Sing, Memory

Dave and I went to my brother's yesterday and finished boxing up his things, including his books. We'll bring those home with us and sort through them, some to keep, some to release to the universe via little free libraries in our neighborhood. Books have always been important to us; my brother always had books, as have I. As a child, I followed him down a lot of reading paths (The Great Brain series, Z  for Zachariah) and would try to read his library books after he did and before he had to return them to the school library. I became a better, faster reader for it, as he was three years older and three grades ahead of me.

I remember once going to babysit for one of his friend's younger brothers (the only time in my life I ever babysat) and the family had a big screen TV but no books. I asked the kid if his mom had any books and he said he thought she had a bible or some magazines in her bedroom. (I did not go in there to look.)

I looked up that friend of my brother's a couple of weeks ago. They were friends back in middle school. (I was still in elementary school.) The friend was the only white kid who lived in our neighborhood and I had a big crush on him, lanky and dorky as he was. We used to, the three of us, play touch football in the street in front of our house. There were no other boys their age in the neighborhood so I was made the quarterback for both sides when they played, mostly so that I could hike the ball to each of them in turn. That would leave them free to run around chasing each other until one managed to touch the other (in lieu of tackling). For awhile they had a set of flag belts for flag football, no doubt lifted from the gym at school. There were two long flags--one set fluorescent yellow, one set fluorescent orange--attached to each of two belts with velcro and they would each put on a belt and then, after I hiked the ball to one of them, would chase each other around trying to rip a flag off the belt. I loved those flags--because velcro was a rare and wondrous thing in my world--but they only had two belts, so I didn't get to wear one and I was only allowed sometimes to tuck the end of one of the flags into my pocket so it looked like I was wearing it velcroed to a belt.

My brother's friend had a sweet younger brother who played with my younger brother and a skinny divorced mom who sunbathed in a bikini in the backyard and dated a guy who installed windows. That guy drove a truck with an A-shaped frame on the back that was loaded with huge glass panes that I coveted as a child (probably because it seemed dangerous, all that glass, and I knew I couldn't touch any of it). Anyway, according my faulty internet stalking skills, my brother's friend became a truck driver and he did that for a long time and now he sells insurance.

I wonder if he ever thinks of us.

My brother was a better but less ambitious reader than I was and he was always more athletic than I was. He liked to ride his bike and play football and baseball when we were little. Later in high school, he started wrestling, which I, still in middle school, hated because he learned a bunch of moves and holds that meant I could never again win one of our physical fights. We fought a lot back then, fought almost as often as we played together.

I've been trying to will back childhood memories of my brother these days and I have felt desperate to keep them, good or bad, from fading.

There are a lot of scary memories where I watched my brother get hurt, the usual kids' type of injuries though sometimes serious. We spent a lot of time playing on our own, so injuries most often happened when there were no adults around. Like, one time he was building a model and got a wire stuck almost completely through his finger and when he started yelling, I got scared. He yelled and my grandfather heard him and came in and pulled the wire out of his finger. One time we were playing with a molded plastic wading pool in the backyard, taking turns running and jumping into the water-filled pool over and over, and on one of his turns when he went to jump he slid on the wet grass instead and the sharp plastic edge of the pool caught him under one arm and opened him up and there was blood everywhere and he had to go to the hospital for stitches. One time he choked on a bite of raw carrot and couldn't breathe and my grandfather heard me yelling and came in and pounded him on the back until the carrot came out. I didn't eat carrots for a long time, decades, after that.

Those scary memories are burned into my childhood self, but there are others, too, good ones. We shared a room, my two brothers and I, when we were little. They had bunk beds and I had a small twin bed. We shared an imaginary friend named George who was very small and bedtime arguments were had over who George would sleep with. We spent at least one summer playing Monopoly together in the side yard when we were little kids. We had some old wooden school desks that we pushed together to set the board on and we would play throughout the afternoon, taking turns being the secretly embezzling banker. We played a lot of board games together before there were video games and then after there were video games, we played video games. 

We did other stuff, too, fished for crawdads in the irrigation ditches, climbed the neighbor's trees to steal apples, and one Christmastime, we spent hours together listening to an album of Christmas carols and learning the lyrics that were printed on the back of the album cover so that we could put on a performance for my parents.

 

This was that Christmas. I'm leaning against the top bunk of my brothers' bunk beds while we look at the album--and here we're sitting on my small twin bed with my cousin Marty, that same night: