it into some prophecy because I know how the story ends. I don't know what was going on inside Jay's head that day.

I only know what he put on the page.

Then I hit the line that absolutely leveled me:

"I raised you up, which wasn't very fair."

No, dude, it fu***ng wasn't. You were a kid!

And then, almost casually, he explains the whole thing:

"We had no one else, but each other."

Seven words.

Brotherhood. Love. Violence. Loyalty. Anger. Two kids trying to figure s**t out inside circumstances neither one of us had chosen. Jay somehow understood himself as having helped raise his little brother. And even at sixteen, he knew there was somethin wrong with that arrangement.

Then:

"So, little brother, don't be like me."

I had to stare at that sentence.

He didn't write, Don't do what I did.

He wrote, "don't be like me."

Again, I know what happened two years later.

And again, I refuse to pretend that gives me some magical ability to climb inside the head of sixteen-year-old Jay Matthew Roemhildt. It doesn't.

But Christ.

Those words definitely land differently now.

Somehow, through all of this, another realization kept knockin me sideways:

Holy s**t, my brother could write.

Not “pretty good for sixteen.”

The kid could f**kin write.

And that's another thing these pages are giving back to me: the whole Jay.

He had this hardass exterior. Tough. Angry. Sometimes intimidating. And yeah, his anger was real. I know that better than anyone.

But Jesus, was that kid sensitive.

Jay was athletic as hell. He had swagger. But Jay was a lover boy. He was sweet and emotional. He was vulnerable in ways that didn't always make it through that bulls**t exterior. He wrote poetry. He took photographs. He noticed things. He loved people, and apparently needed somewhere to put all that feeling. Sometimes it came through a camera. Sometimes it went onto a page. Sometimes, it revealed itself in a handmade birthday card to our mom.

And the more of these poems I read, the more ridiculous it seems to try to separate those versions of him. The hardass and the poet weren't two different people. The angry kid and the sweet kid weren't two different people. Neither were the brother who hurt me and the brother who sat down afterward and wrote I'm sorry, little brother.

They were Jay.

The collection isn't some long teenage howl of misery, either. There's love all over it. Curiosity. Wonder. Wisdom. And then anger shows up. Sadness. Guilt. Shame. Burdens. Some of it's funny. Some of it's beautiful. Some of it makes me wanna reach through forty-one years of paper and grab that kid by the shoulders.

And the little bastard already knew something I've spent much of my own life tryin to learn as a writer: you don't always need to decorate the sentence.

"I raised you up."

"We had no one else, but each other."

Dude, that's writing.

I guess that's part of what I couldn't understand when I was fourteen. Those contradictions were confusing as hell when I was living inside them. At 55, they don't make Jay easier to explain.

They just make him human.

So I've been sitting here with these old pages trying to understand why reading them now feels so different. And I think maybe it's because there are three people in the room this time.

Jay is sixteen.

Wayne is fourteen.

And this old dude is 55, staring at the two of 'em.

For most of my life, I knew that story from the little brother's side. Of course I did. I was the little brother.

But these pages let me stand somewhere else for a minute.

I can see him.

Not excuse him. Not rewrite what happened. Not turn him into something he wasn't.

Just see him.

A sixteen-year-old kid who hurt his little brother and knew it. Who loved him. Who believed he'd helped raise him. Who understood somehow that none of this had been fair. A lover boy. A photographer. A poet. A hardass. A sweet kid carrying around some pretty fu***ng heavy ideas about himself.

My brother.

And he sat down at a typewriter and tried to tell me.

So maybe there's something I need to tell him back.

Jay, I forgive you.

For the beatings. For hurting me. For all the complicated s**t between two boys who, as you wrote yourself, had no one else but each other.

And I forgive you for leaving.

That one took me a lot longer.

Because underneath everything else was another wound I carried around for years: you took yourself away from me. You were my big brother. You wrote that we had nobody else but each other.

And then you were gone.

Eighteen years old.

I can understand something now that fourteen-year-old Wayne couldn't possibly have understood. Maybe even something 35-year-old Wayne couldn't understand.

You were a kid, too.

A kid trying to raise another kid. A kid capable of hurting somebody he loved and knowing he'd hurt him. A kid carrying things I couldn't see because I was standing two years behind you trying to survive my own s**t. A kid who could look like a hardass to the world and then sit down somewhere alone with a camera or a typewriter and let that enormous soft heart of his come spilling out.

And a ridiculously talented sixteen-year-old writer who somehow managed to put so much of it into eleven lines.

"I'm sorry, little brother."

Forty-one years later, I finally get to answer.

I forgive you, big brother.

I'd forgotten the poem.

Jay hadn't changed a word.

I just needed forty-one years to read it again.

And then I closed the collection.

That was enough Jay for one day.

It took me months to muster up the emotional courage to open that packet and start reading in the first place. I made it halfway through before I found LITTLE BROTHER, and that was it. I couldn't read another poem.

The rest of them are still there.

Wonder how long it'll take me to open it again.