| My brother may have been the cause of most of my physical pain growing up, but I must say, he was the cause of a lot of good things as well. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there were times when it was actually worth having him around.
For instance, I can vividly remember most of the bus rides home from school during my early elementary years. The reason: the inevitable every day fight with one of the kids from my class. I can’t quite recall his name (brain damage, remember?), but every day, no matter how I tried to avoid it, everyone (my brother included) would encourage this deranged kid to pick a fight with me. Now, any sane person would think that the bus driver would cease this moment and enforce his "master of the vehicle" authority; after all, this IS his turf, right? In this case, it wasn’t his turf; it was his ring! I swear, someone might as well have given the man a bag of popcorn! So every day, for no particular reason (except it was either beat each other up or get beat by the sixth graders), we’d go at it. Then, one day I decided that I had had enough of this nonsense. You have to keep my home life in mind as well. I was getting pretty tired of constant chaos. And, to my surprise, he actually accepted my offer for peace. The treaty had been signed! We were finally friends (well, ok, not really friends, but at least we didn’t try killing each other anymore). Without the recurrent cock fights going on, the bus rides became quieter and quieter with each passing day. I knew that with these crackpots on board, something had to give. Now, everyone in his grade knew that Rodney was a force to be reckoned with, and everyone in the grades below knew this as well (except for this one kid who was…well…a little slow. He was fourteen in the fifth grade, and thought he was the man. Well, the man made the wrong comment one time to the wrong person (my brother) and ended up with a broken nose.), but unfortunately, one of the high school boys hadn’t obtained this useful knowledge. He also had no idea that I was Rodney’s little brother. I wish, for his sake (and for the sake of his future children) that he would have given me a chance to explain what he was getting himself into, but the poor kid was too busy smacking me around. My brother was mean, but he knew right from wrong. Me and a kid my age fighting—now that’s entertainment (even if I was getting my butt kicked), but an older kid kicking my butt—well, that calls for punishment; and punishment he got. I think just about every boy on that bus cried out with a loud "ooooo!" or ooowwwww!" as my brother gently placed his foot right in between the poor sap’s legs (almost as gently as when he placed my nose on that trailer hitch—except I think this time he actually did cause some brain damage). If it would have been a kickball game, that would have been a grand slam homerun. The guy never made a sound. He just collapsed. My brother grabbed me, and we made our stop right on time. That is certainly a moment that stands out as one when I was actually thankful for having Rodney around (that is—until later that day when he held me down and spit in my mouth). Rodney was, and still is, an avid outdoorsman. Among all of the painful memories, there are ones of hunting, fishing, swimming in ponds, riding horses, sledding like an olympic bobsled team in the winter, becoming proficient archers, skinning squirrels, climbing trees, etc., etc. etc. These are all things that will stay with me until I die. I mean, how could I forget something like the time we were rabbit hunting with our shotguns. After a couple of hours of acting like we were hunting our starving family’s next meal, we were finally face to face with the fuzzy little creature (well, more like tail to shotgun barrel). I remember watching eagerly as I wondered how Rodney would make his approach. I wanted to do everything exactly the way he did it. I would literally try to step in the same prints that he had left on the ground. Without hesitation, he took his shot. Now, remember: my brother hardly ever missed his target; and this time was no exception. He knocked the tail right off that bunny. You would think that a 12 gauge shot right to the rectum would suffice, but it was as if nothing had hit the poor thing! The rabbit took off almost as fast as the shot that hit him. As my brother reloaded, I seized the moment to capitalize on what seemed to be a rare blunder on my brother’s behalf. I chased fast and hard until I had an open shot. "BOOM!" Another hit right up the ol’ bingo hole! Yet, this seemed to be no ordinary rabbit. This thing gave "buns of steel" a whole new meaning. "It’s super bunny!" I remember saying in awe. Luckily for me, my brother knew that my percentage of hitting my target was much lower than his; so, he was kind enough to let me use the three-shot, pump-action 20 gauge. I took the third shot of the expedition: another hit landed (this one just kind of spread out and scattered pellets all over the animal’s little body), yet, the bunny kept going and going and going. Now I know where they came up with the whole energizer bunny concept: someone from the energizer advertising department heard this story! By this time, my brother had reloaded, and he was absolutely determined not to fail. As I stood there flabbergasted, Rodney was the one to administer the fatal shot. We just sort of stood there looking at each other in amazement for a few seconds. Then, proud as a couple of hens, we picked the bunny up by what was left of it his ears and trotted home. Our mother was (and is) an absolute clean freak; and that is a completely separate story that I might feel inclined to tell sometime down the road. So, you can imagine her reaction to a couple of sweaty, stinky, filthy kids asking her to take a picture of them holding a dead rabbit at the back door. This thing looked kind of like a mouse that had been chased around, smacked around, and mauled be a cat; and so did we. Nonetheless, she took that picture, and I