|
sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
|
The Eldest of The Demon Brotherhood
How Sentimental, Take One Let me tell you, sorting through my old photos for pictures of my brothers sent me on the inevitable sentimental journey. Which I hate doing, but there it is. And here you are. My oldest brother? I still won't tell any stories about him, but I will put up a few pictures of him. I thought about what his reaction might be to my putting this stuff online without his permission, and I'm sure if I told him I had done so I'd get a disapproving growl. But you know what? I'm going to do it anyway. Just because he was so damn cute as a baby. See?
There he was, sitting on Santa's lap. He must have been about a year and a half when that was taken. And this is his school picture from, I think, the second or third grade:
Here is the earliest photo I have of us together. My grandmother is holding me. My brother is being held up by my grandmother's third husband, Mike. (I cut Mike out of the picture, but that's okay, he didn't last long in my grandmother's life either--they were divorced after a few years.)
That photo doesn't have a date on it, but there I am in my christening outfit, so I must have been about three months old. That would make my brother about three-and-a-half years old. Here we are together at Christmas, probably, oh, around 1977.
Oh, wait. I will tell you a story about him: My brother and my father have the same name, so they became known as Big __ and Little __ to most people. But sadly, when he was a baby, my mother inadvertently gave him the nickname that plagued him as a child when she (a first time mother, all of sixteen years old) was shocked at this tiny, little, weeks-old baby who could blow a snot bubble the size of his own head. Yeah, she started everyone calling him "Booger." (And, yes, even now that he's 36, my grandmother still sometimes calls him this.) Poor my brother. In all fairness, I will go ahead and tell you that the nickname that plagued me as a child was given to me by my father (and its level of insult will truly only be appreciated by my fellow brown kids). It was "Gringa" (which is a derogatory Spanish term for "white girl"). I cried so much when I was called by this name that eventually it was changed to "Green Grass" (because my father had such a hard time not calling me "Gringa" that he would say it, then when I cried, would protest that he had really said "Green Grass.") Anyway, that's my older brother. He is still my favorite.
More lies:
|
|||||
