Sibling Love

As I wrote my last blog on curfews, my Mother sat across the table from me and asked me what my blog was going to be tonight.  I had shared with them the night before my blogs and they both listened carefully as I shared my experiences with on line dating.  My parents have been married for fifty eight years next month.  They have been together for sixty three years. They don’t remember dating and when they dated, it was in the early 1950’s.  Things have slightly changed over the years.

But Mother wondered what I was going to write about tonight.  I told her that I write about what I think about or my experiences and today I was writing about being the rebellious child that I was.  She kindly told me to move over; she’d take it from there. 

I had to share with my Mother that without me, she would never have embraced the full experience of motherhood. She needed a child that challenged her and forced her to use every parenting skill she had in her arsenal.  I really wasn’t a bad child, but I was not my brother who she thought was perfect. He had his moments though when his horns rose ever so slightly, like when he came home from school one day and decided to melt a slow poke sucker over the stove like he had seen my mother do umpteen thousand times. He didn’t possess the skill to know the precise moment to remove it before it went from a soft gooey caramel delight to a Tiki torch that set the curtains on fire as he threw it into the trash receptacle and missed. No, she shares that proud motherly moment with laughter and blames herself for doing this in front of him and not warning him of the dangers. 

As he aged and became a licensed driver, we were up at the cottage and my parents told him to take the trash over to the dump.  He and I got into the brand new 1972 Oldsmobile Delta 88.  It was winter time and after we had dropped the trash off, we headed back to the cottage.  My brother in an attempt to scare me was speeding as he came upon a curve.  He hit a patch of ice and we went sailing landing in a snow packed ditch.  We both jumped out of the car to inspect the damage. OY! The bumper and grill were damaged.  Not to the point that you had to look twice, but smashed!  Somehow we got it out of the ditch. I’m not sure what was going thru my brother’s mind, but in my mind I was thinking, “Yes! I’m going to be an only child now.”  I knew that my Dad would kill him!

We drove home and he pulled the car into the driveway, really close to the garage door.  We got out of the car and inside we went.  Our folks were packing the cottage up as we were heading home after a weekend.  My brother said nothing. He just walked in and acted as though nothing had happened. I couldn’t contain myself, the killing had to begin, so like all siblings do, I ratted my brother out.  Someone had to tell my parents and apparently he was rolling the dice that it would go unnoticed.

Dad went outside to inspect the damage.  I just knew when he saw that his new car was ruined, my brother was a goner!  My Dad is a very a patient man.  He opened the door and went outside.  He was furious!  As only my Father could do, he gave my brother a chance to come clean. “What happened to the car?”

The door has been opened! Here is your chance to act as though it had slipped your mind, you had forgotten about it in the last half hour or so.  Did he take the window of opportunity to admit that he had an accident? Nope.  He looked at my Dad and just as clear as he could speak, responded, “I don’t know.”

This was it!  There was a killin’ on the horizon!  I was going to be an only child finally! No more taking second chair.  No more fighting over who got to watch their show on TV and always losing the battle.  No more riding in the dog sled while my brother stood on the back and grabbed branches coated in snow allowing the cold snow to hit me in the face. I was going to rule the world!

My parents instructed me to put my stuff in the car and wait there.  I patiently waited knowing the ride home was going to be grand, the whole back seat to myself. No sharing, no one poking me, no one slugging me as a Volkswagen drove by.  I was deep in my dream of being an only child when my brother came out the door, tears in his eyes and soon followed my parents. YOU let him live? I started to rearrange my things, a wall of protection.  I sensed I was going to pay for ratting him out.  I could already see it, S L U G  B U G! I envisioned thousands of Volkswagens on the highway as we drove home, invisible to my eye, but not his.