The Misplaced Person, prologue

Prologue

I was only four when our sister had her first seizure. She was a two year old in the stroller when her head began to jerk, flopping back and forth like there was no longer any bone in her neck. She stopped breathing. Mr. Don took our mother and us to the emergency room at Central Baptist Hospital, and from that day on I used to think of ways to make her all better.

Don McCullough was always an old man. He mowed his small lawn with the first riding mower on the block, then sat on his back steps smoking a Kent until there was nothing left but the Micronite Filter. He pitched the nub into the yard and I would leap up from his side and stub out the smoldering butt. The Micronite Filter, endorsed by doctors, was full of asbestos, and slowly helped tobacco to stub out Mr. Don.

Our father smoked a cigar once in a while in those days, and occasionally lit a briar or meerschaum with the unpracticed hand of one who searches for his persona. Our mother smoked too, but had the presence of mind to use a cigarette holder which contained a disposable DiNicotea filter. I would examine them before their use, fresh from the box, and find them clean and clear. I would also retrieve them from the trash after their purpose had been served, staining my hands with the same yellow and brown hue that comes from the walnuts thrown beneath passing cars by brothers walking home from school.

She still smokes. But the beach of Sullivans Island is thirty five years and eight hundred miles from 114 Johnston Boulevard, Lexington, Kentucky, where our sister suffered her first seizure. We are going to take a legendary family Christmas picture on this beach today, portraying in a dying medium the families that have grown from our first family. It is a reunion in the finest sense of that word, despite the fact that several faces are missing from portraiture. We will not tell of all the missing: of our twin sisters who were both christened Mary moments before their neonatal deaths or of my estranged wife whose mind is tormented so deeply by demons of her past that reality no longer holds sway. Only one person is truly misplaced; missing.

The sun is now poised correctly, fifteen degrees above Fort Moultrie to the West, and the tide ebbs. Our father has erected his tripod on the dune, adjusted the self-timer on a camera which we know contains no film, and we begin the long, slow dance of our family which our children have come to love so well.