My brother

I can't imagine our family without my brother. He is kind of what makes us interesting. He still lives in Maine, and I miss him. I wish we were closer... in a lot of ways. Charlie is a mystery to me. I think he always has been. I love him endlessly, and I look up to him in a way that I can't really explain, except to say that he is my big brother. I am funny, but he is funnier. I am smart, but he is smarter. I wish I had the courage to bend some rules and have some adventure in my life, like I think that he did, but I never had it in me.

As a kid, everything that he did was cool in my eyes. In high school he had this awesome collection of music. So cool. I used to sneak into his room to look at his stacks of cassettes in his desk drawer: The Beastie Boys, Billy Joel, Bob Marley, James Taylor. He has the quickest wit, and is very sensitive and insightful, and I think he is probably the smartest person I know. This fact was impressed upon me when playing Trivial Pursuit with him about fifteen years ago. I think he got every single answer right. Literally. The one answer that stuck in my head was that he knew that Rudyard Kipling is the poet who, though Educated in England, was born in Bombay. Who knows that just out of the blue? He is very philosophical, and I love the way his brain works. It was a potential source of torment, at times, for my mother whose brain works almost completely in retrograde of his...but even that was terrifyingly cool to me. While I dreaded the dinners where Charlie would push my mom's buttons, like asking how to get his status changed to "deceased" to avoid repaying student loans, I also watched in awe and amazement at how it all just sort of amused him.

Charlie turned out different from my sister and I. She and I are alike in that we really didn't question things our parents told us, things about life, faith, citizenship...but my brother challenged them all. At our cores, we share the same values, but express them so differently. My brother is a bit of a hippie. He was "green" before being green was trendy. He balks at consumerism, in fact, my mom bought him a Red Sox shirt once for his birthday, and had to return it because it was made by Nike and had their small, signature, swoosh symbol on it. He didn't care for being a walking advertisement for a large conglomerate like Nike.

We're all grown up now, and I suppose even middle aged, but Charlie is still inexplicably cool in my eyes. He is a talented artist, and story teller, and a good family man. He likes jazz, and taught himself to play guitar. I can picture him now, picking at is guitar on my parents porch while the summer sun is setting; his dirty bare feet keeping the rhythm on the pine wood boards, and an occasionally off tune melody on his lips.

Yep, that's my brother. I have always sort of just watched him from a distance, admiring things in him that I never saw in myself. At the same time, I completely identify with him and feel we are kindred spirits. So, we are back to my big brother being a mystery to me. A mystery that I love, and have always wanted to be so much more like.