I had the tremendous pleasure of watching my youngest brother, Andy, graduate from high school last week.

People are usually surprised when they find out I that have a brother of graduating age. This is ironic, since it is also not quite rare for me to receive ribbing for my youthful appearance, or even my outright youth. (I will be 31 next month. This is no longer all that youthful in my view, and happily for now, the age jokes are on the decline.) Even so, a reproductive span of thirteen years–and the actual maximum in my family of origin was fifteen years, as I have an older sister–is pretty large these days. So whether the surprise is warranted or consistent with other jokes at my expense, it is usually the case anyway.

Andy was five when I left the house. I think I could fairly say that his first five years were perhaps not my most attentive to family life, as I was between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. I was much too concerned with my friends, later my girlfriend, and later my fiancée to be highly involved with a toddling/video game-playing baby brother. After Kari and I married and moved away, I saw my younger brothers and sister only during a few summers until the time Andy was ten. I have spent the last eight years of inhabiting the same city with my brother getting to know him.

Enter my son, Zach, who was born when my brother was nine, and who himself will be nine five days before I turn 31 next month. Key milestones in Andy’s life have given me occasion to reflect on Zach’s future: his voice changing, dating, prom, graduation, learning to write (I mean really to write, not just draw out letters), analyzing literature, doing calculus, writing software. But being a brother, even a thirteen-year-older brother, is not being a father. I do not provide for Andy’s basic needs; he does not live under my roof; and I have a much smaller responsibility for his upbringing than I do my own son’s.

However, neither is it quite being a brother in the way we normally think. It is certainly not being a brother in the same way boys born 18 months apart are brothers. Andy and I never got in a fistfight over whether to watch Thundercats or Transformers (or Speed Racer or Underdog). We never had a crush on the same girl. We never had the same teacher a year or two apart, who called the younger one by the older one’s name and imputed the personality and work ethic of the older to the younger.

So I am left without some of the attachments that come from a very closely shared fraternal context, and without the responsibility and authority that come from being a parent. Without either one, yet clearly with both to some degree.

Which brings us back to graduation, and forward to it: seeing a young man enter adulthood–one with whom I did not exactly grow up, and whom I did not raise, but in whose life I still have the kind of ownership which normally would be occasioned only by one or the other of these–is thrilling. This middle perspective is a rare opportunity: most people only get to grow up themselves (having, by definition, no perspective at all in the process), then raise their children, struggling to relate the experiences of their youth to the lives of their children in the high-stakes game of forming their children into adults.

A much younger brother is the same kind of tertium quid. It gives me a taste of the kind of pride I will feel when my own son and daughters pass this milestone, but in advance and through a person who is not himself my offspring. Andy’s graduation isn’t any real kind of predictor of Zach’s graduation ten years hence, but it is a dry run of sorts. We don’t normally get even a hazy glimpse at the outcome of our very most important life undertakings, but sometimes Providence is good enough to us to give us a taste.

And if you think that’s something, my baby sister is getting married in August.

• 
• Posted by Tim on Monday, May 26, 2003 at 10:57:25 am PDT
• Category: Miscellany
• Comment RSS Feed