By all accounts, he was the most beautiful baby ever born. Let me be more accurate. By my mother's account, he was the most beautiful baby anyone had ever seen. People stopped her to say so. He was my mother's most beloved child.
I didn't mind it all. I loved him most too.
He was 17 years old when I was born. You know how 17 year old boys are. We have all been in love with a seventeen year old boy, including most heterosexual men according to statistics. And I was so in love with my big brother.
Funny, brilliant, handsome. He even hung the moon. Did you know how it got there, why, it was my big brother.
I loved him so very much. I didn't mind at all that my mother loved him most. There were baby pictures and little boy pictures. Pictures with Santa. Pictures with the boy scout troup that dad lead. Pictures on a horse and in his little pee stained tiny cowboy boots. Lots of pictures of a boy I never knew.
And I adored him.
He would pick me up by one arm and one leg and swing me around in the yard. He would call me turdhopper and ask me to snatch peebles from his hand, made me leave the temple when I could not.
He was interested in medicine and God.
He played the guitar and harmonica simultaneously. Hideously.
Keith, Keith. So many years ago, full of hope. Then something happened to him. I was too young to hear any of it, or know, or be aware. My family considered me to young to hear any of it. To this day.
I am starting to figure it out though.
