BROTHERLY LOVE

Today is my older brother Beans’s 64th birthday. He was born on Labor Day, 1946, a befitting day since Mama Bore likely was laboring like crazy to get him the heck out of her insides before she blew up.

Since I’m almost three years younger, I have very few early memories of life with Beans. I think the first is when we both had pinworms, or was it tapeworms, and we had to swallow the same nasty orange medicine from a bottle kept in the refrigerator. I also recall when he threw up one night while he was wearing his burgundy and white polka dot pajamas. He must have gotten dizzy from his sleepwear.

Sadly, truth be told, I have very few pleasant one-on-one memories from living with my older brother, unless you classify wrestling as being fun. Oh, we could tolerate each other in neighborhood group activities like softball, hide-n-seek, and red rover, but we were typically in conflict over just about everything--what TV shows to watch, bathroom squatting rights, card game playing, name-calling, it ran the gamut. I don’t profess to be totally innocent in these melees. I know I often fingered his comic books and baseball card collection that were off limits, legal grounds for a brotherly bashing.

Even when we got older, we had little association with each other outside the confines of our home. If it was raining, he would refuse to drive me to school in his car. How socially unacceptable would that have been? He might practice the latest dance moves with me in the secrecy of our living room, but at Teentown I was avoided like the freshman plague that I was. Once, he offered to teach me how to drive mom’s stick-shift car, a lesson that lasted a whole six blocks before his harassing and my crying put on the brakes to that little bonding activity.

The relationship hasn’t gotten much better into adulthood. Within the past decade or so, he’s chased me through his house with a taser gun and aimed Roman candles at me during a family Fourth of July celebration in his yard. Who needs this? To his credit, however, he has never told his bazillion-pound Mastiff dog to eat me up.

So, later today I will call him via AT&T and wish him a Happy Birthday and many more years to come. The safest best with Beans is long distance.