The bustle of the Edgewater neighborhood hid the pregnant woman walking to catch the el train into the Loop. The young mom holding an oversized suitcase and her little boys hand was heading back to Oklahoma. She was leaving an uncomfortable marriage in a city that never felt like home.
The single mom took her young family back to the comfort of America never looking back at the stained city by the lake. She raised her young son and baby daughter without a husband, without a father. She never remarried....
Several years later I was born in the same Northside neighborhood to a different mother, but the same father who was left behind. I was raised by a mom not from Oklahoma, but from Indiana. I was ten when I held my mommy's hand and left the same man, my father.
My mom eventually grabbed her suitcase and dragged her little boy away from the stained city by the lake. However I never lost touch with my father. I was able to have his influence throughout my life and I grew to respect and love him.
My dad died of Covid and of old age and of underlying illness in the autumn of 2020. A month later I received a box of his personnel belongings. In it I found a wedding certificate and a divorce decree. The people involved in these legal documents was a lady from Oklahoma who had a son and a daughter. The husband, the father was MY father.
This can't be real? This happens to dysfunctional families.... not my family! I'm an only child from my parents failed marriage. Did my dad have a failed marriage beforehand?
I poured myself a bourbon and sat down with this thing on my computer called Google. Within minutes I found out my Father's first wife, my stepmother passed away early in the new millennium. Her daughter was living her last few weeks of life before she passed away, but her son was living in Arkansas.
It took me an hour from the time I poured Jack Daniels into my crystal sipping glass to the moment I heard my big brothers voice for the first time. A man I didn't know about until I opened a box earlier that afternoon. I lived over fifty years without knowing I was a baby brother, but overshadowing this was something bigger. My brother born eight years before me never got to be nurtured, loved and raised by our dad. He missed out on the great wisdom and guidance that I was able to experience.
A year has passed since my big brother came into my life. He died last week from Covid just like our dad did..... he left a family, he left friends, he left a legacy I'll never know.
As I read all the tributes pouring in I learned who Steve Shepley turned out to be. His widow is left behind.... she hides her grief pissed that Steve never told her his pumpkin cheesecake recipe.
Steve was a manager of a "Hooters" in the middle of who knows where America. At first I was a little set back that my brother was a manager of a "Hooters." If he grew up in Chicago could he have been a Board of Trade Guy like me or a Railroad man like our father?
I read several posts written by former employees that he managed at a restaurant that sells chicken wings and flaunts butt cheeks and boobs. All these girls loved "Scuba Steve." They cherished his guidance, his support and his advice.
Steve was a solid man put in a place where other men would have taken advantage of the vulnerability of young female employees. He was their manager, he was their Big Brother. He was where he was supposed to be. My Big Brother was loved and respected by everyone he touched. Unfortunately he never got the chance to guide me, support me and advice me.
Steve is in heaven and though we started to get to know each other over the last year we will never share that Shepley hug. We will never kiss each others cheek. We will never be brothers.
I'll never know why that mommy got on the Howard elevated train before I was born, but she held that little boys hand and he grew up to be a great man. I guess it's a good thing she didn't feel at home in Chicago because I wouldn't be here if she stayed.
