Tonight is the start of Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement for religious Jews all over the world. Even though I haven’t been a Hebrew-Israelite for nearly twenty-four years now, I still remember my Yom Kippur days at temple in solemn prayer and the days before in endless fasting (which is a great way to save money on food if you have to stretch every dollar like my mother did, by the way). Shalom to everyone who understands the significance of atoning for their sins and looking for a way to reconcile with Yahweh.

As for me, the beginning of the end of my Hebrew-Israelite days started the day my stepfather attacked my mother (see my blogs from June and July 2007 for more details), Memorial Day ’82. But it wasn’t until Yom Kipper in September ’83 that my search for my own higher power began in earnest. I missed a day of school to go to temple with a bunch of hard-looking, salt-and-pepper bearded men for several hours of kneeling and praying in Hebrew, a language that I didn’t know more than ten or fifteen words in. All of the men were dressed in their Afrocentric garb and wearing yarmulkes, having fasted for three days before making the journey to temple to atone for a year’s worth of sins. All that was missing was the sacrificing of an unblemished lamb, the ritual rendering of its body and its burning as an offering to the Lord of Hosts.

Then it hit me. What in the world have I done in the past year that I needed to atone for? Masturbation? Fighting a guerilla war with my stepfather over my right to see myself as someone he couldn’t control? Telling my mother that she should’ve had an abortion three months before the birth of my only sister? I uttered the words I needed to for atonement for these sins, but I realized that I didn’t care and surely didn’t believe in what I was saying. I felt that I had every right to fight to live my life, to survive my situation as best as I could, since Jehovah had abandoned us and saddled us with this asshole as a pretender, a charlatan of a man with no moral center.

And where were the women, the folks who cooked and cleaned and worked so that these men of Yahweh could gather in the One’s house and be cleansed temporarily of their transgressions? Worshipping in a separate room or at home, I guessed. My recent experience with abuse and my knowledge of my stepfather as a abusive adulterous liar and general SOB left me questioning the whole Hebrew-Israelite. By the time we left temple, I realized that I didn’t believe anymore. The whole Lost Tribes of Israel thing wasn’t exactly bullshit. It just stank of rotting intestinal flesh to me.

It took months of personal study time and my ninth grade Afro-Asian History class to keep me from becoming an atheist. Learning about Eastern religions and being able to see the big three belief systems of the West (Judiaca, Christianity and Islam) through a fresh set of eyes soon led me back to God. I realized that what I’d been looking for since my stepfather had come back into my life in ’81 was for someone or something to save me. I was seeking redemption, someone or something to tell me that I was worth something and that my life meant something of value to others, to this world or the next. It took seven months, but I became a Christian out of the simple need to have someone to look to as a shining example of personal and spiritual redemption.

That’s not to say that Yom Kippur is useless or is a crock. Yet for me, carrying around the weight of my sins and the sins of my parents and guardians proved to be too much. I needed (and still need) to have a higher power, God, the One in my life where I could take my sense of hopelessness, my feelings of disillusionment, my wounds of betrayal and give them up for hope, for peace, for love and faith, for the strength to carry on. One day a year for atonement, at least for me, is not enough. Not if redemption can only be granted once a year.

I’ve made it a rule as part of my weekly blog about Boy At The Window to not mention the names of folk who serve as character in my manuscript (family and the deceased are generally the exceptions that I’ve made). Today I’m breaking this rule, for no other reason than the fact that the person in question may in fact already be dead. I don’t do this without some internal conflict — I would prefer for my characters to remain anonymous. But one way or another, I need some answers around this missing person.

Her name is Brandie Barrie Weston. She would be thirty-eight years old, an African American woman about five-seven and overweight. She would also be severely mentally ill, homeless, and missing for the better part of the last five or six years. During the course of Boy At The Window I attempted to locate Brandie for an interview. Only to discover most of the facts listed above. I spoke with her mother about two years ago, who told me that she was either homeless in New York City, had gone south to Atlanta, or was wandering somewhere out west.

About a year and a half ago, another interviewee and former classmate had informed me of a couple of Brandie sightings by him and a couple of other folks in New York in 2003 or 2004. I interviewed one other classmate, this one in March of this year, who said that he’d found classified ads that Brandie had placed in an indy rag in Los Angeles, ads that rambled on about “the oppressor” and how she was a “foster child” (not true) and a multiple degree graduate of the “University of Homeless Services.” I stopped my search after that interview, realizing that even if I found her, the illness (likely schizophrenia or bipolar disorder) would likely make it impossible for me to interview her or even hold a coherent conversation.

