My brother’s world of adventure

My little brother was born today. Except now he’s not that little. He’s a dad to three kids, husband to the amazing and possibly immortal M, and owns a house.

He was my original creative partner. Together we made up all sorts of things. My dad used to work in an office, and would bring home old school IBM printer paper for us from work. My mom would stitch a spine into a stack of it with yellow yarn, making it into a book. E and I would bust out our box o’ crayons (a huge wooden box, which once possibly held booze, that my mama turned into crayon storage. I can still feel the sensation of my hand raking through various lengths of crayons, and the smell of wax and possibility) and our technicolor Crayola markers and draw stories.

We made worlds together. We’d take the GI Joes and Barbies out into the yard in the spring. We’d use my mom’s pruning clippers to cut out the middle of a patch of fast-growing grass, and that would be a doll bivouac. GI Joes had to explain why they were so small and Barbie was so big. It was an Amazon situation, in the jungles of a lawn in the Midwest.

There were snow forts, chokecherry wars, the time we made little paper hats for all our stuffed animals and set them up as one audience in his room for my mom’s birthday.

My brother always knew who he was. He came in knowing. He knew what he liked, and what he didn’t. There was the great stand off around eating vegetables. My mom had cut a deal with him — he could pick one vegetable to refuse, and would never have to eat it when it crossed his plate. But everything else was fair game. He picked tomatoes. I remember a bag of tomatoes getting sealed off in a ziplock and put in the freezer. I remember my brother being dismissed from the table to go to his room, and choosing instead to sit in the front coat closet. He was bold. Defiant. Unintimidated by the consequences.

We dug up squirrel bones in the backyard one summer.

We held a sticker convention in the living room, where we meticulously laid out our prize stickers and negotiated trade deals.

We got up at the crack of dawn on Saturdays to watch cartoons and eat sugary cereal.

As we got older, I turned to writing and found verbal people who liked making things up. When I was 13, the next door neighbor and I started writing plays together and staging them in our basements. My brother is more of a feeling-body guy… he got into skateboarding, mischief, and watching TV.

I learned the joy of making things with my brother. He’s now an artist — a printmaker — but his whole environment is infused with things and experiences that are made by hand. He values what people make themselves, with their own hands. He believes, I think, that what we make ourselves has a special potency and value to it. He also values the exchange of handmade things between his friends. He’s participated in art exchanges, where his people trade a piece of art they have made for something another artist has made.

In this way, my brother is a spider. He has always woven a web of connection between his people. Everywhere he goes, certain people are drawn to him, charmed by his different way of looking at the world. I think he makes it safe for them to be different, too. When we were in high school, he used to skateboard in our neighborhood with some kids in middle school. That didn’t strike me as unusual at the time, but looking back, I think that most high schoolers don’t welcome the company of younger kids. My brother did.

My brother has also taught me to let myself love what I love. He loves the Simpsons. It’s a religious experience, to watch the Simpsons with my brother. He laughs his ass off, sometimes to the point of crying. It’s like being in the audience of a holy person, when you are with him and he is laughing. He possesses this rare ability to completely give himself over to whatever it is that he is engaged with. Whether it’s watching the Simpsons or looking at a map. My brother studies maps like he’s about to go blind and needs to memorize where everything is before he does.

My brother introduced me to the world of wilderness adventures. I tend to be someone who could sit in a room and let her imagination carry her on a magic carpet ride. But my brother is fierce about getting out into the world, especially into the wilderness. He was the one who got me a job leading backcountry hiking trips and long distance bike tours. When I wasn’t convinced that someone could even ride a bike up, over, and down a mountain, my brother was the one who said, “you can do it. You’ll be fine.” He’d already done it the summer before, so I trusted him.

I can’t fully put into words how much of an impact this has had on me. None of my college friends were going out into the woods like this. None of them were testing the limits of their physical endurance and mental stability by riding bikes through the mountains for 12 hours a day. If my brother hadn’t done it first and then told me I could do it, too, I would have stayed in a world of offices, buildings, and cities. I would have never known how to traverse the civilized world like a sport, or an adventure.

What you’ve given me, E (because I’ve just decided to send this to you when I’m done) is freedom. If you hadn’t invited me into your world of sports and adventure, I would have continued on a path of operating in someone else’s built environment, following the path they had intended for me. You helped me see that I have options for how I traverse the built landscape (and that I can always retreat into the wilds of nature and find myself again when the civilized world gets to be too much). Remember that book you gave me? Outside Lies Magic? That was the reframe— that I don’t have to walk on the sidewalk, just because it’s there. That I don’t have to follow traffic patterns, if I’m not in a car. That plumbing the cracks and the in betweens of the built landscape — the alleys, the old rail line through ways, the spaces that haven’t been developed or designed — is always an option.

This has changed how I move through cities in the most wonderful way. I know I don’t have to buy anything to belong. And if I’m bored or its feeling stuffy in the city, get outside and change it up.

You gave me an adventure orientation to life.

And on the wilderness side of things, I feel at home in the forest and out in the mountains, because of your example and our adventures together. I didn’t know how to set up a tent or cook on a camp stove before that first trip you hired me for at O. But you were like, “ah, you’ll be fine.”

That was all I needed to hear. And now I poop in the woods like the rest of the forest creatures.

So, thank you. Thank you for expanding my natural habitat. Thank you for showing me the door to the world has always been open, and how to cross over the threshold.

And thank you for being your own man, from the beginning. Happy birthday, my brother.
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