WANTED A PUPPY. GOT A BROTHER

“The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.” Garrison Keillor

I was nine years old when my brother, David was born. My father called and said, “You have a baby brother.” “Hooray!” I shouted into the phone. “Is he a boy or a girl?”

Now, some eighty years later, as I look across my kitchen table, I remember the boy, but see the man whose funny quips and gentle laughter remind me so much of our father. David is no longer the little boy who slid down the banister, jumped on top of piano, stomped on the keys---on his way down to terra firma--- bounced off the piano bench, and then ran like Hell to get away from our grandfather, the pianist.

His musical explorations continued when he fell in love with the big bass drum, and joined the band in grade school. The school couldn’t afford summer uniforms, so at the 4th of July parade, he sweated in his woolen uniform, valiantly banging on that enormous drum, while marching behind two flatulent horses.

Although my teenaged girlfriends swore that his first name was “Get out of here, David,” I acclimated to his mischief and mayhem. Most of his pranks were harmless, such as when he “borrowed” my lipstick to make himself up as a clown for Halloween, but I thought there was a limit to this sharing stuff when he gave me his chickenpox.

Most of his mischief was harmless except when he and his larcenous friend, Chuckie ran away from home, ended up on a farm and asked the farmer if they could “borrow a horse.” I want to think that Chuckie was the mastermind when they broke into our grandmother’s apartment, and ate all of the goodies in her refrigerator. David claimed that it was to teach her not to leave her window open when she was gone, because “burglars could get in.”

When he became a teenager, I was convinced that he would never be a successful criminal, because when he sneaked a smoke in the bathroom, he left a window open---just where Mother was tending her garden. Busted!

He grew tall and strong as he lifted weights in his bedroom. To this day, I don’t know how the weights left those deep indentations in his bedroom ceiling.

When he joined the Peace Corps in the 1960s, he was sent to a primitive area of Micronesia for two long years. The letters and audiotapes sustained us, but we knew his homecoming was overdue when a coconut fell on his head, and then he wrote, “I am looking forward to reading the Sears Catalog.”

I don’t know when my little brother became my big brother, but it happened. To the outside world, we have changed, but with our memories, stories and shared laughter we reach beyond the touch of time.

Once, when I was angry with my brother, I yelled at my mother, “You should only have had one child!” I didn’t mean it, but she considered it, and I’m sure if she had taken my advice, I would not be here to tell this tale. Once a Prince always a Prince!

Esther Blumenfeld “Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.” Charles M. Schulz