Exercise everyday, eat well, die anyway

‘Exercise everyday, eat well, die anyway’.

These are the words on a chipped coffee mug that my brother left on the kitchen bench a decade ago. The words are white on black and in a playful font.

He is careless like that. It was an impromptu visit by him. When he stepped from his white Iveco van, he was already talking. He had something to tell me, he said. He also had a steaming mug of instant coffee clasped firmly in his hairy right fist.

Over the hour which followed he talked, as he was wont to do.

I sipped a freshly made cup of green tea in the first part of that hour. I listened to him some of the time and occasionally tried to have input. When I breached his monotone, he would inevitably branch off on yet another tangent. There was a genuine risk that he might never get back to the original story that he wanted to share with me.

I enjoyed the conversation at first. But I interjected less as time passed, hoping that it would at some point reach a natural conclusion.

Eventually he finished the dregs in his mug and thumped it down on my kitchen bench.

It was only soon afterwards, in the deafening silence which followed his departure, that I realized that I still had no idea of the purpose of his visit.

I also noticed that he had forgotten to take his mug with him.

In the days which followed I initially felt that I should get it back to him. I’m like that. If I borrow something, I don’t feel right until I return it.

But the weeks, then years, passed. The presence of the mug in my house normalized. I washed it one day in hot soapy water, rinsed it and stored it with my other coffee mugs. It looked right there.

He never mentioned it. I felt no obligation to return it.

Ever.

My brother, of the coffee mug, is the second eldest of the 5 males in my family. He was always a natural leader. He took up the reins at a young age, harnessed us in, and took us on his journeys. He looked out for his siblings whilst using us as chess pieces to suit his end goals. He had his ideas of what was best for us, then created narratives so that we were all, in his mind at least, in a win-win situation.

Irritatingly, he was often correct.

He was also sometimes horribly wrong. When this happened, my brother created a mythology where he had miraculously become the wronged party. He quickly came to believe his own spin and was usually indignant of alternative narratives.

I have less to do with him these days, but I believe that he remains to this day a clever, deeply flawed mess of contradictions, a solid hairy man who believes that he eats well and exercises everyday despite evidence to the contrary.

My brother (of the mug) was usually there when I needed him.

I started working for him about 14 years ago by accident.

I’d taken time away from my usual teaching job for one year to get some perspective.

Enter my brother, stage left.

He offered me work in his Farmers Market business for 6 months on a casual, unofficial basis.

The offer was attractive. He would be going to Thailand in the near future with his wife to live for three months. She came from a village in Thailand, and he loved it there. I would run the business in his absence because I would be sufficiently trained and capable by the time of his departure. He would profit share with me while he was away, and his projections were surprisingly lucrative.

I tentatively accepted. It was something to do, I might make excellent money and I’d be done by mid-year regardless. There was nothing to lose because, at the very least, I would experience a lifestyle hitherto unknown to me.

Years later I understood that he had probably anticipated me continuing past those few months. The work would initially intrigue me, and the money was too good to walk away from. The situation allowed him to have free time and to travel, while cash continued to roll in.

I was a puppet, a chess piece, but I was also an adult and a willing participant. The situation was a win-win in many ways for at least several years. The business exceeded his projections - it was crazy, really - and everybody seemed happy.

Three months turned into six and a half years, but a crisis in my personal life caught me off guard about halfway through that period.

My first wife told me one afternoon that our 25-year marriage was over and left the same day with our children. I had not picked up on the warning signs at all and felt devastated. Apart from the expected shock, I felt immense guilt for my children and missed their full-time presence. There was also the reality that how I had perceived my/our life was not how it was. I’d got ahead of myself. I was not ready for this.

To his credit, my brother was often there for me.

He gave cheerful, ruthless advice. He drew on his own marriage break-up decades before, how he had suffered and what he had learned from it going forward.

‘We’re all surprised you lasted that long’, he said happily.

Yeah, thanks for that.

‘Stop trying to get her back. What are you going to do if she says yes? Is that what you want?’

No, I realized with surprise, it wasn’t.

‘The only reason she is important to you is because you were together for 25 years’.

Well, obviously.

‘You have to understand, Michael. You’re free now’.

Free for what, though? Being middle-aged and single?

Or when she lost a lot of weight:

‘It doesn’t matter how much weight she loses. She will still be short with a square head’.

