"Never, I guess," I said, feeling like the question was just really bizarre. It doesn't matter that he's bigger than I am, old enough to buy alcohol or join the Marines, or smokes like a chimney; he'll always be my little brother.
Every family has its craziness. Every member of every family is convinced that their family is definitely the weirdest, most screwed-up, or most special, but in the end, the flocks tend to be pretty average--fluffy and pale, with the exception of one or two off-kilter black-wooled members who make the rest bleat in frustration more often than not. When I look at my family, though, I can't help but feel like the sheep analogy comes up short. There are one or two of us who put on the white wool when we have to, but for the most part, the darker spectrum suits us as we line up in shades of black when we get together. Okay, so we have an entire family of black sheep, each not quite understanding the rest, but recognizing a similar cadence in temperament. And then, there's my brother. In the family of black sheep, he's the Goat.
There have been lots of times when I've looked at my brother and asked myself, "how is it that we come from the same gene pool? How were we raised in the same house?" While my cousin--raised with us, basically a sister--and I never entertained the notion that we might not go straight to college after high school, it was a constant, painful, uphill battle just to get my brother to get through 12th grade. I'll never understand why he took up smoking, since he, right along with the rest of us, has spent his entire life watching members of our family die of lung cancer. I'll never figure out why so many things "seemed like a good idea at the time" to him, or how he ever managed to survive others. So many times, I just gave up, figuring that my brother was just another of the mysteries of the Universe that are destined to passeth all understanding. I just didn't speak Goat.
I never gave up all hope, though. There's just something about my brother that makes anyone who knows him need to believe that the good kid you know is in there will win. He's funny as hell, his heart's in the right place, and you can still find him playing with Legos and watching cartoons on a Saturday morning. He has a buoyant personality, ebbing or rising to suit the level of those who currently surround him--often with mixed results. We've had a rough go of it for the past couple of years, but this Christmas, my family got what I see as the best present we could want: my brother has enrolled in school. This isn't to say that going to school would be the only acceptable path for him to follow. If he'd joined the military, begun an apprenticeship, started in a job where he could work his way up to a stable position that'd support him, I'd be just as happy to see him taking those reins and getting his shit together.
Still, school is what he's chosen, and I have high hopes for his success. He's going full-time in pursuit of a career in the precision automotive field. He explained some of it to me, but it's honestly over my head. Sure, I was a bit of a garage brat, and I can change sparkplugs or if pressed, rebuild a carburetor as long as I have a manual, but I'm nothing like the gearhead he's going to be when they get through with him. We joke that when you hear him say, "trust me," you run for your life. That kid has been blowing up lawnmowers, go-carts, and dryers ever since he could turn a wrench. Maybe you think that doesn't bode well for his ambitions, but I personally think he'll be glad of the knowledge he'll gain to let him take stuff apart without that snapping, sizzling, smoking shrapnel that has so often trailed in his wake like a second shadow. Knowing that he's going after something he'll enjoy and probably be good at gives me confidence that he'll really thrive. He's not trying to hide in with the sheep. He's finally figured out that it's okay to be the Goat.
My gift to him this Christmas was a copy of David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, because it contains the story You Can't Kill the Rooster, which Sedaris wrote about his own brother, and I couldn't resist sharing the similarities between Sedaris's Rooster and my Goat. He started reading the story at the page I'd marked as soon as he opened it, then left the noise of the family and guests to sit on the porch and read the rest. Whe he'd finished and I told him why I'd chosen that book for him, he said, "you finally understand me."
Note: If you're reading this in an environment where it isn't suitable to play the above reading, which does contain profanity, you can read the story here, though the version in Me Talk Pretty One Day (read aloud by the author in the audio clip above) is longer, and continues to a nice ending.
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