My Brother's Birthday

A few weeks ago my older brother observed the beginning of a fourth year in this brave new world of the ninth decade. I wasn’t sure what to extend in the way of congratulations. Aging is not, in itself, an accomplishment but a biological imperative over which we have limited influence. Perhaps the best I could do was offer some greeting card-style sentiment like, “Best wishes for your future health and happiness.” But the bland impersonality of that expression had scant appeal.

When I was a kid, my psyche was dominated to an absurd and probably unhealthy degree by a burning desire to do everything my brother was allowed to do, notwithstanding the nearly two-year gap in our ages. Boys on a farm were conscripted for work at an early age, and while most chores, like gathering eggs, or pulling weeds, or carrying buckets of slop to the hogs, were tedious in the extreme, one was eagerly anticipated because it marked the passage from a kind of extended infanthood to the wonders of the adult world. That was the driving of tractors.

This essential farm vehicle was in constant use during planting and harvesting seasons, but at other times it would sit idle, inviting my brother and me to take turns on the seat with our feet dangling above the brakes and clutch, twisting the steering wheel back and forth and making engine noises by blowing air through our lips. My brother was—and still is—taller than me, and when his feet could reach those pedals my father showed him how to start the engine and work the throttle and shift the transmission, all while I seethed with envy and impatience to grow another six inches so that I could take my place on what looked from my unprivileged vantage point like a royal throne.

By the time I got to high school there was a second tractor, and I could handle both with an adroitness equal, in my mind at least, to my brother’s. But another thorn had emerged from the tendrils of envy, the fact that when my brother turned sixteen he would be legally allowed to drive a car while I would be condemned to the second-class status of passenger. We went to church every Sunday in a small town a dozen miles from our farm, and after he got his license my brother often drove, with my parents in the back seat and me in “shotgun,” a term that only later came into vogue. There I watched the monotonous agricultural scenery flow past the windows and dreamed of the moment daylight pushed the darkness from my life and I would be allowed to do everything my brother was allowed to do.

At that point I had already begun a pointless flailing at authority, fueled by a sense of being oppressed by almost everything embraced by the adult world. It would be several years before I read Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, but when I did it struck a loud chord in its description of American society as corrupt, hopelessly hypocritical, and destructive to the mental health of its habitués. Wylie gave voice to the chaos of unarticulated ideas and feelings in my mind, and while it’s hard to pick a single passage as illustration, the following harangue on the glorification of the “common people” as an embodiment of the country’s values is typical of hundreds of jeremiads aimed at militarism, religion, motherhood, education, and almost everything else considered bedrocks of society.

“It is common people,” he writes, “who run off our many annual lynchings. It is common people who scream for blood at prize fights. It is common people who, acting concertedly, vote fools into Congress and the state legislatures. It is common people who fill the insane asylums. Common people massacre each other on our highways. Common people, mostly, fill our penitentiaries. Common people run our rackets.”

The fact that Wylie wrote the book in 1942, the year of my birth, seemed an auspicious fact although I would have been hard pressed to put my finger on a reason why. Not long after I read that book, I discovered Henry Miller, who had a similarly jaundiced view of American society but articulated it in a less overheated and polemical style, and leavened his diatribes with a substantial measure of humor. Miller and I were both born on the day after Christmas, a fact to which I also attributed significance that survived all thrusts of logic and rationality. But the kind of hyperbolic nihilism expounded by Wylie, and a similar world view that was a constant and sometimes tiresome adjunct to Miller’s adventures with a cast of picaresque characters gradually lost its appeal, like the hard candies I loved as a child but haven’t touched in a long time. By the time I was in college and married, my views of society in the lurid colors of Wylie’s renderings hadn’t changed; what was different was a belief in change, in the efficacy of demonstrating against war, canvassing for the candidate with the right ideas, casting a ballot, speaking out against racism and sexism not just in rants and polemics but in the form of action.

But what, you might ask, does this digression have to do with sibling envy and its manifestations?

