Member-only story
Relative Strangers
And how I dreamed of them.
Last night I awoke from a dream — one that I actually remember. I had been talking to my cousin Barry on the phone, trying to understand where his/my family came from.
Why I would be asking such questions of Barry, I don’t know. We worked at the jewelry store his dad owned and that my dad managed for many summers. Barry was in sales, was being groomed to take over the store one day when his dad, Arnold, retired. His two older brothers, Ronnie and Donny, had no interest, had made careers for themselves in far away other cities, Seattle and Houston.
Even if someone had asked me, I would have had no interest in making the store my future, either. I was hired to box up new merchandise, to change price stickers in order to reflect inflation. I wore jeans and t-shirts and worked in a backroom with my favorite FM radio station pumping strange tunes into me, like Manfred Man’s Earth Band’s “Buddha,” or something once known as The Michael Quatro Jam Band.
Barry wore blue oxford button-down shirts, khaki slacks, and a tie every day. His hair was rarely combed, often still wet when he arrived each morning. Sometimes he’d stop by my room as I was attempting to compute the store’s “cost” from the wholesale and retail price guide.