Stamped: June 26th, 2007 | Toggle Similar
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I've been homesick recently. Summer in the city always does it to me. I love summer and sun and everything about hot and heat. Summer reminds me of Georgia because there it's pretty much summer from March to November. Winter is a New York season but summer I think about home and this morning I started thinking about my little brother.

My brother is 22 and one of those people who will be good looking his whole life. He eats cake batter and cookie dough raw, smokes green like it's going out of style, and never works out yet manages to maintain a physique that rivals that of an Olympic sprinter.

I was three when he was born and I remember seeing him in the hospital nursery. A little fat yellow butterball with curly hair and a scrunched up face. My grandmother and aunts there, pointing and laughing, "He's so cute."

"I don't like that one," I told them. "Let's not take that one home."

But we did. And he's been there ever since. As a child I was amazed at how dumb my little brother could be . My dad was adamant about us finishing all of our food at the dinner table. I learned early on about the chew-and-spit-into-a-paper-towel method of deceit. My brother was never that canny and always got in trouble because he'd leave the remnants of his chicken nuggets right on top of all the trash in the kitchen trash can.

My parents were very overprotective from elementary school to high school, my brother was my only companion since it was rare that I could go and hang out at a friend's house without a special reason or occasion.

When he was three, we were playing on the back of my dad's truck. My brother decided to bite down on side rail. I grabbed his legs and gave a yank. He fell back into me and his right front tooth fell to the ground. My brother was missing that tooth from age three til the permanent one grew in after he turned 10.

When he was seven, he was crawling around on the floor in the den covered with a blanket, pretending to be a monster. I was trying to watch Family Matters and was getting increasingly more annoyed that he was making noise. Suddenly he let out a yelp. I got up from the couch and gave him a good knock in the head with my hand letting him know that it was time to shut the fuck up. My mother then intervened and that's when we discovered that he was crying not because I hit him but because he had crawled over a needle I'd carelessly left on the floor after finishing up with my newest hobby: sewing.

That's right–he had my needle stuck in his knee and the next day we went to the hospital and they had to surgically remove it. The kid was stuck on crutches for a month.

Somewhere between me graduating from high school and going to college, my little brother grew up. Suddenly I couldn't cheat him in Uno anymore. Promises of favors ceased to hold sway. He grew a foot and was taller than me. My little brother was turning into a man. We didn't watch wrestling on pay per view together anymore. We stopped spending our New Years Eves with musicals on the Disney Channel. He had forgotten that we used to spend summers glued to the TV at our aunt's house with Bo and Hope from Days Of Our Lives.

Sometimes when I go home to Georgia, my brother drives his shiny-rimmed, loud speakered, pimped out '89 Chevy Caprice to pick me up at the airport. He likes to put in the fake gold and diamond studded teeth piece my mom bought him in a moment of weakness. He plays his music too loud and the way he smokes his Newport cigarettes is laughable. But he's my brother and no matter how much he's changed and I've changed, he'll always be the cute little boy who was afraid to sleep in his top bunk because it was beside the window and he thought he'd wake up and someone would be looking in. The little boy who shares my love for meals that consist of pizza and french fries. The little boy whose room I used to sleep in whenever I was scared or he was scared. And to this day he's the only person who really gets my sense of humor sometimes.

Last 5 posts by Brandy

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