Three weeks ago, another former classmate called to tell me that Brandie was dead. She’d received this information via email as part of an email chain that went through three or four other people. There wasn’t any real evidence in these emails, not a newspaper obituary or death notice, not an article from the police blotter of a body found or anything to confirm the rumor. I said that I would check into it.

Since then, I contacted another classmate, one that at one point in life was Brandie’s best friend, who then went through the email chain himself and declared her dead. I also contacted the L.A. County Morgue, an emergency homeless shelter for the mentally ill in Santa Monica, traced Brandie’s travels to L.A. and Berkeley/Santa Cruz, and discovered that she was in a band as a backup vocalist prior to and at the beginning stages of her homeless wanderings. Yet none of it gave me any evidence that she was alive or dead. I’d contact her mother, but I knew from my phone conversation with her two years ago that she’d know less about Brandie’s current existence (one way or the other) than I do.

It’s truly sad in so many ways. I first met Brandie a bit more than twenty-seven years ago, before we became classmates in our gifted-track program at A.B. Davis Middle School in Mount Vernon. Our’s wasn’t anything close to a friendship. We met because Brandie’s mother and my father Jimme were drinking buddies. On the day we met, me, Jimme and my older brother were at Brandie’s place with her mother. As Brandie walked into her bright and yellow apartment, idiotic me said, “Wow, she’s fat!” Not exactly the best first thing to say to a girl in the beginning stages of puberty. She was beyond pissed off with me for years after that. It wasn’t until high school that we even became weak acquaintances. This despite having bumped into and conversed with Brandie’s mother and Brandie’s older sister on multiple occasions throughout those years.

There are a lot of things I remember about Brandie. Her infectious laugh and smile. Her off-center creativity. Her love for music — which I assumed she picked up from her mother, a great singer in her own right — along with the arts in general. Her contrarian attitude toward Mount Vernon High School and its hundreds of cliques. Most of all, I remember her saying to me, “You’re such a pessimist, Donald! You need to be more optimistic about life.” Brandie said this to me all of the time in our last three years of high school. It suggested that I needed to be more like her, that I needed to take the things that happened to me less seriously than I actually did at the time.

The last time I saw Brandie was in August of ’93, yelling out of the back of someone’s beat-up Chevy something or other near Gramatan Avenue and Hartley Park in Mount Vernon. She seemed happier than she was at the end of high school. I was in the middle of a family visit and getting geared up for my third year of graduate school, this one being my first at Carnegie Mellon. I waved at her, realizing that she hadn’t changed much since the first time we had met.

I wonder whether anything I ever said to her, including the “Wow, she’s fat!” ever affected her outlook on life. Or was it years of insults about her weight, her face, the constant comparisons with her sister, her mother’s slights and anger, her college life or the everyday unfairness of this world that triggered her downward spiral? All I know is that somewhere between ’87 and ’07 Brandie traded in her optimism for depression, that she preferred the life of a mentally ill wandered minus meds to the lifelessness that comes with anti-psychotic medication. Or maybe she didn’t trade in her optimism after all. She left for L.A. in the hopes of making it, despite the awesome odds against her. Either way, I hope to find her soon.

in 2001, the not-so-famous day before you-know-what, I was a tired and disgruntled assistant director of a social justice nonprofit project en route to Atlanta for a 2 pm meeting with some hotel folks at the Emory University Conference Center. I was doing a short one-day trip to run reconnaissance in planning a winter retreat for the folks that we funded. For the trip I only packed one-pair of everything casual and wore a suit on the flight in, went from the airport to MARTA rail to a cab to the meeting and then to my hotel in Buckhead.

I was in the middle of five weeks of insomnia caused by my neurotic worker-bee self, my idiotic and paranoid boss at the time, and by my family in Mount Vernon. I had learned about a month before that my seventeen-year-old and youngest brother Eri had knocked up his girlfriend back in April or May. She was due to make my high-school-dropout-of-a-sibling a father — and my mother a grandmother for the first time  — in January. My mother was going nuts over this reality, and wasn’t exactly pleased with me for having turned off the money faucet for her and my siblings at 616. My then boss had run me into the ground with travel and projects all during the spring and summer months, with my only real break my honeymoon with my wife in Seattle in May.

