Thomas Edison had a low opinion of Ouija boards. Chris has for some time been in possession of an original Frank's Box built by Frank Sumption, who loved dogs and chasing ghosts, and who himself passed on in 2014. Sumption modeled his boxes after the occult listening machines Thomas Edison built to try to prove the quackery of Ouija enthusiasts. Chris and I spent the past year building various iterations of Shack Hack devices, anticipating your death, but none picked up much otherworldly chatter on the AM dial. In truth, not even the original Frank's Box works. There are online communities devoted to Thomas Edison's views of the occult in the context of a wider spiritualist movement, his desire to scientifically quantify communication with the dead, and most of them would likely agree that the Shack Hacks that me and Chris built were real crappers, despite our collective advanced engineering degrees.

I have long admired Thomas Edison. I wonder what he would think, like I wonder what you think, about the recent societal discussions of neurotypicality across the human spectrum.

I love my aunts like mothers, Mano and Sister Agnes Mary. We are all of us kids a team effort, the product of the collective maternal efforts of you three sisters. But love like a mother is a pale simile for the way I love you, Ruth, my actual mother, for the way my heart went sonorous and resonant when you touched my face, deep music vibrating all through me, like a double bass.

When Chris pitches our hybrid hydraulic braking system to city managers and CEOs, he calibrates his emphasis on potential savings in price versus the potential savings in cost after he reads the room. For him, the faces reflect the degree of volatility in the oil markets, which is based on forecasts of an invisible future supply and demand, the degree of instability in the Middle East, or the possibly unsettling results of a long-shot presidential campaign. Beyond the sociopolitical factors, Chris, like all skilled salesmen, makes spot judgments about values and truth and bait.

It occurs to me that Chris sees me as a pale simile father, despite my lifetime of striving to be the man of the house (house being a metaphor now for family generally, for you and Chris, especially). I am only eight years older than him, after all, but how often did I hear that “man of the house” bit from you, from Mano, from Sister? I wish you'd understood then the way I imagine you do now, Mom, the ways that operated on me. I forgave you all eternally long ago in light of the many other ways you shaped me, but I wonder if this is one of your enduring memories: my little boy heart, earnestly beating, the three of you taking turns stacking responsibilities like lead weights upon it.