After I got my driver’s license, the urge to compete with my brother faded and lay fallow for a number of years. As an adult I made the unremarkable discovery that while I was free to do whatever I wanted, there were limitations and barriers everywhere, both beyond and within my control. When I was in high school my father, who had little interest in sports either as participant or spectator, helped put up a rim on the side of the corn crib and I spent hours shooting baskets in the vain hope that I would actually hear the coach call my name during a game. It took awhile to accept the fact that no amount of work would overcome physical limitations, just as no amount of wishful thinking would turn my introverted skin inside out and make me a witty bon vivant who would cause girls to swoon and other boys to smolder with envy.

When I decided, at the age of twenty-three, to quit my job at a meatpacking plant and enroll in a state university, I chose to major in engineering. The reasons for this ill-considered decision are important only inasmuch as they illustrate the aforementioned delusions about my innate abilities. But at this point my brother was living in California, the paradise from which I had been rudely ejected, and his letters—no email in those prehistoric days—brimmed with accounts and descriptions of cars, women, travels, boats, all manner of wondrous things. I eschewed whatever social experiences offered themselves and studied. I sat at my desk in my narrow little room until late at night, poring over math and chemistry and physics books while my roommate snored in his bunk. The first quarter I got B’s and C’s, and redoubled my effort, to the point where I was startled by the remarkable sight of an A on the final exam in Advanced Calculus.

Who would have guessed? Well, maybe nobody, because the long hours, the tedious grasping at elusive concepts, the mysteries that stubbornly resisted all attempts to unravel them, eventually gave me a massive headache and all at once I gave up, quit studying, got a parade of F’s and academic probation, and switched my major to English because someone said it was the easiest one of all. I liked to read. I could write a complete sentence. I was even good at spelling, for whatever that was worth. What could be simpler? I went to class during the day, partied with friends most nights, and skated into my last year, where the latent urge to prove myself once more kicked in, and as I wrote in “Unsolicited Advice,” made the Dean’s list. Would this be the coda marking the end of educational servitude and the beginning of a life like my brother’s, replete with wonders no longer out of reach because a perverse decree of fate had made me the second son?

The life of my more grandiose fantasies remained just that, a product of idle daydreams. Ten years after the chancellor or dean or whoever he was thrust a diploma into my hands, I was living again in California, but driving an old, worn-out car and working as a laborer on a construction site. My brother had quit his job and was trying to establish himself in the art world, a fraught enterprise dependent not only on talent but a healthy measure of luck. Now here we are, a half-century later, both with spouses and adult children, retired from jobs that required us to get up every weekday morning and go out into Wylie’s world of depravity and oppression and mingle with his common people, a congregation from which we can’t, in all honesty, exclude ourselves. We communicate almost daily, not by letter—an unfortunate relic these days—but email. Much of this discourse in the form of links to articles, along with our own observations on the perfidious state of global affairs—climate change rendering the planet uninhabitable, authoritarians licking their lips at the prospects of unlimited power, wars that seem in essence a kind of blood lust, chronic disease, starvation—now I’m sounding like Wylie and Miller.

We drag our younger sister into these exchanges, because, while she’s less prone to intemperate alarm and outrage, we all share a general view of the world as a place with the possibility, however remote it might seem at times, of redemption. Not in the religious sense but in the embrace of an idea of peace and harmony and well-being for everyone, regardless of what they look like or where they happened to be born.

I envy those who can unequivocally embrace such a vision. But it’s not the kind of competitive envy I felt as a child. The only whispers of that derive from the fact that my brother has always had a witty side that I lacked. The ability to produce a bon mot with apparent ease when the occasion calls for it. I’ve never possessed that gift, and I long ago realized that no amount of effort and practice would change that fact, although I’ve always enjoyed banter with my spouse and friends and others who can distinguish a tongue-in-cheek remark from a serious statement. Still, when a witticism in an email to me and my sister prompts a responding LOL or grinning emoji, I sometimes feel, for just a moment, a vestige of what I felt looking up at him on the tractor seat. I wish I could do that.