Family ties

My brother called me today as I was wrapping up my work for the day. I didn't really have time to talk, but there are two reasons I did.

1. My brother is not a phone person, so if he actually wants to talk, I don't want to miss it.
2. When I look back at my day, I'm guessing I won't regret the fact that my work took about 15 minutes longer than it should, but I'm pretty sure I would've regretted not talking to my brother.

I'm close to my family. We all check in with each other often (I talk to my Mama every morning on the way to work). But with four years difference in our ages, my brother and I weren't always close.

When we were kids, I used to torture him terribly. I would throw his shoes out the front door, wait for him to go out and get them, then I would lock him out of the house. We also used to fight and hit each other. We were terrible to each other. 

But Lord help anyone else who ever came at one of us. We could say or do mean things to each other all day long, but if anyone else said or did anything mean to either of us, the other one would be ready to throw down!

We went to a small school in a rural area. It was K-6th grade in one building and 7th-12th in a neighboring building. When I was in 10th grade and my brother was in 6th grade, I drove us to school each morning. I was supposed to leave early enough to drive to the other side of the elementary school to drop him off. But of course that never happened.

I was always running late, and I would drive straight to the high school parking lot and make my brother walk through the high school, across the bus driveway and into the elementary school. He always told on me, and Mama always fussed at me.

But even though I was not doing what I was supposed to do, something cool happened as a result.

As my brother would walk down the main hallway of the high school, my friends got to know him. So by the time he moved from 6th grade to 7th grade, he was already well-known by a lot of upperclassmen. And didn't that make him cool among all his friends!

Of course, if you ask him, it was all in the course of my little brother torture routine.

My brother has two daughters and a son, and they love hearing stories like this. And this past weekend, when we visited with them, one of them said they really didn't like their sibling.

To which I replied, "That's okay, you'll like them later, when you're older."