In early 1989 my family and I lived in a small three bed, one bath home on Brown Drive. Mom worked at the elementary school that I went to, dad worked at an auto parts store at the time (I think), and I was in first grade. I had my Nintendo and Saturday morning cartoons, Ghostbusters and Nickelodeon….everything a 6 year old could want. One morning I came in the living room and found mom crying, and I asked her if she was sad. She said she was fine and that it was a happy crying. As a kid you only really cry when you’re sad or hurt, so this didn’t make sense to me. She told me to run along and play, and later her and dad sat me down and told me that I was going to have a little brother or sister in a few months. I remember being very excited about this prospect.
The summer went by and mom got bigger. I had my 7th birthday party, which was interrupted by rain (26 of my 29 birthdays have been in some form or fashion…one almost killed me, but that’s another story), and school started back as usual. October rolled around and it was getting close to my best friend Shaune’s birthday. His party was on a Saturday and we had a great time. The next day dad came in my room and told me that I was going to have to stay with my friend Scott for the night. I thought that was odd since it was a Sunday, and it was a school night.
That night I went to the hospital with my grandparents to meet my little brother, Josh, for the first time. It was weird…I knew I was small, but he was just plain tiny. I had never held a baby before, and was terrified of dropping him. After mom came home it was pretty cool to have her home all the time and to have a baby that just looked up and laughed when you made faces at him. Very entertaining! As he got a little older mom decorated his room with large all stickers of the Disney Babies. One near his crib was Goofy, and every night before bed, mom would hold him up and he would “pat Goofy night-night” by reaching up and patting the sticker with his hand. We still have that wall cling somewhere in the attic.
Over the next few months a lot of things changed. Josh learned how to crawl, I finished the 2nd grade and we moved into a new house. We had a birthday party for Josh turning one, and we have photos of him in his high chair, face absolutely smeared with chocolate ice cream. The small piece of cake fully intact, but the ice cream was decimated….though most of it was on his face. Christmas came and every year it was the same story, we’d go to open presents and Josh would head straight for my stuff, leaving his behind. Though mostly because mine had bigger boxes…he’d grab the toy, put it in his mouth until someone took it away, pitch a mini-fit, then turn to the boxes and be content again.
Eventually Josh learned how to talk and walk with regular ease and went from a baby to a kid who had his own likes and dislikes as well as being someone that could play with us. One day we were playing around in the den and Josh was running around at full speed laughing. He tripped and fell, hitting his head against a piece of furniture. Just like that he went from being happy and giggling to lying on the floor screaming in pain. It was so sudden, so fast that I didn’t know what to do so I cried with him. That had an impact on me that I wouldn’t realize until much later.
In 1992 I had to have a bone-graft surgery due to my cleft palette. It was done at Duke and I was there for about a week since they had to take part of my left hip out and fuse it with bones in my mouth, so I couldn’t walk. Josh was only three at the time and didn’t make the trip up there with us. The doctors told me that if I could walk without pain, then I could go home. I didn’t think that I could do it because I was still in a lot of pain. One night dad drove home to pick up Josh while mom stayed with me in the hospital. When he got home he called mom to tell her that he had picked up Josh and gotten home okay. I asked dad if I could talk to him, and when dad asked Josh if he wanted to talk to me he said no. It was pretty late and I guess he was tired. I remember that being the only time that I cried around the surgery. It was then that I decided I had had enough and was ready to go home and see my brother. I told the doctors that I wanted to walk, and walked down the hall. They asked if it hurt and I lied my butt off and told them it didn’t. I just wanted to go home and see Josh.
1993, Josh is 4 years old and we sit down to watch a movie. This was a critical turning point for him. We start the movie; it’s a pretty dark movie with some bad guys robbing a stereotypical family, taking dad’s wallet and mom’s jewelry. Josh is pretty interested in what’s going on since the bad guys are suddenly running away from noises coming from places they can’t see. Suddenly, they were knocked down and beaten up. That’s when Josh got his first full view of Batman. After that, it was all over with. Josh would tie a towel around his neck and use it as a cape and would be Batman all the time. Around this time the animated series began, further fueling the fire. A family friend of ours actually made him a Batman cape and he wore it all the time. For his birthday that year, there were Batman toys aplenty, but what Josh really wanted was a Little Tykes Cozy Coupe. (You remember that red car with the yellow top that you could push around or go Fred Flintstone style with your feet?) We were all sitting around in the den, listening to Josh explain his new Batman toys to us when the garage door opened, and there was dad, pushing the Cozy Coupe up toward the house. Josh stopped, jumped to his feet and yelled out “My car!!” and ran outside with a grin on his face that mom and I wish to this day we had on film. After that there were tons of times where I would be pushing the car while Josh wore his Batman cape, pretending that the car was the Batmobile. Things were simple and fun.
Years passed and we got older. Josh got into video games and we would play Nintendo until we fell asleep in the summertime. Batman gave way to Power Rangers and we would watch it after school. We moved once again and Josh actually got the bigger of the two rooms (for a while…). That fall we started a tradition we keep to this day. On Christmas Eve we would gather in the same room and watch Christmas specials (and later the “24 Hours of ‘A Christmas Story’”) until we eventually fell asleep. One thing you have to know is that Josh absolutely loves Christmas. He’ll listen to Christmas music as early as possible, he just loves it. So every Christmas he bargained with mom and dad about what time to get up to open presents and see what Santa brought. He would sneak into my room and wake me up (even though I was already up….) and then we’d go get mom and dad. Our house is two stories, and Josh and I would sit at the top of the steps and wait for mom to go downstairs and look on in awe, then tell us we could come down.
