Love of a Brother, part four

I knew my brother Harold all my life. He and I butted heads much of the time, because we were competitive, and that is the way with competitive siblings. And because our DNA was similar enough that I was at least once mistaken for him, we had quite an overlap of interests, Marbles and Bowling and Ping-Pong and old-school Skateboarding and Neil Young, just to name a few.

With Marbles, oddly parallel incidents occurred in our separate lives. Harold once brought a huge batch of his marbles to the local racetrack Turf Paradise on a family outing. We were seated just above and behind a corrugated tin roof above the ground-level spectators. The popcorn box Harold kept the marbles in was knocked over, and the marbles rattled down the tin roof and rained on the spectators below. Retrieving them was an embarrassing chore.

I lost my own marbles in middle school in a more complex way. I had a cheap gumball machine that I’d fill with marbles, mostly cheap and ordinary but including a few real treasures, including the coveted Bumblebee. For a penny a kid could try his luck, shaking the gumball machine if desired to try to get a good marble into position. On a good day I could make 19 cents, which at the time was worth three candy bars and three Bazooka Joe bubble gums, plus one penny tax at the 5% rate prevalent in Glendale, Arizona in the mid 1960s.

But my fledgling business literally went bust in the classroom. I had arrogantly placed my gumball machine atop my desk, whose desktop was slanted about five degrees. My errant elbow sent the contraption sliding over that edge, it fell to the floor and the cheap plastic shattered, and the marbles rolled in all directions. Miss Morse had everyone bring them to her desk, my gumball machine was tossed into one of the gray metal trash cans, and my fledgling entrepreneurial venture came to an ignominious end.

Harold was a star long-jumper in high school, setting the sophomore record with a leap of 21 feet. Soon after, I found to my shame that though our DNA was similar, mine lacked the fast-twitch muscle fiber necessary for long-jumper success. But I tried anyway, stubborn mule that I was, even to imitating Harold’s fish-faced puffing as he picked up speed on the way to the sandpit. Alas, my personal best in the long jump was a pathetic 15 feet, 6 inches.

Harold and I were estranged for many years, starting on May 16, 1991, the day I resigned in protest from Aim-Safe, my family’s safety-equipment business. It was too high-voltage to interact with him, so for the most part I kept away, looking for and finding work elsewhere and teaching daughter Katie (now Kate) to read and cipher and ride a bike.

Years passed. Life unfolded. Eventually Harold and I started doing things together again, mostly restaurant meals but an occasional movie or exercise at the Phoenix College track. And we went to Boise together in 2003, alas, after the untimely passing of his first daughter, my beloved niece Lori Marie. Harold bought my plane ticket.

Three days ago we had a Celebration of Life for Harold.

My niece Anna told the story of how Harold took an unhoused man home for a family meal and overnight shelter, only to find him long gone in the morning, along with a bicycle and other miscellany. “If only that were the only time Dad did that,” Anna said with a wry smile.

When I spoke, I imitated Harold’s voice three times, first imagining what part of him must have been thinking when he had had cardiac arrest (“Oh, COME ON!!” in frustrated anger) (amazing fact: Anna and her husband Blayne kept Harold alive in the six-or-so minutes it took for the EMTs to show up), then what he shouted when Harrison Ford prevailed in The Fugitive (an uber-enthusiastic “ALL RIGHT!!”, and he was the only one in the theater to do so), and what he said when he saw me in the doorway the very last time I visited him: “My brother.” Parkinson’s and cognitive decline had done a number on his quality of life, but he was still a loving, striving man.

Some years ago I had given Harold and his loving wife Terry a vase I had made on the potter’s wheel and inscribed with Hebrews, chapter 12, verse 1: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that encumbers, and the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” And as Fate would have it, the valedictory poem that is featured in the cards we received for his Celebration of Life is titled “I have Finished the Race.”

You have, my brother. I hope you are enjoying the Great Beyond. I love you.