24-Nov-63

My brother was born on November 24, 1963. President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on the twenty-second, and my mother cried so hard she went into labor. He was born in the early morning.

I had just turned three a few weeks earlier, but it is my first memory—my mother sobbing uncontrollably, sitting in a wooden chair very near the wooden clock that had come from Switzerland with her when she was only seventeen and arrived in California. That Swiss clock, with the rhythmic ticktock that sounds mournful no matter what—even now, in her living room. I tried to climb into her lap—to comfort her? to calm myself?—but she had no lap, I remember, so I slid off and sat by her feet, near the pine-cone-shaped lead weights that dangled from the rope that kept the clock ticking. My father was gone. He had left us—her pregnant, me refusing to eat our last oatmeal—and now the president was dead.

She left me that night with a neighbor, and went alone to the hospital. During the dark, a fierce Santa Ana windstorm swept down off the foothills the way it always did where we lived, in a tiny rural place of one-bedroom houses and dirt roads in inland Southern California. Somehow the neighbor fed me, fed the cat, but didn’t lock the front door, and the wind blew it open. When my mother arrived home the next day, her house was surrounded by tumbleweeds piled so high they blocked the windows like brown snowdrifts. Inside, the rooms were filled with fine dirt and sand that covered the yellow layette my mother had knitted during her time alone, waiting for my brother to be born. She cried and cried, and he cried, his hands never unfolding from their fists for weeks. She cleaned out the bassinet and laid him there. She taught me the words—layette and bassinet—and because I was her only girl, she taught me to knit as she had learned in Switzerland, hand-rolling the yarn around pieces of shiny hard candy. As I moved the needles to make stitches, the yarn would unwind around the candy, and if it fell out, I could stop and put the piece of peppermint or butterscotch in my mouth.

I have three half-brothers and -sisters from my father and stepfather, four stepbrothers and -sisters from my stepmother, and many foster brothers and sisters who were raised with us for my entire childhood. But my brother Jeff and I shared the exact same blood. We had the same thick blond wavy hair, the same spaced teeth, the same blunt, strong fingers, and eyes the color of year-old...