ROGER FARMINGTON’S SISTER, MEG

“You were supposed to be dead!” The lahar came from Meg’s animated orifice as if a pyroclastic flow from Krakatoa. Her overheated vitriol gassed out like the encore during a Flo and Eddy concert. WTF!

My sister Meg was a different cat. She became emotional over the slightest trope or social issue. She always seemed confused with a myopic impression of what is and what should be. Meg would always ask the question, “Why?” I would fire back with my wisenheimer quip, “What was the question?” Obviously, not to her amusement.  

Meg wasn’t always on the bus to crazy town. My early childhood would see Meg as a warm, caring older sister. She would ensure my breakfast was on the table before I went to school. She ensured I had gloves and a hat on before leaving the house on a snowy Midwestern day. We would watch movies together, engage in “What if” conversations and explore organized religion. She was attractive and popular in school.  

This social construct would continue until my twelfth birthday when Meg went off to college. During her second year at Kent State, her views, family attitudes, and opinions turned toward the left side of the barnyard fence. She started reading books like Abbie Hoffman’s REVOLUTION FOR THE HELL OF IT and FUCK THE SYSTEM. She also carried around the book DO IT by Jerry Rubin, mainly to make Dad mad. She’d leave the book on the living room coffee table with “dog-eared” pages highlighting American Imperialism, Western Colonialism, and the sins of slavery. Dad asks why she was reading that hippie stuff. Meg’s only reply would be a confrontational correction, “Not hippie father, Yippie.” Mom was oblivious to Meg’s pro forma agenda thanks to her daily uptake of “Mother’s little helper” and evening cocktails. 

Meg began to change her appearance to accentuate her newfound political religion, morphing into a tirade of caricatures. She wore ragged jeans and tie-dyed shirts with not-so-subtle proletariat messages. Whenever she would wear her “Save the Whales” or “Ban the Bomb” apparel, I’d put on my t-shirt with a cartoon of an orca being engulfed by a nuclear mushroom cloud and the caption “Nuke the Whales.” Dad appreciated the Animal House satire; Meg called me barbaric. I’d call her a peasant. She’d call me bourgeois. I’d fire back with “You’re a pseudo-intellectual wearing a flowered sundress.”  She’d call me a capitalistic bastard. I’d say you’re a poor broke B… I’d leave it at that. 

She was always barefooted except on what the family called Meg’s dress-up day. She would put on a pair of Birkenstock sandals and a dashiki that she claimed denoted “Power to the People.” Her beautiful auburn hair would go weeks before seeing any hair brush, comb, or shampoo. Her body shape still looked young with the correct contours but showed significant wear and tear from her bohemian lifestyle. Her once flawless complexion was now peppered with red blotches generated by UV rays, bad hygiene, and a crappy diet of sunflower seeds, raw vegetables, and goat’s milk. 

Meg would try and get everyone’s attention with long boring sermons on Cloward-Piven, Norm Chomsky, Malcolm X, and Karl Marx. When she pontificated about the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and the greatness of Lenin, I’d poke the bear and comment, “You know, Meg, Lennon was overrated. McCartney was a better songwriter.”  She took herself too damn seriously and blabbered, “You were supposed to be dead!”

This current episode of Meg’s journey to crazy town started with her rebuke of me and my comments about procreation. I admitted I was a Luddite regarding women giving birth, but I found her argument poorly thought out. She argued that life began as the fetus exited the birth canal. The supreme court determined that life began in the first trimester of a woman’s journey toward motherhood. This philosophical dichotomy would imbue a generation of angry dinner discussions, family breakups, and the enrichment of trial lawyers. My logical thought process took it further and shared my solution to this universal polarity. I told Meg to “Wait till the kid was twelve years old before deciding to keep it. If you don’t like how he turned out, terminate with prejudice the little bastard.” I again poke the bear further by telling Meg, “How could nine men in black robes determine life in the womb based on an amendment that gave citizenship to ex-slaves.” Of course, I didn’t know what I was talking about, but that didn’t stop me from continuing to goad her. 

As I got the better of Meg’s temperament, she threw a glass at me. As the sound of the breakage subsided, she again screamed out the declarative, “You were supposed to be dead!” After this outburst, my curiosity caused me to ask Meg to explain her diatribe.

She went on a convoluted story about Mom and Dad’s early years. She was eight, Hank was four, and I wasn’t even thought of. Dad was in graduate school working on his Ph.D. Mom was teaching grade school. One late hot summer night, the stork came a calling with an OOPS baby. Dad had one semester and a doctoral thesis to complete his work. Mom began experiencing debilitating morning sickness and would not be able to go back to teaching in September. The household budget was experiencing profound incertitude. Roe v Wade hadn’t reached the courts yet; only one option seemed available. My parents would make a life-altering decision to travel across the San Diego/Mexico border to Tijuana and liquidate the problem. 

