Family Stories: Daniel, My Brother

Family Stories: A Brother Visit

Daniel My Brother asked if he could visit a couple of weeks ago.

Well, of course! Visits from Daniel, specifically at our house but in general anywhere at all are too rare. I assumed we were just a stopover; a place for him to rest on his way back to my parent’s in Oregon. We are in a strategic stopover place; guaranteed to house frequent travelers.

But it turned out that Daniel drove up just to see us.

And we had such a lovely visit.

(including a tour of Salt Lake’s Temple Square in springtime: Frank, Daniel, and I)

(Below, Faux Staten Island: Free photos in the genealogy center…I’m trying to look travel worn)

Why would Daniel’s visit be such a surprise? Why was this occasion so rare?

These are important questions to me.  I’m considering them, having come to value family stories.  Meanwhile, for the sake of a random ramble, I’ll write about what I do know.

Daniel was born just three months before I turned seventeen. I remember my parents telling us that my mom was expecting, and thinking…Hmm. A change. A novelty.  I liked those sorts of surprises…the news that we were going to move, the news that someone might visit us or we might travel to visit them, the news that my mom was expecting again. Any kind of news that meant change. I remember when Daniel was born (my mom’s third Caesarean), visiting the hospital thirty miles away from home. Her room felt strange to me. Not homey. And she did not seem herself.  I felt slightly threatened, uncomfortable.  And I worried that Daniel might be fragile.  When I was five, our first brother came too early, just a few years before isolettes and intubation.  We lost him.  When I was eight, my second brother, David, was my mom’s first Caesarean; an emergency.  We almost lost him, too–and Mom, Dad tells us.  A frightening thought.

But Daniel is anything but fragile.

He has wildly curly hair, beautiful eyes, a huge grin. His hair less wild now that he’s in his 20’s.  Still curly.  I’m surprised that his skin is ruddy, and not more olive, like my dad’s.  Even as a toddler (or maybe, especially as a toddler?) he was bewitchingly charismatic.  We laughed at almost everything he did.  And later everything he said.  And I remember that if he got too tired, he became a little crazy.  Some nights, it was my job (and I don’t remember minding it) to rock him to sleep…he’d climb  and jump all over me and the blue rocking chair I tried to hold him in, until finally, absolutely exhausted, he’d suddenly be out.  Just like that.  Asleep.  I’d always feel smugly victorious that I’d won our little battle.  And tender, when I considered his sweaty curls and angelic sleeping face.  Reluctant to lay him down in his bed, he slept so sweetly.

He was a beginning toddler when I left for college, when I lost track of him.   When he started saying those cute things.  Three, almost four when I got married.  Always entirely loveable when we visited…although by the time he was ten and my youngest sister was five (my mom had Nola nine months after I had my oldest, five years after she had Daniel), he could be a pill.  A disarmingly cute pill.  And now, I think it must have been painful for him to transition from the charismatic, entirely loveable baby to the charismatic, sometimes frustrating boy.

Sometimes I was scandalized by how he talked to my mom, as he hit adolescence.  Mostly, I was still charmed, but also…guilty. Guilty that I really didn’t know him anymore.  I missed an awful lot.  Reaching for anecdotes now, I’m coming up blank.

Sometimes his eyes seemed to be telling me that he needed something from me, but I couldn’t quite guess what.  He was too old now to rock to sleep…the only thing I’d ever really been good at doing for him.

And when life got scarier and crazier for him—those teenage years, connecting was even more awkward.  I felt terribly boring, fearing that  anything I could share might sound like a lecture.  Pedantic.  His wrecked cars, heartbreaks…I could only laugh at the winning things he said or the radical things he did.  Like microwave a telephone, his friend at the end of the line listening.  Teach himself guitar.

Disappear for awhile.  There was a stretch—a couple years, when my youngest was a toddler, that I cried every time I tried to sing “Danny Boy” along with Eva Cassidy, driving.  I tried again and again, til I’d worn past the lump in my throat and I was almost confident my voice matched Eva’s.

And now, my brother Daniel seeks me out. Which is nice.  Daniel says he’s ready to let his family back in, that he wants the connection.  Guiltily, I think…no, it wasn’t you, it was me.  I got lost back there in the rocking chair.  At any rate, however awkward it is initially, we really talk now when we visits.  And  regardless of the seventeen years’ difference and the lost years, I find myself often measuring my choices, my thoughts, against Daniel’s (the ones he’s shared with me).  Having found that he is remarkably wise, in ways I’d like to reach for.

This one’s for you, Danny Boy. Thank you.

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