Tuesday, September 22, 2009

how to love a brother

These are in no particular order.

1. Slumber party in your room. At the age of four or five, your brother adores you. You read to him and play Trouble with him. He does not want to sleep in his own bed tonight. Your floor will do just fine, the floor parallel to your bed. He will sleep, snoring, in his Toy Story sleeping bag. You sketch him as he falls asleep not because you are creepy but because you are nine and love to draw and need a subject. He serves just fine on many a drawing occasion.

2. Play Barbies together. Don't hate him when he bites all the hair off of the Mike Barbie (teenage boy) and leaves teeth marks in the skull. Go with it. Tell Stacey and all her Barbie palls that Mike's sporting a new look. Let the GI Joe and Barbie go out together in the tractor. They can take the convertible out another night.

3. Offer to clean his room, paint his room, rearrange his room. He will like it, theoretically, but will bar you from entering his room with his very own arm. He will knock you down if he has to. You will not enter his room, he says. But you will, and you will sketch a new layout. You will make his dream of street walls with screeching tire marks in places come to life. You would dust his dresser, if he wouldn't notice, and put all of the quarters laid out in a football formation into the neon green piggy bank you bought him. Because he kind of trusts you, he will let you help him rearrange his room once. Not again. Not because he doesn't like your concepts but because the concept he did let you carry through was too good.



4. Take him to a K-State football game for his birthday. But make him buy both tickets. It's not that you don't enjoy football and spending time with your brother when you now live 134 miles apart--you do--but you don't enjoy spending $55 per ticket on 3 hours of your life. Let him hang around the stadium for as long as he wants after the game. Let him play your Game Cube when you get back to your apartment and stay up all night watching who knows what. Drive him back the next day and wish he'd like school enough to want to go to college near you.

5. Play defense. After your dream of becoming a basketball star dies (because you're five feet tall and clumsy running with the ball), defend him on every shot he tries for on the driveway. Challenge him to shooting contests from the middle of the yard, from the porch. Assist him in dunks; toss him the ball at the perfect height at the perfect moment. Photograph him flying into dunks on the playground. Buy him a basketball for his birthday. Buy him a ball return thing for the rim. Buy him an indoor miniature hoop that goes over the door and watch him use it until his palm is twice the size of the ball. Keep throwing him the ball.



6. Try to kill him. Out of love for being an only child, push him in his infant walker to the ledge of the basement stairs. Give it another nudge and watch it/him tumble to the bottom. Good riddance. Hear your mom's screams as she catches him before the walker actually goes a notch down and be relieved that your brother is still there and that he won't remember this because he's too young. Do not kill your brother.

7. Buy him birthday gifts. When no one else does, keep buying him things like iTunes gift cards and sports stuff and t-shirts and those movies he loves. Help him pick out a big screen tv and arrange his new living space in your parents' basement because you know that he wouldn't do it for himself. Buy him birthday gifts not because he needs anything but because you want him to know you still know him.



8. Hug him. Even though he's now ten inches taller than you, much more muscular, much quieter, and much more wealthy, think "aw" when he leans over to hug you and says "Thanks for coming." It doesn't happen often. You try not to be too loving-sibling-like because you're a girl and it can too easily get on his nerves. You let him do his thing, and sometimes he comes to you, big sister, and that is when you remember why you like each other, why you get along, why you wanted to take him on his first plane ride and big city trip to Chicago last summer. Not because he was a good travel companion (bless his heart, he's not) but because you wanted him to experience life outside of Kansas and life off the ground. Hug him, and rub his buzz-cut head for the way it's felt for the last sixteen years. Text him because that's how he gets and gives all his messages these days. A text can do the hugging. But not really.

Happy twentieth birthday to my brother.

1 comment:

  1. Oh Kari!! This is beautiful. Please tell me that you sent him this? And 20... really? How is this possible? I know it's cliche, but geeze Tom's getting so old!

    -Beth

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