"Your sister is taking photos of the dog," said my brother-in-law. "It will be a few minutes."
I slumped in my chair and waited for the dog's headshot to be perfected. I had called my eldest sister to discuss our middle sister, the one with the mental problems. And discuss her we did. And we also talked about the dog, the weather, the Buckeyes. She talked about her Secret Santa exchange at work. She bought her designated recipient a Browns mug, "even though I'm a Steelers fan." This was news to me. Her husband is a Steelers fan, but her? Never once heard her mention it.
"If you were really a Steelers fan, you wouldn't buy a Browns mug," I replied. "You'd get them a Steelers mug."
"Huh. That's exactly what my husband said."
And so what passes for witty repartee in my family ran its course, and as I got off the phone, my thoughts drifted where they go after every phone call home.
My siblings are fantastically stupid and uninteresting. They are inarticulate, ill-read citizens of an exceedingly small world. I say things like "[Our ill sister] needs some structure in her life. Without her husband and job to occupy her active mind, she's got way too much time to count the conspiracies against her." and they're baffled by abstractions like "structure" and "the."
"What do you mean?" they invariably ask.
This is what vexes me after every phone call: the lowest IQ among us five kids is 127. The human average is 100. Just how monumentally stupid is the average person if these mouth-breathers so definitively trounce their IQ score? My siblings can't be exceptional. They just can't.
Time to add another lock to the doors.