Titso had the first of her two wedding showers last weekend. This one was thrown by my mom and we got a scrapbook my mom has been working on since the day we got engaged. Within the scrapbook my mom asked both my brothers to write a story about us growing up together and something that was meaningful to them. I liked my younger brothers, so I thought I share. It’s really freaking long so I don’t expect anyone to read it, but it was a good story and one of my favorite moments with him.
Pretty much my entire life I spent looking at my older brother Tim as a man. I saw myself as someone who one day would be a mand just like him. There are a lot of reasons why I have this opinion. Tim always had such a hard work ethic, he always went for what he wanted, he was the biggest (muscles at least, I became the tallest) in the family, and he was the only one to have a beard as far as I can remember. By the way, I thought now at 26 I would be able to grow a beard and that hasn’t happened, but that is beside the point. Even without a beard, I finally feel like I have become a man like Tim has always been in my eyes.
The first time I felt like me and Tim had a man to man experience was win 1999. It might sound ridiculous, but I always felt like having a beer and actually enjoying it with another man was a grown up thing to do. It is always something I saw men doing. Now I can’t lie, I had plenty of beers in high school and so on, but never really enjoyed the taste or the experience; I just did it for the rush and the fun. But in 1999, our family took a trip to Ireland. I was almost of legal age to drink beer at 20, and in Ireland it was perfectly normal for me to be in a bar for the first time in my life with my older brothers.
It may have been the first night in Ireland, perhaps the second, I’m not sure (probably because of the beer), and me and Tim were out after hours in a night club after everyone else retired for the night. We ended up meeting a few people from Europe, I am pretty sure they were from Germany. There was a huge lack of communication between us and them, but Tim and I were connecting like never before. We ended up getting invited back to a party that was about a mile walk away. So we decided to take the walk with them. Once we got there everything went from being fun to being complete outcasts. It was apparent we were the only Americans around and these kids were no doubt in our minds talking about us and poking fun at us because we did not know what was going on. Not after a few minutes of feeling like outcasts, me first memory of my older brother Tim and me bonding as men occurred.
We looked at each other, decided it was time to go, and turned around. But we did not just walk away. We threw our beers high in the air, let them hit the ground, and sang the star spangled banner at the top of our lungs with out arms around each others shoulders. We never looked back, and laughed the whole walk home. And like a man, on a few hours sleep, Tim was launching 300 yard drives on the golf course the next day.
No comments:
Post a Comment