Happy Birthday, Bimmie

Today is my brother’s birthday.  This is for him.

A month ago, I wrote about the relationship I had with my sister and how special it was to me.  What I have with my brother is no less important to me and has had no less influence on who I am today.  But that influence is very, very different.

I made mention in that blog of how I spent more of my time with him and as I think back to those years, it amazes me to think about how much of who I am I owe to him.  I’m not sure I can entirely blame the tomboy part of myself on him, but he certainly had a big hand in it.  I don’t know if he ever really thinks about it, but I am who I am because of him. I read fantasy novels and mysteries, I’m a gamer, I love computers and technology.  All of these are such an integral part of who I am and they all came from him in some way or another.

I may have been socially awkward, but when I borrowed books from my brother, I could get lost in Pern or Xanth or Middle Earth.  I don’t have a conscious memory of wanting to read those books because he did – I don’t recall looking up to him that actively.  It may have simply been a case of there not being any other books around that looked interesting to me.   But, it didn’t matter.  What mattered is that I started reading them and was hooked.  Fast forward a couple of decades and I wrote doctoral field exams on contemporary fantasy fiction and wrote a dissertation on Harry Potter.    Those moments in my career had their seeds in him.

I may have had no idea how to keep white clothes even remotely clean, but I could explore the world of computer games pretty well.  I remember sitting in a brown comfy chair that my brother had in his room and playing Nethack on a monochrome monitor in the times I had when he was at school and I was not.  I remember playing Gauntlet on a split screen as we sat side by side in his room.  I would drag my desk chair into his room and we played for hours.  I may have gotten yelled at for not being very good at them, but in those hours together a gamer was born and from those roots as a gamer, a love of technology was born.  Fast forward a couple of decades and find me firmly established as the Humanities professor whose niche is technology:  I sit on technology committees, I use technology in my classrooms, I go to conferences centered on its use.  I married a gamer whom I met in a game, some of my friends are gamers, I still play games.  These moments in my life and career had their seeds in him.

In short, when I say I am proud to be a geek -- it's because my brother helped make me one.

There are so many little things we shared growing up – from the nickname he gave me to Monty Python and Sherlock Holmes.  My brother was no less socially awkward than I was, but we had such fun times regardless of that.  We hung out and watched movies, listened to music, played games.  We worked together, even, when we got older.  We used to go to the mall all the time, and it was a very different trip than with my sister.  In fact, I can’t even remember anything we did there – I just remember walking around relatively quickly and having a great time.  We went to concerts, too.  We used to go see REO Speedwagon every year, including the year I was in the hospital until just a few days before the concert.  I always felt safe with him, despite the noise and the crowds.

Even when I went away to college, he would come up and spend the weekend in my dorm room and we’d do all the same kinds of things.  He joined a group of us who went up to Toronto to see The Phantom of the Opera.  I think he drove entirely around Lake Ontario that weekend.  When I went on to my Masters and my Doctorate, he’d do the same thing.  We may not have talked much on the phone or wrote letters, but we got together often enough that it didn’t matter.   A perfect example of this kind of unspoken relationship we have happened in the early days of electronic communication.  It was birthday season in my family and, being a college student, I was running low on cash.  I wrote to my brother and asked him if he could help out -- just a little something to help me get by.  My parents were coming up that weekend and they brought with them some new CDs that I had ordered through his CD club (back when Columbia House was cool).  It wasn’t until after mom and dad left and I was opening the CDs that I noticed one of them was slit along the side.  When I opened it the rest of the way, there was a $20 bill inside.   This is the kind of thing he does – he may not be demonstrative of his affection for his little sisters, but it’s always there.

I owe a good portion of who I am to the influence my brother had on me growing up -- he is goofy and fun and weird and a little crazy.  I can’t even really express how ecstatic I am that he has found someone who loves him for who he is and makes him happy.  He deserves it; though, I will admit that sometimes I miss the dedicated time we used to have to hang out at the mall, eat fast food and stay up too late playing games before I crashed on his couch.  I love my brother and I admire the personal strength he has had to get through the tough times and I’m so proud of where he is now.  He will always be my big brother and I will always treasure the memories we have made and the ones I’m sure we will keep making.

So, big brother, want to go to the mall?