The honeymoon might as well have been five years ago on September 10th. I was mentally preparing myself for my next move. I wanted to quit my job. But I also knew I needed to get my family off my back. So I also decided to do a family intervention, to confront my mother and siblings about all that was wrong with our lives and with our family. I wasn’t sure about doing this, about possibly and permanently damaging my recently strained mother-son relationship.

Yet I was tired, T-I-R-E-D of the demoralizing weekly telephone calls where my mother would say “Tired” with a sigh that seemed to have come from a dying zebra whenever I asked her how she was. I was tired of pouring money into a bottomless pit of laziness, not on my mother’s part. Of my younger siblings, one was a college dropout after graduating with honors from Mount Vernon High School — this after having been labeled mentally retarded in kindergarten. Two — including my youngest brother — were high school dropouts. Eri had spent two and a half years in ninth grade. And my only sister Sarai was an eighteen-year-old little girl, having been completely infantilized by my mother. My older brother Darren still wallowed in his miseries, the result of a kid being placed in a school for the mentally retarded for fourteen years after teaching himself how to read at the age of three.

Then I woke up the next morning around 8 am, went downstairs to the hotel restaurant, came up to my room just before 9 am and turned on the Today Show. I saw the one tower on fire, heard the cries and assumptions about terrorists and thought it typical media hype. Then I saw the second building get hit. I was in so much shock that while watching I continued to pack my bag — not that I had much to pack — as if my noon-time flight was actually going anywhere. After catching the MARTA train downtown and hearing that all flights had been grounded — except for the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family (okay, I didn’t find that one out for a few days) — it finally hit me that my nation, my world was under attack. As soon as I got back to my hotel in Buckhead and re-checked into my room, I called my wife and my older brother Darren. My wife had just gotten home from her job, four blocks from the U.S. Capitol. She also had an adventure getting back from her office that morning. Darren was a mail courier who delivered almost every day to the World Trade Center and the Twin Towers. I didn’t hear from him for four days because the telephone lines were so jammed.

I was stuck in Atlanta for three days. I couldn’t so much as rent a car or take an Amtrak because of the attack and the immediate impact of grounding the airplanes. I ended up getting back to the DC area by Greyhound, a most unpleasant sixteen-hour experience. I was on a bus with White guys who wanted to beat up a South Asian man because he “attacked our country.” There was this constant sense of senseless coming out of the mouths of the passengers all trip long about “kicking some ass” and “nuking them.” And then I woke up in time to see the damage done to the Pentagon by the third airplane attack as we crossed the Potomac into Washington. I was mad, but not just at the terrorists. I was pissed because I knew that our acquiescence to our government’s ridiculously one-sided foreign policies with regard to the Middle East had contributed to this ridiculously vicious response.

As an obvious consequence for me, I didn’t do my family intervention for several months. My insomnia continued for another six months, complicated with images of my first home, the New York City area, seared in my mind’s eye. But when I did do the intervention, I’d had nearly half a year to think about what to say, time to allow my anger and rage to be channeled into suggestions for my younger siblings to live. My relationship with my mother hasn’t been the same. It was really nonexistent for a couple of years, but it has gotten better. Eri’s since finished his GED, learned how to drive. Unfortunately, he also joined up with Uncle Sam as a Army reservist and is serving in Iraq. My other brother Maurice is almost finished with his associate’s degree, and my sister moved to Alabama with friends in order to live her life.

These events influenced my decision to write Boy At The Window sooner instead of later. I realized that later may in fact be too late, that if I waited too long I would be cheating myself of the opportunity to help others, to influence the hearts and minds of those who’d been abused by life or family or friends in some way or another. These events also helped me to understand that victory and defeat in our lives aren’t absolute. They can’t be. For if each of us are true to ourselves and to the lives we choose to live as fully as we can, we have to be prepared for success and for challenges, and ready to accept that those closest to us may or may not be ready to turn their own lives around, even with your help.

In the spirit of Labor Day, I want to take on one of those subjects that our society glorifies and idealizes every day. It’s this idea of a so-called self-made man. We idolize everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Sam Walton (founder of WalMart) for being penultimate success stories who started from humble beginnings. Our media’s most savvy commentators trip all over each other when they find the time to discuss America’s favorite stories of success. Rarely do they forget to remind us of the importance of hard work, that without it we are all to blame for our individual failures and our lots in life.

