Jay Wrote

 Family and Inheritance:  The Wilkinson Case My paternal grandfather and name-sake,  J. Edgar Wilkinson, who died soon after I was born, was a private firm lawyer practicing in Philadelphia’s Orphans’ Court.  We call that probate court in Minnesota and it addresses disputes over the deads’ estates and wills and oversees trusts and guardianships.  I was told he spent a lot of time seeing to it that the needs of widows and orphans were attended to.  But I know nothing about his practice save the following story I have pieced together. In a case where he was appointed guardian of an older man, Brooks, there was much at stake.  It was alleged in the Philadelphia court filing that led to J. Edgar Wilkinson’s appointment, that Brooks was "feeble minded and unable to properly care for his property; that he was the victim of designing persons; that large sums of money had been secured and extorted from him …”  The guardianship, with its first stop in Phil...

   December 2023 I write to you from Aotearoa/New Zealand as Karen and I are summering here just before the “winter” holidays. It's an upside down world! I know that Minnesota is going to have a brown Christmas but this is something different - the semi-tropics with Sara, Don, Lily, Lachlann and many Harris relations.  We’ve been in Auckland for a week and today, the 23rd, we drove to Hawke Bay, a vacation spot.  Next week we go on to another place for more R&R. Early in January we’ll attend the interment of the kids’ Kiwi great-grandparents' ashes before returning to the metropolis.   Karen and I visited here 4 years ago, Sara and crew moved here 20 or so months ago.  Lily likely remembers visiting her great-grandmother during our 2019 visit and we’ve learned some interesting family history from Don’s aunt, Sandy.  Murder most foul!  Among other things.   It was a full day, door-to-door, to get here. 17 hours + in two flights w...

I looked at his painting and snickered.  His women looked like sullen wax candles melted weeks ago because they stood too close to the hearth.  He could not afford the slow constant heat of good coal, even though we were in the coal fields where Zola had researched Germinal .  Every night as the sun disappeared I scavenged behind the coal wagons that hauled the miners’ piles to the rail spur.  But last night, a pair of armed constables chased me off, one hollering “Van Gogh, if I catch you, you’ll wish you’d never come to visit your failed-preacher brother.”   The coal hopper was empty as we finished the bread and wormy apples that was our dinner.  He went to the vestry and gathered a pile of dusty hymnals and discarded bibles in his arms and returned to the cottage.  Once Genesis and Exodus were sacrificed, Vincent threw whole volumes onto the grate.  The flames leapt high, pages like orange-rimmed black leaves scattered onto the scarred woo...

  Clouds Followed His Every Move       All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions.     Nabokov, Symbols and Signs In 1980 my brother moved from Vermont to live with us in St. Paul after a falling out with co-workers. David believed they were drug dealers and plotting to harm him. Six weeks later he was on the street under hot summer skies. I put him there. He was twenty four years old. He could have become one of the lost chronic homeless, like Sam, my friend's brother, who sank into the muck of life on the street and disappeared.  David’s childhood was hard. He was born with developmental troubles. He may have been hit by a flu virus during gestation. No...