He started Cub Scouts and did bowling, baseball, and a bunch of other activities. He got really into Pokemon and played the card game heavily. I tried to learn but it was beyond me. One summer Josh got a Sega Genesis and the Sega Channel, which plugged into the system and let you get games through the cable. It was pretty advanced for the time. We would get up early on the first day of each month and see what new games were available to play. We would play Earthworm Jim, Toe-Jam and Earl, Vectorman and all kinds of games. We played football in the yard, and I would strap one of dad’s motorcycle helmets on him and be a little bit rough with when tackling. I thought the helmet would be just fine…but never thought about him not having pads on. Oops. We got a basketball goal and played one on one all the time, with me winning most of the time due simply to size….but every now and then he’d get the better of me, and it pissed me off.
By the time I got to high school things started to change. I had to worry about my own self-image and maintaining my circle of friends as well as my girlfriend. This is where I’ve always felt that I failed as an older brother. Seven years is a very big difference when you’re in high school and in my mind I seem to remember being away a lot with my own friends and not spending time with Josh. I know he had friends of his own, but being his age and unable to drive I just have these visions of him sitting at home alone, playing in his room waiting for me to come home. And when I did I was usually involved in my own stuff and not spending as much time as I could. Even if it’s not true, I wish I could change it.
Before I went off to college I wrote mom and dad a letter, and Josh a separate letter. I don’t really remember what I wrote, but I know that it referenced a lot of the things we did together, and that I would come home when I could and see him. The day I left for school mom and dad rode in a truck together, and Josh rode with me. I remember us listening to music that we both liked. We talked about how I’d be home and I made sure he was okay with me being away. He said he was and held his composure pretty well….I don’t know if it was real or not. We moved me in and got things settled, and I said my goodbyes and told them all not to cry. I really figured mom would be the worst, but from what I’ve been told it was dad who was torn up the most!
Freshman year I went home often and called when I could. When Rocky Mount finally got high speed internet and Josh got his own computer we were able to IM back and forth and keep up that way. Holidays were great because since most of my stuff was at school I spent a lot of time in Josh’s room watching tv or playing games while he played with me or was doing stuff on the computer. The summer after freshman year was one of my favorites, mostly because of what Josh and I would do. We would sit up late nights after I got home from work and watch Conan O’Brien, then watch the reruns from weeks before that came on later. In between we would take turns working through Resident Evil 2 for Playstation or would watch this show on MTV where people would vote on what video they would play next, and we’d go online and vote too. We saw stuff on Conan and Letterman that we still laugh about today, including “Max, the Existentialist Storyteller,” deleted scenes from “The Score” that had Marlon Brando call someone a sweetheart and then “fall” through the floor, or the Letterman specials where he worked at the Drive Thru at Taco Bell that had him confuse a lady so bad that she drove off, prompting the next guy to tell him “She’s gone already, chief!” To us, that was about as funny as it got.
The next year was more of the same, and that summer was fun as well. I took Josh to see Spiderman the night before dropping him off at camp for two weeks. It was then that I finally got a feeling of what it was like on his end….and I didn’t like it. All I wanted to do was spend time with my brother, but he was off doing his own thing. While I missed him and didn’t want him to go, I was proud of him at the same time. When he came home we did much of the same as we did the previous summer….but he was getting older and becoming more of who he is today, and I knew that I might not be back the next summer….things were changing yet again.
When I moved into my first apartment in college, Josh came with my parents to help move me in and bring my bed and desk and large items. I was going to come home the next weekend anyhow (for what I don’t remember) so I convinced Josh to stay with me for the week and we had a great time with my roommates in Wilmington. We went to an Orioles game in DC and to the Blink-182 concert in Raleigh. It seemed that I was doing my best to include him as much as possible, and making the best of the time I had with him. This continued for a few more years, and every time I went home he got bigger and smarter…and better. There was a shift that occurred where it seemed like he was influencing me more than I was influencing him. I picked up on some of his music and started to like using a Mac. He started making more jokes that were some of the funniest things I’d heard in a long time, and it was fantastic.
I moved to Greensboro in January 2007, and that fall Josh moved to Wilmington to start college at UNCW. Of course I went to help move him in and help show him around town. While I did visit Wilmington quite a bit that year, I decided to let Josh have his own college experience and not spend all my time down there with him. The next year I would stay with him when I visited and have ever since, but that first year I felt like it was important to be an older brother again, give advice and stay out of the way and not a buddy who is always around. There are still days where I think about how cool it would be to live in Wilmington again, just to be in the same city as my brother one more time.
Josh turns 22 this week, which is so very strange for me. In my eyes he’ll always be middle school age. It’s so hard for me to think of him as an adult. When it comes to my brother there are many times where I feel like I let him down. Mostly in high school when he was little and I feel like I wasn’t around as much as I should have been. And right after that leaving for college and leaving him there alone and without his brother. I know how my brain works and how I tend to focus on a lot of the more negative times than the positives, and seeing how my dad and his brother aren’t very close bothers me that the same thing might happen between my brother and me. I feel like there are times now where I tend to spoil him, and I don’t care. I don’t know, maybe it’s me subconsciously trying to make up for doing what most people my age would normally do, or maybe the idea of him being unhappy or hurt like he was when he was little just wrecks me and I have to do whatever I can to make sure that doesn’t happen. Or maybe it’s a fear that we’ll grow apart….I don’t know. But one thing I do know, I love my brother more than just about anything else in this world and I’ll always try to make up for lost time, and will always be there for him.
Also, Josh if you’re reading this, I hope I didn’t embarrass you.