As Dad drove Mom the forty-five-minute south on highway 5 to TJ, a catharsis filled the passenger side of the late model Dodge Gremlin. Just South of Carlsbad, the car pulled over at a truck stop. An emotional, tear-filled discussion followed. Ten minutes later, Dad gently embraced Mom, wiped her eyes, took her hand, and said, “We’ll be OK.” The car turned around and headed back home. 

Meg’s summation was, “had abortion been legal, Mom would have walked two blocks to the Planned Parenthood clinic and made a different decision. You were supposed to be dead.” Wow, me being dead, not being here, and not spreading joy to the world blew me away. But I now know the meaning of Meg’s outburst. From that moment on, I had a different opinion of Mom. Every day I would thank her for choosing life for me. She didn’t know I knew the story and, at times, looked puzzled at my spontaneous “Thank you, Mom.” I would carry my gratitude and secret to Mother’s grave.   

Meg graduated from Kent State with a degree in sociology, summa cum laude, cum laude, or magna cum laude, one of those Latin phrases used to justify lack of partying. I would struggled to keep up with my high school sophomore classes and pass into the eleventh grade without summer school or repeating geometry. Dad keeps saying I’ll have to attend a junior college or trade school if I don’t focus. Focus on what, Pythagorean, Euclidean theorems, and Geometric group theory? Hell, If I wanted to know the sum of the area of an isosceles triangle, I would ask Patrick; he’s on his way to becoming an engineer.

But Mom was proud when Meg was accepted into Brown University. The Ivy League notch in her mother’s belt was a validation that she was a successful mother. Dad was a little more skeptical about Brown because of the price tag, her Women Studies degree, and the social chaos sweeping the college campuses. He thought it was a vacuous ritual to live vicariously through Meg’s accomplishments. 

Dad’s concerns would come to fruition during a family Thanksgiving event. Meg came home on Turkey day with a hostile attitude. Her usual morose persona was replaced with a choleric temperament. Meg’s change in disposition wasn’t the only surprise entrée. 

She brought home a supper guest and proclaimed him her boyfriend, soulmate, and life partner. His birth name was Samuel Jacobs, but he went by the eponym Toussaint X, an ode to Haiti’s late eighteen-century general and anti-slavery fighter, Toussaint Louverture. Meg claims her guest grew up in poverty living in Detroit’s inner city. She claimed he had ancestry going back to slavery in an antebellum South Carolina plantation. We later would discover her companion was a second-generation African from Nairobi whose father was a Cardiologist and whose mother was a dean of international studies at Vanderbilt University. This would future enhance Dad’s suspicion and dislike of Meg’s suiters. Hank and I just looked at each other and smirked, “Guess who’s coming to dinner,” a reference to Sidney Poitier’s cinema masterpiece.   

Sam, or Toussaint as Meg preferred us to call him, was a tall, handsome sculptured man with skin as black as Coca-Cola. He was in his mid-twenties and a second-year graduate student at Harvard, pursuant of a degree in microbiology. But lately, Toussaint had taken a sabbatical from Cambridge to engage in radicalism.  

Toussaint’s color wasn’t a problem for the family. We were raised believing that skin color was only pigmentation and pigmentation was an immutable trait assigned by God. Besides, it was an open family secret that Mom’s great-grandmother was a mulatto blanco, the offspring of a white mother and a black father. In the eighteenth-century Americas, the mother determined the newborn’s race. Since Granny Elsa’s mother was white and had a light complexion, she was classified as white and lived a life of privilege in Richmond, Virginia. Whenever a cousin was birthed with brown coloration, the extended family would pronounce the lineage as Seminole or Cherokee Indian. But the Farmington’s knew the surreptitious façade. More importantly, we never care.

What did cause angst at our dinner table was the spouting of radical black nationalist and anti-American fulminations coming from Sam. Toussaint kept blathering all over the candied yams about American imperialism, a country founded on slavery and systemic poverty of people of color. Meg would start to pontificate about the plight of the Indians (feathers, not dots) and interrupt her soliloquy with sobs. Dad would roll his eyes; Mom would fain interest, Hank occasionally coughed “Bull Shit” under his breath, and all I could think of was what the fuck was going on. Thanksgiving was a day of peace and togetherness for family, friends, and country. But all Dad would give thanks for was tomorrow, not having to listen to Sam.

Samuel Jacobs Toussaint would later be killed in a shootout with the LA police along with five members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst.  The six dead would include de facto leader Donald Defreeze, nom de guerre Cinque Mtume. Meg would continue her search for the meaning of life, discarding three husbands and two children in her quest for self-actualization.