Brother’s Keeper
By Wink
Are you a guy? Did you have a brother? Was he older or younger?
I am a guy, with an older brother.
I don’t know what it is like to have a younger brother because I WAS the younger brother. I am sure I was pretty annoying…. hanging around, saying stupid things, bugging his friends.
He is about five years older than me. That doesn’t matter much now, but when he turned eight, I was still three. When he was 11, I was six. You get the picture.
He could have been really obnoxious and abusive, like many older brothers are, but he was never that way.
Maybe he appreciated me because his two older siblings were girls. He never really had a ‘guy’ to play with until I came around.
I imagine at times he thought of me as a toy, or sort of a smart puppy dog. I always just wanted to be where he was, and do whatever he was doing.
He had to teach me that our toy cars were meant to be smashed together. We would get down on our knees, about ten feet apart, and drive (fling) the cars at each other as hard as possible. Toy cars were WAY cooler back then, made of metal, about the size of a small cat, and weighing 2-3 pounds, so smashing them together actually involved physical risk to the smashers…
He taught me how to wait til the very last instant before tossing a firecracker. This is a lesson I have NOT passed on to my kids.
Even as a kid he knew how to fish, hunt and work on cars.
I attribute his mechanical abilities to his intense desire to take things apart long before he had any sense of how to put them back together. Dismantling things is a skill that will drive parents crazy, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Did I say ‘dismantling things?’ He also taught me the quickest way to dismantle things ….. blow them up. This is why God created the Fourth of July. (We both still have all our fingers, but his have more burn-marks than mine.)
We had bunk beds, and slept in the basement.
Yep, he would prank me now and then (and I will never forget the old ‘smelly pillow’ trick), but I never feared him. I knew he would never hurt me and, more than once, he stood up to neighborhood bullies in my defense.
Rubber-band fights. Paper airplanes. Knee football (which we poetically called ‘crawl football’). He taught me all of this useful stuff, and more.
He had (has) mechanical ability that has always eluded me. I imagine he wonders how I can be so mechanically inept.
Because we are guys, our standard form of communication is the insult. You guys out there who have brothers know exactly what I am talking about….
“When are you going to get rid of that piece of s*** car?”
“I presume you got THAT haircut for free.”
I could never say any nice stuff to his face. Still can’t. It was damned difficult even to write this, but I decided I was not going to wait until his funeral to say all these things.
By the way, he is NOT dying. He is WAAAAAYYYYY too obnoxious to die young.
I am forever indebted to him but, as a guy, I am not allowed to say it.
I suppose he doesn’t think about it much. Maybe he never thought about it but, to me, he was an amazing force.
Some kids grow up in fear. Sometimes there is fear of the unknown, but too often it is fear of the known. Abusive parents, abusive siblings.
I lucked out.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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