Except that the idea of the self-made man isn’t true at all. Everyone who “makes it” has had some help along the way. Benjamin Franklin’s family might not have owned slaves or a plantation. But between his colonial family members in Philly and Boston (not to mention hard work), Franklin became a colonial American success. Sam Walton, like so many of today’s self-made men, did have some help from the Federal government, otherwise known as America’s corporate welfare system.

I don’t discount the reality that people like Franklin and Walton worked hard, and in Walton’s case, literally to death to get where they ended up. Their hard work, though, was smart work, strategic work, calculated work meant to involve others as role players in their larger vision. It wasn’t sheer hard work. If that was the case, millions more of us could say that we’ve “made it” based on working two or more jobs or working in mines or factories or working for evil bosses.

Plus, the self-made man myth is sexist and devalues the work of so-called ordinary Americans. Plenty of women have achieved greatness without even half the help that men like Franklin and Walton ended up getting in their march to success. For most of us male and female whose backgrounds are considerably more humble than those that our society typically puts on a pedestal, even we recognize that without someone in our corner at one time or another, we wouldn’t be who were are today. My life is as close to “doing it on my own” as anyone’s. Yet to say that I’m a self-made man would be a boldfaced lie. The dozen or so teachers, friends, mentors and the occasional kind stranger are the difference between me working on publishing Boy At The Window and being an embittered thirty-seven-year-old or not being here at all.

Success isn’t as easy to define as our press and media make it. It’s about much more than making enough money to buy an island or charming the pants off of heads of state or the press. It’s about achieving dreams, having friends, family, and lovers worth loving and living life with. It’s about knowing when and where hard work is required and when to just chill and relax. It’s about living the life that’s meant for you. While many may be beloved and remembered by media types because they’ve dedicated their lives to building an empire of success, laboring to emulate that kind of success can make our lives so much poorer than they otherwise should be.

As per my weekly Boy At The Window blog, I often update all of you on some obscure anniversary from some point in my life’s timeline for the manuscript in which I seek publication. This weekend and week coming up is no different, except for the fact that most of the anniversary dates are more positive and their effects just as lasting as some of the more depressing ones.

But I should start with August 25 of ’85. It was a Sunday that year, the last one in August before the start of eleventh grade. My stepfather got into it again with me that afternoon, over the usual. He wanted me to “some him some respect” by calling him “Dad.” “You’re not my father, and you’re never gonna be my father!,” I yelled in response. He tried to wrap his fat left arm around my head in our narrow hallway while trying to punch me in the head at the same time. I was fifteen and realized that he was attempting to do too much at one time. I twisted out of his hold and inadvertently elbowed him in the side–where his blubber apparently was less thick–in the process. I ran as far as I could for the front door twenty-five feet away. When I turned to see where he was, I saw the big guy on the floor holding the side of his stomach. I left, beginning a twenty-one hour odyssey through the streets of Mount Vernon and in Mount Vernon High School.

I walked for almost two and a half hours, looking for my father Jimme–who was in the middle of one of his summertime drinking binges–and generally pissed off about our impoverished fate while looking at the homes that I knew some of my classmates lived in. The contrast was so striking that I couldn’t help but feel that though I saw myself as a child of God, that somehow God’s blessings had completely skipped us all. I ended up spending the night inside my high school, in the offices of the gifted track coordinator for our program. After spending more time walking around the school and looking at its Wall of Fame (including Dick Clark and other Mount Vernon natives), walking around Mount Vernon and spending three hours at a Catholic Church praying and listening to Latin liturgies, I went home and awaited my fate. Ironically, nothing happen. I went to sleep, dreaming again of the life I wanted to have, with my young siblings voices dancing in and out of my head.

Two years later, August 26 of ’87, twenty years ago on today’s date, I left Mount Vernon for Pittsburgh and my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s literally the dividing line between my childhood, my five years of familial and K-12 torture, and the beginning of living my life for me (as opposed to for my mother, my siblings, dreams of my first or second crush, etc.). The details of waking up at 4:30 am–I barely slept really–to take a 7:50 am Amtrak out of Penn Station in NYC to travel nine hours to Pittsburgh aren’t all that important. The reality was that in some sense, I’d won but didn’t realize that I had for another two years. I was leaving 616, my world of uncomfortable comfort-ness and no longer in Mount Vernon’s public schools, which had become a world of strife, confusion and loneliness by the time we threw our caps in the air two months before. My summer of obsession over my second crush was over, or at least, so I thought at the time. Regardless, I had much more to look forward to than what I was leaving behind. But at the moment I got into a Reliable Taxi to catch the 2 Subway at East 241 in The Bronx, I mostly felt sorry for my mother.

