My Brother, My Friend

I've been doing a bit of spring cleaning lately (summer cleaning--potato, po-tah-to), and I came across this old shapshot in a drawer.  It has always been one of my favorite childhood pictures, of me with one of my favorite childhood friends--my older brother, who is 16 months my senior.

This 1967 photo, snapped at the top of Whiteface Mountain near Lake Placid, NY, was taken by our aunt, our father's only sister, who had no children of her own and treated my four siblings and me as if we were the most special people in the universe. My brother was 10 here, and I was 9.  Just a couple years after this picture was taken, the two of us rode a Greyhound bus by ourselves to NJ to visit her, and she took us to our first Broadway play.  Every kid should have an aunt like her.

I feel like this picture should be captured in oils, it's so endearing.  And I think the perfect artist to do it justice would have been Norman Rockwell, who was so good at depicting heartwarming scenes of small-town life in these United States.  In fact, I think my brother looks an awful lot like some of the boys Rockwell painted--he could have been one of his models.  Look at him up there with his perfectly shaped head, perfectly shaped face, and cute upturned nose...and those blue jeans with the plaid lining are killing me.  Everything about him screams "All-American boy."

He reminds me a little bit of this lad.

And these sports fans here.

And this cutie-pie, too.

My older brother is one of the funniest people I've ever met--that guy has always been able to make me laugh!  He teased me mercilessly when I was young, never letting me forget that I was a nerdy-looking thing.  He was the one who dubbed me "the fly," because of my ginormous glasses.  But I always knew that he loved--and liked--me.  We always got along so well.   My dad has told me that even when we were little tykes, we never really fought.  "You were best buddies," he said.

Well, my old best buddy is about to have a big life change.  The eldest of his three children, his only precious daughter, is getting married in a few weeks.  He's ready for it, though...especially because it means he gets to be a grandfather soon.  Like me, he has always lived for his children.  And like me, now he will live for their children as well.

Some things really don't change, no matter how old you get (thank goodness).  One of them is that my brother and I are still the best of friends.  And as you can see, he's still making me laugh.