Recivilize or

 Go live in a pigsty, I don't care, our mother pretended she really didn't.  

  One brother packed his room items into the wagon and hauled it all off to the compost pile.  It was the summer of hot dogs.  We had ketchup, mustard, and dirt on our faces pretty much for the forty days of school's out.

  A lot of shocking and apalling had happened in the real world which was hotly debated as being political, or not.

  Mama drove Daddy to the train station as the sun started to make the low tide sand of the Long Island Sound stink worse.  I ran into the Golden Dolphin to get two coffees, milk, no sugar.  That was my errand in exchange for pink, snow covered mountains of rubbery marshmellow covered cupcake with cream filling.  I reasoned out loud, it had to be the sun.  Not yet, my mother didn't growl, but close to it.  She sipped the coffee and put one beautifully cared for hand on Daddy's leg.  It's too early for that, greenhouse gas they are calling it.

  The pollution?  Daddy gulped his whole coffee in four parts.  He hadn't heard any news but gave the baseball scores of the New York teams and the Dodgers.  He had a running list in his head since childhood.

  While our Dad was spending 2-4 hours a day commuting to a 9-5 our mother was making earrings to make enough money to make a vegetable garden and bring us each (six kids + friends) to the thrift shop.

  It was a secret, so I was fuming my mouth shut, hold onto the excitement and drill sargeanting self not to blow it.  Then Daddy counted out train and Post money for his day and gave mama about seven dollars for the plan.

  Wait, what?  YOU SAID it was a secret.

  Your father and I have no secrets from each other.  Dad was staring at the hourly rush build up of people walking into the station.  Mama pinched his knee but not too hard, Right honey?!

  Yes dear.  Dad couldn't break the stare zone.  Mom gave him the rest of her coffee.  This melted his face into smile, then kissing.  She pulled him back as he started to get out with one minute seventeen seconds to go.  More smooching.

  I wrangled myself into the still warm front seat of the station wagon.

  Irate negroes?

  A brother had hung up the phone with two feet of braided coil and summed up why Dad couldn't make it out of the City.

  My mother repeated the question, irate negroes?  Did he actually say that?

  We knew that it meant hotdogs or bologny sandwiches again instead of once a week spaghetti night.

  One tube sock'd foot aimed for the family room but the other slid towards my mother, that brother a stalwart always torn between siblings and parents and sides.  Answer me.  And why is your face a red sweaty mess?

  Lugging all Dad's tools back to the garage.  Not what he said.  I saw on TV.

  And his long legs disappeared him.

  My mother sworded the pen at me, YOU, go in the garage and start a list!

  Of what!??

  Now.

  She grabbed the dishtowel, group hanky a lot of days, and went to see the television.

  I crept towards following her but she swatted me away with the towel.  So I crept towards where she had a poetry-writing desk set up near the phone.  The Thesaurus was open to the A's.  I saw angry.  Then I saw irate.

  In the garage I dug out Dad's transistor radio and dialed through to my news channels.  Are Egyptians negroes?  I wondered.  I'd have to go back inside to look up consulate and diplomatic.

  We'd had half the neighborhood's tools locked up in their garage so people could go to work and take parents and kids to appointments.  The brother that was born a builder had gradually tipped the balance one tool at a time from locked up to compost pile area.  He was making a farm.  He'd replanted all the crabapples the neighbor rolled down the hill from Daddy's wheelbarrow.

  Living so close to NYC meant that thieves could vanpool.  They just stripped blocks of locks off and did all kinds of crimes.  And now this.  They'd gotten purses and luggage with visas.  They'd stolen make up and made themselves tanned and mascara'd their eyelashes.  Even cut up furs and wigs to make moustaches and beards.  It was even more serious than when the neighborhood teenagers did every sin in under twelve hours.

  Whether or not we could or couldn't say brotherhood, it was on a girls not allowed list of words; or had a flagpole or not, or had one without hardware in the morning; or knew some foreign was Greek and some I-talian, we knew American Law was all in a terrible scramble 'bout what was going to help

  Community a Japanese old person told a basement of people at St. Patrick's Christian-style collect money for lasagnas "meeting".  Long ago and on the other side of the world people who lived near each other had community.

  Whether it was a stolen thesis or relayed from school, startup would be nations and all kinds of groups were making manifestos like communist leaders, and all the traveling was letting thieves and hijackers and war criminals and "celebrities" just come and go as they pleased and Americans (sometimes literally) chained up in submission.  The religious turned political and political turned paramilitary led to a host of world event terrorism actions.  Daddy said we had to take it one day at a time, keep it simple, let God do his work, and be nice to each other.  House divided, he'd recall studying the Civil War and tell us something smart Lincoln had said.

  It's why nations do not want to let other courts judge a nation as just any old group.  Why nations can war and various groups cannot.  There's linchpin in this.