I'm not old enough to have a 40 year old kid brother!

My kid brother turned 40 this week. He’s not supposed to be that old. It’s bad enough that I’m almost at my jubilee mark. But instead of focusing on my upcoming birthday, I want to recall the day D was born.

I was nine years old, a forth grader in Miss Freeman’s class at Bradley Creek Elementary School, just getting a good start on the road to perdition. 1966 had been a trying year. We’d left Petersburg, VA, where we’d sojourned for a few years, that summer and moved down near the coast of North Carolina. I didn’t want to move. I had nightmares of tidal waves and jelly fish and sharks. I didn’t want to leave behind my friends and move to a place that was obviously so dangerous. And following this turmoil, D came along.

I don’t recall what I did that day in school. All I remember is that I went home with an extra assignment. For the first time in my academic career, as punishment, I had to write sentences. This seemed to be a favorite method of punishing wayward students in the fourth and fifth grade and by the time I’d gotten out of elementary school, having written thousands of sentences, my handwriting was ruined for life. I’m surprised I didn’t become an engineer as I had also manufactured tools that allowed me to write five sentences at a time. Instead of patenting my technology, I offered it freely to other students, which lead to our fifth grade teacher to expand the sentences to paragraphs. This quantum shift that called for new technological designs. But I digress. I was just getting to work on writing the sentences, sitting at the kitchen table, when my dad ordered us to get in the car and we all headed downtown to the old James Walker hospital. That afternoon and evening, sitting in the lobby of the hospital, I wrote a hundred times something about behaving in class. It was long after I’d finished my penance that my Dad finally came down to the lobby and took us home, without mom. It was strange, we knew she was pregnant, but at this point we learned that she hadn’t yet given birth. We woke that next morning and were told that we had a baby brother. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but life wasn’t going to be the same. Of course, credit should be given to my brother. His birth distracted my parents and I didn’t receive a second dose of punishment for my misdeeds. The double jeopardy clause in the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to children; in this incident I got off easy.

D had a tough life ahead. My mother use to put him in my brother's and my room for his nap. If he was still asleep when we got home from school, we couldn’t go into our room. This we cured. One year for Christmas, we got a blacklight and some neat posters of dragons that we plastered on our wall. The room was naturally dark and when you shut the blinds and turned on the blacklight, the dragons glowed as if alive. After telling D a few stories about the dragons, he never slept in our room again. I also think that trick had something to do with my mother’s disposal of our posters. And then there were the stories of the danger of being flushed down the commode which, I’m sure, delayed his potty training. As D got older, he hung around with me a lot. I use to take him canoeing and fishing on Town Creek. We’d float down the creek, fishing the lily pads along the bank. When it was time to turn around and paddle back to the bridge, I’d tell him stories about how we were getting close to the falls and had to paddle hard upstream to save ourselves. D would paddle like mad as we made our way upstream.

With three older siblings who did their best to screw him up, it’s amazing that D made it this far without, as far as I know, any serious mental illness. Happy birthday D! With the exception of your politics, you seem to have turned out okay.