Summer was a season of imprisonment for my younger brother. Like most families with neighborhood age offspring, he tagged along constantly. Jack and I undoubtedly felt that he was contaminating our scatters outdoors and indoors and dealing with this harboring of exasperation manifested itself into locking him in the basement most days, after which we would realize we had nothing to do. Playing with Legos or struggling with Jack's older brother's baseball Playstation games were infinitely more fun when we had someone to blame the failures on. So he would be released from the cellar, scowling; but his expression of victimized disdain would be temporarily relinquished when we included him in whatever we were doing that day. We all played boisterously, fought constantly, and broke things pretty much all the time.
This forced my brother to develop survival skills, at least until he found his own friends to pick on smaller kids with. He soon discovered that if he was charming enough to make us laugh, he would be better equipped to duck the punch when we struck out in MLB 2007. As the smallest one on the couch, the power to amuse and disarm was extremely helpful to him. A person who is making you laugh is a very hard person to slug, a concept that probably saved him from many a bruised arm.
Winters saw us overcompensating for the absence we felt during school hours. Jack and I both understood that, because I was a girl and he was a boy, during school our friendship was nonexistent. This was tragic, but abandoning our association for six hours was necessary for the sanity of everyone involved. However, after the last bell and on the weekends, we were kept warm by winter coats and the sweat produced by endless shoveling and tunnel-making. If a successful hole through a snowbank could be dug, the day was not wasted. The Big Dig had nothing on our frozen architecture. This chain-driven relationship was something I could put in my pocket and forget about as I grew up into learning that I was supposed to be friends with girls instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment