brother

my sister made the threats first. this is how she works. she anticipates the potential foolishness of a person and just goes right ahead and threatens that if whatever she thinks might happen eventually does, someone will get a near-fatal dose of her wrath. the thing is, i know she didn't just threaten me. she threatened him, as well. i guess she figured she didn't know any two people further away from each other in every way and the possibility of the two of us killing each other must have seemed pretty high. she just wanted us both to get along. this seems funny now, considering she's generally been known for roiling things up just for the excitement.

i want to say i got into town on the bus and that he was there at that raggedy station over on second, but i can't be sure and it may have been the train. i am pretty sure my hair was long and wild and i can tell you i was wearing some sort of hippie skirt and birkenstocks. i'd stopped shaving my legs and underarms and had never quite figured out makeup. i was exactly the way she must have described me. but he was not what i expected at all. you can't always see young republican on the outside. of course, in her haste to anticipate every potential problem she'd listed what she thought might be every thing i'd hate about him and then insisted i not hate it. and as i said, i'm sure she did the same when she spoke to him through gritted teeth about me.

he took me fishing. we got up early and drove nearly an hour down to a place around noel, if i recall correctly. and we talked. about all the things she warned us she'd kill us if we talked about. politics. feminism. hunting. all of it. in addition to finding we had plenty of common ground, there was the thrill we both felt disobeying a direct order from her. i don't recall whether we caught anything but i'm pretty sure we didn't. i just know i laughed a lot at a time in my life when i hadn't been laughing much at all. and i could imagine this little sister of mine laughing a lot, too, which is really what you hope for when you think about the futures of the people you love. that they will find people who can make them laugh.

she decided she'd keep him years back, or maybe he decided he'd keep her. i suppose they decided together. but he is our family, my brother now for nearly as much of his life as he wasn't, and that is just fine by me.

happy birthday, alan.