still look at it when I need a good laugh. My brother and I were always doing something such as this for entertainment. Neither one of us was ever a television type of kid (although, I did enjoy my cartoons). If it wouldn’t have been for him, I would have probably just been a little couch potato. But he made sure that that never happened. We would come home from school, and he would say, "come on, boy, we’re gonna go ride the horses." He taught me how to maneuver a horse while riding bareback (which is really a wonderful feeling for an eight or nine year old). He taught me how to shoot a bow and arrow—very well actually. We could take a paper plate with a hole cut out in the center about the size of a quarter, sit it on the ground sixty feet away, and send an arrow right through the center of the hole without touching the sides. This type of accomplishment is also a wonderful feeling for a kid. And he taught me how to slick down a snow ramp just right in order to get the ultimate hang time on a sled (evidently, a little too ultimate—once he landed right in a huge ditch (the ditch) at the bottom of our designated winter time snowhill and busted his nose and broke our sled). He also taught me how to fish. However, the one event that stands out in my mind while fishing is sort of bitter-sweet. We had three ponds on our land: "the little pond", "the middle pond", and "the big pond". We would go just about every day and go dig up worms (which was sometimes more fun than the fishing), and we’d start making the round from pond to pond. It didn’t take long for my brother to get bored with the worm hunting; so, he quickly moved on to fishing for bass. It took me a little while to really grasp the concept of bass fishing, but when I did, I was "hooked". I remember the first real bass that I caught. I had caught a few prior to this, but They didn’t really count in my mind because, while Rodney was yanking out three and four pounders, my largest largemouth had been about a pound or so. But from the moment I hooked this one I knew that I had to be at the top of my game. I recall shouting something like, "holy cow, I think I just snagged a truck!" As Rodney coached me (and as I pretended like I didn’t need him to), It became evident that it wasn’t a truck, but a nice, healthy, three and a half to four pound bass. After a few long minutes of fighting, it was done. The feat had been accomplished. I had finally caught a REAL fish. I was finally in the same league as my brother. However, my glory was short-lived. I didn’t trust myself to carry the thing home; so, I gave Rodney the honor. I mean, I couldn’t just throw it back. This was the biggest fish in the world! It was like a slow-motion sequence in a movie. I realize now that, although he tried to seem straight-faced, Rodney was happy for me. And in his excitement, he seemed to forget everything he knew about our home terrain. He dropped the bass and it flopped right on back to it’s home. That’s right, he dropped the fish! This was another one of those times that we just looked at each other for a few seconds in amazement. Oh, the irony of it. We didn’t really know what irony was at the time; so, we just reverted to anger. I was mad at him, and he was mad at the fish. The anger went away, and I was left with the left with the bitter-sweet satisfaction of catching the world’s largest largemouth bass. It was at times like this that I realized that It was thankful for my brother, and, ironically enough, I wouldn’t have been at peace without him. Another time that I came to this realization was a couple of years after that. After the joy of hunting, fishing, and occasionally cutting the heads off of large snakes with a shovel, we matured into what was and is the expectation of a lot of parents: piano lessons. Just the thought of my brother sitting patiently behind a keyboard made me snicker. Needless to say, his stint as a concert pianist was short-lived. Mine was also short-lived, but I did enjoy the lessons. Our instructor’s house was just down the road a few hundred feet; so, every week we would make the voyage with our "piano for beginners" instruction books in hand down the road to Mrs. Marcoleck’s house. She was a very patient woman, but even she could tell that Rodney needed just a little more excitement in his life than the piano could offer. So, just like many times in the past, he used me as the source of his excitement during this boring time. I remember the event quite vividly. Dusk had just set, and I was on my way back up the road going home after a lesson. I was simply scared of the dark. I hated some of those walks home. So, my brother agreed to take the late lesson and make the walk after dark every week. What a nice guy, right? Wrong. As I began to top the large hill before our house, I could see this figure lying on the road. I trembled more with every step. The large object didn’t move, so I kept walking toward it (I still have no idea how I mustered up the courage to keep walking). The closer I got, the more I realized that this wasn’t simply road kill—it was my brother! I then began running believing that he had been hit by a car while crossing the main highway in front of our house. I saw him lying there motionless. I had no idea what to do. I slowly kneeled down as I shook like an old, beat up truck going down the highway. Every second seemed longer than usual until he jumped up and screamed right in my face. It still amazes me that he had enough patience to lie there on the road in the middle of the dark until the perfect opportunity arrived. You would think that he would have been able to incorporate just a little of that patience into his piano lessons. What did I do? What any real man would have done: I screamed like a little girl and ran home crying. I’m not sure if I was crying because I was just that much of wimp or if I was actually still worried about my brother’s possible death, but I do know one thing: I was surely glad to see that he was actually OK. May 25, 2004 -dj |