Revised 1200 memoir

Our family is what my father would like to say as "broken." Each one of us is different in our own ways. We're not broken in a way that a family can be; my parents are still married and all of my brothers and I are pretty healthy. I know we are somewhat the different, but why are we "broken?"

My parents were a cute kind of couple; they met at Travis Air Force Base as they were on the same intramural softball team on base. After a few months of dating, they decided to elope because it was much easier than trying to bring my mother's family from Spokane, Washington and my dad's family from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, together.

They then had three sons, P.J., Matt, Danny (in order from oldest to youngest) and one daughter, me. People say we are a rich family because we live in beautiful brown house, right next to an alfalfa field with an acre of space surrounding it. Living near cornfields and a few other houses in the town of Greene, where they only have a volunteer fire department, town hall, and a church. The "Big Brown House" that is named as our own, has a dark brown coat on the vinyl siding with beautiful trees that my father put in himself, now very tall maple trees that litter the front yard surrounded by marigolds of oranges, yellows, reds, along with other colorful flowers.

The inside is filled with beautiful coffee colored walls and the wooden banister leading up the stairs to an open kitchen and living room to the left of the stairs. The yellow colored kitchen and dining room area livens up the house, but seems almost ridiculous now to see. The house throughout the years has been fixed up with different colors, every room, except for my own that still has the light pink wallpaper with a cute little border of light blue houses repetitively along the walls. But with the added touches of several collages of pictures over the years of friends and trips along with several posters of guitar chords, art I made for classes, and a big kitty poster, it adds a nice touch--at least I think so. My father tried taking down the wallpaper border, but gave up because he knew it would be too much trouble for me to go take it all down off the walls. So my room is the only one with its wallpaper still intact.

Everything seemed alright; our family was never really rich, but we never had too many financial problems or anything. Except this one time when I was about eleven, my mother had to take a trip to Puerto Rico to fix a plane over there (she is an electrician for cargo planes like C-70s) and they get some free time. Well, she decided to go to a casino with other co-workers and I remember it was a hot summer afternoon, and my father was on the phone with my mom. He started to get this angry tone that he gets and face got very tense as his brown eyes grow darker with sweat shining his forehead and balding head, he starts yelling and goes to his room down the hall and slams the door. You could hear his voice and he comes back out with our jar of coins and had us starting to roll the coins and kept ranting about how my mother has made us go bankrupt. I remember sitting there trying to roll up pennies, and wondering what’ll happen if we don’t recover from this.

Not much was said after this incident and we kept the handsome house. The family evolved in personality while the Wagner kids started to grow up. Matt became the dedicated student, being on the Dean’s List a few times last year here at Ohio University. Being the shortest of the family, his five foot and eight inches stature is athletic, with wavy, short brown hair with matching eyes that could pick out anything wrong in anyone or anything. When we were younger, we were close in age being the middle children and got along quite well. Today it’s the opposite though; I’m more easy going and take life as it comes while he is the one who worries and prepares for everything. I am more social than my brother and like to help out my friends, which he finds is a fault. Don’t get me wrong, I try to help out my family, but I feel differently towards family and show better interest in helping out my friends if I can. You could say Matt is broken because he has had severe ear problems with two ear surgeries and received Ulcertificus Colitis, which means that he had to suffer through an ulcer in the lining of the large intestine during his freshmen year of college (WebMd).

There is Danny, the youngest of the siblings, and is the most social of us. He’s very gifted in sports; it could be baseball, basketball, football and he could play those and more pretty well. That's why I think Danny is the most outgoing, being somewhat close to the "Jock" kind of personality, but being smart also. His hair being straight and wacky from the innumerable amount of cowlicks, he's very tall and skinny, but has a very athletic toned body. Danny goes from sport to sport a lot, so you'll find him sleeping most of the time he's home and not really doing chores that my Dad would end up doing for him. The thing that makes him “broken” is that he’s smart yet, doesn’t apply himself. Unfortunately, that’s how the eldest of the Wagner children, P.J., ended up being.

P.J. was a very smart guy; getting perfect Math ACT scores, the test consisting of 60 questions “with 14 covering pre-algebra, 10 elementary algebra, 9 intermediate algebra, 14 plane geometry, 9 coordinate geometry, and 4 elementary trigonometry,“ according to Wikipedia (and he also got a perfect Math score on the SAT). My parents were so proud of their brown-haired, hazel eyed, first born son, except when he started not doing homework, that would then lead to him averaging C's and B's instead of acing all of his classes. P.J. managed to join the Navy ROTC at Penn State University. And one winter night, he was
watching "Passion of the Christ" in a local movie theater with friends when he fainted in the men's bathroom from all the blood from the movie. After receiving a concussion from hitting his head on a sink in the Du Bois movie theater, he's never been the same; P.J. eventually dropped out of Penn State to
a local, community branch of Kent State University, and started working at Kraft Maid. After not finishing it at the Trumbull campus of Kent State, he continued working at Kraft Maid until he was laid off and moved in with my Grandmother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania working as a waiter for a Japanese (or sushi) restaurant.

When coming home for the long winter break, I really enjoyed being with my family after living four hours away from them in Southeast of Ohio. We were talking to my father about his knee replacement surgery (he busted his knee years ago doing sports and finally brought up the courage to replace his knee after doctors telling him he needed it) when my father said he had to talk to us about something important. Of course, I got really worried, inheriting the “worry wart” trait from my dad’s side, and he explained to Matt and I how they spent my college loan money. They told us that my mother and himself got into gambling to hopefully help pay for college and ended up using so much money that they took from the Athletic Boosters fund--my dad was treasurer--and eventually paid them back. I was totally stunned; they never mentioned any problems on the phone and acted like life was good. It brought me back to a time where I was away at band camp for two weeks and when I got back, my dad told me that my kitten accidentally ate driveway sealant and the other kitten was all by his lonesome. Except this was my loan money, that I needed to get through college. I was just in disbelief as my father asked me to “forgive” them. I did because they are my family, as I forgave Matt for not helping me study for the Psychology course that my parents thought would be beneficial to me to have my smart, hardworking brother help me.

“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).


This family could never be the same happy family I once thought it to be. The simple, loving family was gone; it was replaced with bitterness of the cold hard reality that my parents have tried to keep hiding for so long. Just seeing my parents so weak was a rude awakening for me, that not everyone can handle certain things in life. For my family, finance has shattered our perfect picture into an empty frame.