Unfair (and possibly misogynistic) coming from a short man with a chunky head, but it made me reluctantly smile regardless.

This – and time – gradually allowed me to notice the sunlight again.

He inadvertently left the coffee mug on my counter during this period.

It is said that as one door shuts, another door opens.

After a few years of trying to open a shut door, I realized that I no longer wanted to. I started a relationship with my current partner. Ten years on, I’m married once more and feeling great about life.

As I ‘rode the crest of the wave’ (my brother’s expression) about eight years ago, my current partner and I took a 4-week holiday to Italy. We left determined to ‘be in the moment’ (another of his expressions) as much as possible, so did not check phone messages or emails in that time.

The first night back in Australia, I checked my emails. I eventually found one that my big brother sent 4 weeks previously, while we were still winging it to Italy. It was lengthy and verbose, so convoluted that I had to enlist the help of a younger brother to decipher it.

We decided that I was dismissed from my job working for my brother, effective the day we flew to Italy.

The gist of it was:

He didn’t want to profit share with me. It wasn’t necessarily that I’d done anything wrong, but more that, as boss, he wanted 100% of the profit. He knew I’d be furious with him, so, to avoid conflict, he’d waited until I was on a plane leaving the country to inform me by email that I would have no job on my return.

As owner of a business, he had every right to make decisions which would return more profit to him. But I also understood that making me instantly unemployed after 6 and a half years of dutiful service, and doing it by email, was wrong and a cowardly way to handle things.

But time heals.

As one door shuts, another door opens.

It was time for change again anyway. I was tired of all the long-distance driving in his white Iveco van and sick of working weekends with 3.30 a.m. starting times. I was over selling apples, pears, and stone fruit, even though they were usually excellent quality. I also felt dreadful missing my teenage children’s soccer matches on Saturday afternoons because I was a 3-hour drive away when they played.

Just as my marriage breakup hurt like hell but opened up other opportunities, so did ceasing to work for my brother.

He may have believed that the apron strings needed to be finally cut (I say ‘may’ because we still have never been able to discuss it). Or he may have convinced himself of all this, to justify the underhand way he removed me from the payroll.

In short, he may have thought I’d be okay and therefore he was completely justified in being a bastard.

Years have passed. A younger brother has prematurely passed away in that time and my mother recently succumbed to cancer one day short of her 90th birthday.

I live in a large city now, teaching as much as I feel necessary at an excellent secondary school. My partner and I have been together for ten years this week. We bought a house near a forest about 4 years ago and married. I exercise in the forest. I write part -time, something I’d wanted to try for a long time but found reasons to put off.

It feels right.

I eventually shelved my anger at my brother and rehabilitated him by inviting him to my second wedding. He accepted with obvious delight and the long road back to normalizing our relationship began.

I spoke to him last week by video call for about an hour. He rang me from his COVID19 hotspot in Thailand soon after I sent a two-word message: ‘Still alive?’

I knew that he had not been vaccinated yet.

It was nice to see him at first. His whole head filled the screen of my phone for much of the conversation, except for the horror of when he walked around, and I could see most of his near naked body. He looked older and more overweight than I recalled, despite him telling me how he exercised every day and how healthily he was eating.

‘I just can’t seem to lose any weight, though’, he said, as he chewed on a leg of fried chicken.

He was also holding a white coffee mug in his hairy right fist. It was plain, no visible words of wisdom.

His monotone soon lulled me into an almost comatose state.

I listened to him, occasionally interjecting. He branched off on tangents. I interjected less but he continued onwards.

Relentlessly.

Eventually, after saying goodbye several times, I cheerfully ended the call.

I think he was saying something like ‘But just one more thing …’ as I pressed the red button to terminate our conversation.

I then boiled the kettle and thought about our relationship.

Despite my annoyance with him, I’d reaped more than I’d sowed in our relationship. I knew that.

I located his sterilized coffee mug, made an instant coffee, and wondered again about the message on the mug.

Was the mug that he’d left with me flaunting his philosophy that healthy eating and exercise would not stop us dying prematurely?

Or did he simply find the message amusing?

Or was I overthinking the whole thing? It was possible, after all, that he had ‘taken’ the mug from somebody else’s kitchen bench (without their permission), because he did that too sometimes - and rationalized it.

Regardless, he didn’t exercise every day and eat well, so hopefully the ‘die anyway’ part of the message was also nonsense.