My Big Brother Says...

A younger sibling endures a lot. And we are often changed for life by our older siblings; usually for the worse. My brother is 6 years older than me, so I always thought he knew everything. Well, 'cause he told me he did, so of course I believed him. I guess all along he was cut out to be a lawyer. He was always talking his way out of stuff. And...talking me into stuff. His talking always got me into trouble. Mostly, my brother has always had a gift for making up great stories.

He has always had a quick explanation for EVERYTHING. Truthful -his explanations are often not. Some of them I easily saw through; the little people in the TV, the monster stories, booger stories but over time his storytelling skills improved and he had some really convincing stories. Sugar rats, his special homemade candy, escalators with green lights that would suck a kid up, fish that would bite my toes in the lake (I swam in socks for years). He fooled me lots of times. After having a son I now know that the best power a brother has over a sister is fear.

Over the years I often just accepted his explanations and it often changed the way I did things. You gotta understand, he was really convincing. As I got older I would say, "Oh! be careful with that! My brother had a friend who had one of those explode." And, the grown up me would stop and realize... wait. That's really dumb... There's no way that can actually explode. Today at 38 years old I was helping the girls with something and I said, "Oh, don't do that that way, Uncle Todd had a friend who died when he ... and I stopped and I thought... you know, I better start fact checking my brother before I pass his craziness down to the next generation." I can just see my grandchildren telling their children some crazy falsehood about their eyeballs popping out if they sneeze with their fingers in their ears or something. And they'll claim they know it's really true because they had a great uncle that had a friend who saw it happen.