Being Brothers

We do look alike. We have heard that for many years. I suppose our voices could be mistaken for the other as we do sound a good deal like each other when we talk. People, even family, sometimes look me in the eye and carry on a conversation with me, and then call me by his name. When that happens, I’ve learned to not flinch, but to just accept it and smile. That’s all just part of having a brother.

You should know if you don’t know already, that there’s a few years difference between me and my brother. When I was born, he was around junior high school age. Even though there are a few years between us, we didn’t have the normal brother-on-brother feuds and fights. Not to say there haven’t been times when we didn’t get ticked off with each other and share sharp words. I imagine it took a good deal of restraint, and maybe some running interference from our parents, for him not to throttle a snot-nosed kid who smashed some of his prized model cars or who scribbled gibberish in one of his high school yearbooks.

I have a lot of memories of me and my brother ranging from some of my earliest memories right up until the most recent time I saw him. Usually when I think of him I think of all those years ago, when he was approaching adulthood and I was his shadow. It was a time when he was the big brother and I was the kid brother. I suppose I felt closer to him then because we were in closer proximity to one another. I guess close proximity is sharing a room with one another, which we did when we were both at home together. Now we live in different states and only see each other a handful of times during a year. We both have wives. He has kids and, now, grandkids. He owns a business. My job takes away much of my daylight hours. I suppose our roles have changed a bit through the years. That is just how life plays out over time.

Still, I know who taught me how to ride a motorcycle. It was his late 1960s-model red Honda trail 90. It felt like it weighed three thousand pounds but my brother taught me how to balance it and then let me ride it, even if he may have felt he was turning Evel Knievel loose on our north Georgia neighborhood. After I first crashed into a bush in our backyard he then taught me how to stop the thing with it’s only working brake.

Other things drift through my mind when it comes to thinking about my brother from years gone by. We used to toss a baseball around in the backyard and shoot hoops and play H-O-R-S-E from time to time. I remember looking at his Car Craft and Hot Rod magazines only after he was finished with them. It seems he always had a roll of Wint-O-Green Life Savers or Certs handy, and was willing to share them with me. When we went anywhere, he would often buy me a Coca-Cola and never seemed worried that I was too young to pay for it myself or that Mom and Dad probably didn’t want me to have one. He could always make me laugh and I have often thought he was the most humorous person I personally knew. And during times when I would get discouraged and want to give up on something he would tell me “can’t never could”. It is a phrase I repeat to myself to this day when something frustrates me to the point of giving up which usually leads me to give things at least one more try.

We used to go fishing. Nothing elaborate or fancy, just two brothers loading into an old red Army jeep he had restored, with two inexpensive fishing rods and a can of corn or tub of worms heading out to Fightingtown Creek or up Aska Road to some out-of-the-way fishing hole. Neither of us has a trophy trout mounted on our walls from those days but we do have memories of cold creek water running through our minds with the additional memory of how we occasionally ditched the fishing for just spending the time together riding through the mountains.

My Dad gets the credit for my love of older music from such artists as Jimmie Rodgers, Kitty Wells, the Carter Family and Hank Williams since, as we were growing up, I recall him listening to them. That music though grew on me over time and became something I appreciated later in life. When I was growing up it was the music that my brother listened to that I remember really enjoying then. He owned a deep blue Plymouth Barracuda, complete with a Hemi engine and a ready-to-play eight track player. It was in that car with the eight track playing where I learned to appreciate Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman” and the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” and Charley Pride’s “Crystal Chandeliers,” “All I Have to Offer You Is Me” and “Is Anybody Goin’ To San Antone?” I mostly though remember my brother listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival, which seemed to meld the raw, earthy energy of my Dad’s favorite music into an electric form palatable to a new generation. Today, when I hear the opening licks of “Green River” or “Down On The Corner” I can’t help but smile and wonder whatever happened to that car. Luckily, I know what happened to the two guys who used to cruise the streets of our home town in that car. For now, we’re alive and well.

We’re older. Even with age, we still look alike, or so we are still told. Our voices could be mistaken for the other with ease. Now with more frequency, people who know both of us, engage me in conversation and often without realizing it, call me by his name. I can only smile when that happens.

This week my brother celebrates a birthday. In some way I suppose thinking about his birthday caused the flood of memories that you have just read. There would be some truth to that statement. The deeper truth though is the understanding that just because my brother has a birthday this week doesn’t mean I just spent a few minutes thinking about him just this week.


The real truth is I think about him every day of my life. And that is just part of being brothers.