Other dates are almost as important. I started graduate school on August 28 of ’91, sixteen years ago this week. I moved into my first “by myself” apartment on Friday, August 31 of ’90, seventeen years ago. And my wife, my son and I are on the biggest roadtrip and vacation we’ve ever been on this week, having left suburban Maryland to visit my father in Florida–whose been a recovering alcoholic for nine years now. We stopped overnight along the way, with my wife meeting my first crush along the way. Now that we’re here, we’ll spend time at Sea World, find a bowling alley for my son to jump up and down about, and maybe even find a miniature golf course for my son to putt to his heart content while I’ll find a driving range and learn how to hit driver for the first time. But none of these dates wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t done what I did on August 26th, 1987.

In the past year or so, I’ve become a fan of the Disney preteen cartoon Kim Possible. For anyone with kids between seven and fourteen, I hope you understand. Of course, my son Noah’s only four, but he’ll watch “KP” anyway. Anyway, the cartoon’s about a cheerleader who’s also an up-and-coming superhero who handles the typical pressures of teens and tweens — popularity, friends, the pressures of grades, boys, work and fighting super-villians. Kim’s somewhat geeky and nerdy sidekick is Ron Stoppable (for those of you unfamiliar, I apologize), who’s been her best friend since kindergarten. The storyline of the series is that they gradually become boyfriend and girlfriend. It’s an interesting take on two characters who — under normal cartoon standards — would be about as compatible together as a Yugo would be to a BMW.

What attracts me to the show besides my son making me watch it with him is that despite the hair, clothes, popularity and other stereotypical variables of the cheerleader construct as developed by Hollywood, the main character really cares about her ridiculously un-cool sidekick and friend. Kim Possible shows a level of complexity rarely seen on any cartoon in terms of sensitivity to others, knowledge of one’s self and our impact on the world around us (okay, I’ve probably taken this reasoning a bit too far). I’ve said to my wife multiple times in the past year, if Kim Possible had been at my high school, she probably would’ve been my first girlfriend.

Unfortunately, no one I knew during those wonderful days of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (with Full Force) and Tears for Fears even approached a level of maturity or sensitivity of this character, male or female. Even the so-called outcasts at Mount Vernon High School were as clique-ish as a bunch of Houston high school cheerleaders on ESPN. And our teachers — at least the ones we had in the high-achievement track — were about as concerned for our general well-being as a lion concerns herself with the feelings of her prey as she chomps and gulps down another mouthful of flesh. I think that there should be a rule in which there’s at least one Kim Possible in every Class of Whatever in every school district in the US.

On a more serious note, I did have one teacher whose concern for his students and his penchant for asking me “Is everything at home all right?” was such that he was able to reach me, as a student and as a human being. He didn’t let me go with my grunting, “I’m fine” responses. He became the only person who knew about my family’s financial straits, had a sense of the domestic violence, and understood my standoff-ish stance toward almost all of my classmates and other teachers. If it weren’t for him, my level of trust in others would be about as high as a dead Mafioso type down at the bottom of the East River in Manhattan, weighed down by cement shoes.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have him as my teacher until my junior year at Mount Vernon High School, way too late to begin forming meaningful friendships with more than a handful of classmates, too late to do more than to begin to imagine relationships with a few girls in my class. Even more unfortunate, though, was my teacher’s untimely death at age sixty-six. He took early retirement on his 57th birthday because the powers-that-were didn’t like his style or tactics in dealing with students. They had tried for nearly twenty years to remove him from Mount Vernon High School, to take away his favorite classes, to discredit him as a teacher. It’s a sad story, and too much to go into here.

But it’s also an uplifting story. Learning how to trust others after your trust has been shattered, burned, and scattered is somewhere between more difficult than the quantum physics of a black hole and as impossible as hooking up an electrical appliance directly on the sun’s surface. I’ll miss my teacher and all of his sing-song, meandering stories, his homilies about history and human nature, about love and trust. Just like there need to be more Kim Possible’s in this world, there need to be more teachers like my eleventh-grade AP American History teacher.