I don’t love anyone like I love my brother T-Bob.
We talk by phone every week, laugh at the same jokes and hate the same movies. I solicit investment tips and he requests marital advice. We two are tight.
It hasn’t always been thus. As children we tried, with malice aforethought, to kill each other.
One summer afternoon 40 years ago, T-Bob tricked me into drinking iodine. I retaliated by attempting to sever his toes with a hatchet.
Daddy grabbed his snarling progeny by the ears and announced, “As mad as y’all are now, that’s how much you’ll love each other when you’re grown.”
“She won’t live that long, Daddy,” T-Bob said. “Dumbness will kill her dead.”
Daddy tightened his grip and said, “Son, the day will come when you’ll do anything for your sister.”
Then he shook me. “Same goes for you. You’ll outgrow this hatchet foolishness.”
We were released with a stern warning to practice kindness and wash the dishes while we were at it.
Years later we learned that Daddy walked in the house and told Mama, “They’re going to kill each other.” She smiled and crocheted another afghan.
T-Bob also pushed me out of the tall birch tree, held my head under in the goldfish pond and split my upper lip with a six-ounce Coke bottle, which earned him the worst beating I ever saw, before or since.
What explains such bad blood? The green-eyed monster, Mama claimed. She said T-Bob was outraged by my arrival. “He was the baby for only 13 months,” she explained. “He used to crawl in the crib and drink your bottle. That’s why you’re so short.” (I’m short because she is 4-feeet-11 and Daddy was 5-feet-7, but you can’t tell her that.)
As the years went by, T-Bob and I declared a grudging truce. Then we began sharing secrets, fears and dreams. By the time my first marriage ended he was my best friend. He searched for ways to help.
“Let me give you money,” he said. I demurred. “Let me introduce you to someone,” he said. I declined. “Let me find you a roommate,” he said. I refused.
Then he played his trump card.
“Let me take you to California,” he said, and a week later we were in San Francisco. There, on a beautiful, balmy day, I realized exactly how much I love my brother.
We were strolling on the Embarcadero, watching musicians and mimes and jugglers. T-Bob bought a bag of delicious coconut cookies, and we munched as we walked.
Then appeared before mine eyes an amazing vision: A man, painted blue and wearing a black-and-white cow suit, held up a sign that said, “Will moo for change.” Passersby tossed coins in a bucket and he mooed like a champ: “Mwwwooooooooh. Mwooooo-hoo!”
T-Bob licked his fingers, looked at me and proclaimed, “There but for a shred of sanity go I.”
It was the funniest one-liner in the history of human speech.
I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I staggered and shrieked and lost motor control 2,500 miles from home. All this, from a woman who expected to never laugh again.
“You so funny!” I howled. “You! So! Funny!”
Normal folk stared and edged away as T-Bob bawled, “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life!!”
Then he winked, leaned against a bench and ate the last coconut cookie.
Julie R. Smith, who hopes T-Bob never needs a kidney, can be reached at widdleswife@aol.com.