Brother

My brother is moving back to North Carolina. He hasn't lived here for nearly a quarter of a century. It will be good to have him available for doing brotherly type things.

Although I am 20 months older than he is, we were only a year apart in school. He and my Dad share a birthday that's special for another reason. It was the cutoff day to start school. If either of them had been born a few hours later, they would have had to wait another year to begin their education. As it was, they both went through 12 years of always being the youngest person in their class. Both of them are blessed with plenty of smarts, I'll get to that in a minute, so they didn't suffer any developmental issues as a result.

My brother and I had slightly irregular childhoods. Our parents were teenagers when we were born and got divorced just as I started school. I left home at 14, after having already lived a couple of years apart from he and my mom and sister. I left because I needed a fresh start away from a step-father I didn't get along with and a school that asked me not to come back over the issue of a little weed I had in my pocket. My brother left home to attend one of the most prestigious high schools in the US, the North Carolina School of Science in Mathematics. We didn't get to hang out much as teenagers, just a week here and there at holidays or in the summer.

When I graduated, I went into the military. When he graduated, he went to study astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland on a scholarship. Unfortunately, being far from home and in cold ass Cleveland wasn't good for his mental health and after a couple of years he came back to North Carolina, where he was accepted to the state’s flagship university in Chapel Hill. He changed his major to English, joined a crazy literary fraternity, made good enough grades to make Phi Beta Kappa and graduated on time. I visited him up there a on occasion, including once on my 22nd birthday where we ingested hallucinogenics and stayed up all night walking around in the snow visiting his friends, who all seemed to be aspiring poets.

He became a technical writer and married a nice woman from Chapel Hill. He eventually decided to go to grad school at the University of Georgia to get a degree in wildlife biology. He completed all the course work and did field research and hit the world's tallest mental block while working on his thesis. He ditched it, ended up getting divorced and moving to California to go to work for the World Bird Population Center. He is a bird expert of some repute to this day. He moved on to other jobs centered around wildlife, met and married a beautiful, smart woman from Marin County, They had a couple of kids. He worked for a good while at the Buck Institute, which studies aging, before heading back to nature related jobs in and around Pt. Reyes National Seashore.

I only managed to make one trip out west to see him in all that time. I actually went out more than that but weirdly enough, I had a trip to San Francisco the same week he had one scheduled to be in NC, so we missed each other. Now, as it happens, he's hit a rough patch in his personal life and he and his college - aged daughter are driving across the country in a few weeks so he can start over again in the east. I want to spend some time with him and do what I can to assuage the personal anguish that this kind of upheaval brings about. Our parents are both in their late 70s now, and I'm glad, as his he, that he will get to spend some quality time with them.

One of the things my brother is excellent at is maintaining relationships. He is still close to the people he went to high school and college with and has made time to go and see them on many of his trip home over the years, Hell, he's still friends with the kid who lived across the street from us when he was in the fourth grade. They used to collect comic books and make up their own superheroes to draw.

Luckily, we have the same outlook on a great many things. We're both non-religious, progressive and inclined toward writing the odd poem now and then. We both love the outdoors. Not only that, but we may end up getting a chance to get to know each other better at this advanced age than we have since junior high school. At least, I hope so.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