OUR BOB

So what's the point in having a big brother? Is it to lie on either end of the sofa in shared misery when one of you is getting over chicken pox just as the other is coming down with it? Is it to ramble through the woods together looking for arrow heads and interesting rocks while listening to a hidden waterfall and a thousand bird calls? Maybe it's to argue over who's going to sit in front as your family drives home from a vacation in Maine, a week where you hung around together because everyone else was a grown-up, and you slept in a room where the walls didn't go all the way to the ceiling, and you will still remember many decades later how when you dug for clams they'd shoot water up out of the sand.  You can still smell the salt and hear the tide going out.

 Maybe you get to know all the early Yankee players and their stats from the baseball cards he collects and the pennants hung in his bedroom. Then there was that one Christmas when you really wanted your own typewriter and your parents bought you a brand new electric Smith-Corona but you watched your big brother struggle downstairs from his bedroom, where he'd hidden a huge and ancient manual that he found in a junk shop and bought with his paper route money. And the way you'd follow him and his friends as they explored the town, even though you couldn't keep up with them, determined to shimmy over drainpipes and climb trees after him, knowing that he was always secretly looking back to make sure you were alright, knowing you had nothing to be afraid of.

One rainy day you're huddled in your brother's bed with him listening to Disney record albums...a day later, it seems, his friends are huddled under car hoods with him, smoking cigarettes and playing 60's rock music on a scratchy transistor, all with their own teenage agendas and here you are reluctant to give up your Barbies while your mother's trying to teach you to cook. He is the bane of your existence; he turns the light off when you're in the shower, chants rhymes threatening to throw you down the cellar stairs, tells your parents where you are and when he thinks you're up to no good; he even accidentally breaks your finger once when he shuts the bathroom door as you're reaching in asking him to pass you the rubbing alcohol for your earrings, while he's standing there hot-combing his hair.

But you give as good as you get: you sneak up and put blue eye shadow on him when he falls asleep on the couch, stick “KICK ME” signs to the back of his jacket and hope he'll make it to the school bus stop without noticing, read the letters in his top drawer from his girlfriends, tell him his legs are so skinny they look like horses' legs bent backward; you even steal one of his two-dollar bills. Embers become flames, flames become fire and you scream at each other. As far as you're concerned he doesn't exist. You act polite to each other when you're at a relative's house, but otherwise you'd rather not be seen with him in public. You'd rather not know him. Deep down inside you admire the fact that his hair is blond and he can do algebra, but you're not about to let HIM know.

 And then without realizing it you DO realize it: you are not just big brother and kid sister. Maybe it happens when you see a chink in his armor or the first time he asks you for advice. You have been playmates and partners in crime, growing in the same place and coming into the world the same way, and no one in the world except you two will ever know what it means when you refer to itching powder, the World's Fair, Dad's mad suit, Ronnie Repap, "Hello Walt," Quatz Booda, Telefunken, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Raccoon,"Green Door," Triscuit crumbs, the upside down 8-track player, Dr. Zito's woodchuck, Powder Ridge, "You might know," and popaholics. (At least not in the context you're referring to.) He knows your secrets. He tells you his. Some.

He rescues you when you get your mother's car stuck in a marsh down by the shore, and pays the taxi fare when you fly in from overseas and are too tired and jet-lagged to wait for a ride from JFK. He gives you nephews, two of the greatest gifts you will ever receive. He drives you everywhere at a moment's notice when your battery dies or your eye somehow gets scratched and is out of focus. He drops off popsicles and Nyquil on the doorstep when you're sick.  In fact when you have an odd flu and finally decide to go to the emergency room, he not only takes you immediately, he stays with you for 9 hours in a little out-of-the-way room and while the nurses help sicker people, he helps you to the bathroom and on and off the toilet a number of times -- modesty flies out the window, not surprising at all.

You begin to understand that together you can get through ANYTHING – that he is a link to your earliest breaths, your primal, pre-verbal memories. He is laughter and security and the right voice on the other end of the phone. He has stood next to you at your dying mother's bedside. As long as he was there, within reaching distance, you did it everything you had to do. He gave you courage.

He will sternly tell it to you like it is and then surprise you with unsolicited admiration and praise, sometimes even to other people, behind your back. You don't just defend each others' quirks and idiosyncrasies, you champion them.

And that's the answer. It's simple when you get right down to it. The use of having a big brother can be measured in how two hearts become one when you are in the world together, and when you're not, you will look down on a sunny day and forever see not just your shadow, but his right next to it.

My brother -- my hero, my rock, my best friend and partner in crime left this world without warning shortly after midnight on June 30, 2018.  He is missed beyond words; we are left stunned and broken. He was robbed. We were robbed.

At his memorial service, there was so little room left in the church they had to bring in folding chairs and usher people up to the balcony. While folks were leaving we played a tune from 1968 that Bob used to play over and over again on his record player up in his room -- so much so that our father finally knocked on the ceiling with a broom and said "Can't you play a different song Bob?" These lyrics perfectly embody my brother and this will always be his song.