The Wayside

In February, I started Blogging. With no job, few obligations, and a lot of free time alone in a new city, I had little else to do. I wrote almost daily, as ideas for "articles" crossed my mind. It was intended as a way to keep my writing sharp, not as a place to post my diary to the world, but a diary is what my blog seems to have become. As I've found ways to fill my daytimes, I've had less time to dwell on abstract ideas. Or perhaps it's simply that fewer ideas now come. But I have started something. Shortly after I began blogging, my mother jumped on the idea. She'd recently divorced her career to avoid divorcing her too-traveled husband and she, too, needed an outlet for her time and energies. Soon afterwards, my brother began one as well. It's his that now means the most to me.

My brother and I are separated by 5 years and a lot of life. When we moved from Michigan to Tennessee, I was eight but he was not yet four. I had a number of troubles adjusting to the new state, including the loss of friends and extended family and transferring from a Top 10 to a Bottom 10 school system, but my brother was too young to be so attached to Michigan, and in Tennessee he flourished. While I fell into early depressions, gaining weight and resentment, his health dramatically improved. His asthma disappeared, his stomach troubles ended, and he entered the only school system he'd know healthy and robust. He had neighborhood friends -- not always the ones I'd have chosen for him, but better than no friends at all -- and, although I was older, my brother took Alpha position between us.

Ten years later, when I was graduating from high school and my brother had yet to enter it, I moved out of the house. While my mother and brother fought for the Household Alpha title, I determined that I could be Alpha without the fight in my own home. However, I missed the connection to my brother's high school years. I knew that he played football and dated girls, but I didn't know what he thought about, what his dreams were, or what he hoped to be. When he was graduating from high school, he was deciding to start a family. His first wife and first child came hard upon the ceremony.

Another ten years passed while our lives continued on different paths. He took a "real" job to support his family as his family grew while I worked several part-time jobs to make ends meet before settling on a long commute between two demanding jobs which was so ridiculously dangerous that even I have a hard time believing I did it. During those years, I spent very little time with family, and I ended them by moving away from my family to Nashville.

My brother's life has continued to grow and change, as mine has, without my supervision. He is now the father of four, a home-owner, and a grown-up. I missed a lot of this transition. My brother is a man a barely know. But I've got the basics. And I read his blog. And every day I learn a little more.

It's time for me to step back up to the plate and write more than a diary. Because I can only hope that my brother learns a little bit about me, too.