After a long hiatus, I’m beginning the Encyclopedia of Me series again.  The subject for this post is brothers.  Brothers have been a big part of my life; I have four of them.  A fifth brother, Donny, who would have been my third oldest brother, died when he was little.

I am the youngest of seven children.  Five of those children are boys.  (I’ll mention my sisters in a later post.)  Each one of my brothers is different from any other.  My oldest brother is in many ways the typical oldest child.  A type A personality, he could often be bossy when we were growing up.  Frankly I didn’t like him very much for most of my childhood.  He was in to sports, especially football, and played on our local high school team until a knee injury put him out of commission for good.  After that incident, he and my second oldest brother, who were often at odds and could easily get into a fight with each other, seemed to put aside their differences.  He was the first one in our family to marry, and I still remember how much that changed our family in a good way because we gained a new family member in my sister-in-law.  Then he and my sister-in-law began to make a family of their own, ending up with six children of their own.  Two of them are now married and one of those two now has a baby, making my brother a grandpa.  I think my oldest brother and I have largely made peace with each other after quite a long period of sometimes strained relations.  Something that I think we have now which was lacking for so long was mutual respect.

My second oldest brother also played football in high school, but I remember him as one who was more interested in the natural world.  He loved fishing, and he also enjoyed catching butterflies and moths and at one time had a pretty good collection of different bugs, butterflies, and moths pinned onto a big, white pinning board.  He was the one who introduced us to butterfly nets and the fun of chasing and catching butterflies, and taught us how to mount them.  He was always interested in bees and has cared for his own bee hives for several years.  He was the one who bought a purebred Irish setter, appropriately named Belle, and brought her into our family.  She wasn’t the only dog we had when I was growing up, but she will always be my favorite.  For as long as I’ve known him, my second oldest brother has been apt to worry about financial matters.  I think I would have been better off if I had a measure of his caution and conservative attitude toward money!  A few years after my oldest brother married, he married as well.  Interestingly, his wife and my oldest brother’s wife were good friends who knew each other long before they met either brother.  He has three children now, and the oldest recently became engaged to be married.

The third oldest brother, like the first two, was athletic in high school and at one time was co-captain of the football team.  He was not someone to mess with and I well remember the time when I was in junior high (sometimes called middle school) and two of my classmates decided to get into a fight in the mens’ locker room.  My brother happened to come in during the fight and according to accounts from others who were witnesses to the event (unfortunately I wasn’t one of them), he picked up both combatants by the scruff of their necks and proceeded to break up the fight by knocking their heads together.  At least that was the way it was told to me.  He went on to become an accountant and has progressed to senior administrative positions at the nearby university.  He was the one who got me my first job, working with him at a paint store.  He also gave me a job at the university which enabled me to pay for my undergraduate education, and he allowed me to ride to and from the university with him each day, thus enabling me to save room and board by living at home.  More than that, he paid for countless lunches, dinners, and more.  He hardly blinked an eyelash when I wrecked his car one time.

My fourth oldest brother is the one I am closest to, both in age and relationship.  He is a twin; his twin is one of my older sisters.  He and I shared a room for most of our growing up years and unlike my sisters, who seemed to always have something to fight about, we rarely argued or fought with one another.  We had some real humdinger fights, though.  He was always more athletic than me and although I think he’d disagree with me about this, I always thought he was more popular with others than I ever was.  When I was about five or six years old, we would be trying to get to sleep at night, him on the bottom bunk bed and me and the top one, and he would enjoy making scary noises to scare the heck out of me.  I was the biggest chicken in the world, afraid of anything and everything, especially in the dark.  He and I enjoyed various hobbies, including breeding guppies and other fish.  At one time we had three or four aquariums operating throughout our bedroom in the basement of the house we were living in. We spent a lot of time playing outdoors and down by the river near our house.

Much more could be written about growing up with four brothers, but I think this will suffice for now.  I’ve purposely left them unnamed, but I love each and every one of them for who they are and for the experiences we’ve had together over the years.