The SLDs

I have two older brothers. One has gotten a lot of face time (or at least mentioning-time) on my blog. (Here. Here. Here. Here. Here.) He is John. He is about eleven years my senior.

My other older brother is Steve(n). He is only nineteen months older than I am. Almost all of my childhood memories involve him. And yet I don't talk about him much on my blog. This is because I don't talk TO him very much. He lives in Texas, about a block away from my folks. He has one very adorable little baby, and an awesome wife whom he has been friends with since he was 12. She and I were also very good friends in high school.

When Steve and I were little, we played together all the time. I don't remember what we played, but we played. He teased me mercilessly. I always wanted to hang out with his friends. Before he started kindergarten my mom started teaching him to read, and I was so jealous that I was not also getting reading lessons that my mom started teaching me at that time too. Pretty soon I caught up to Steven, but right before I was almost caught up to him, my mom had him practice reading with me. We had a book that had several short stories that were perfect for learning to read, and one was about a monkey and a bee. We loved that story.

When we were very small our family had to refer to the Disney film Robin Hood as "R.H." because we loved to watch it as often as possible. Steven introduced me to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I remember this distinctly because I loved to watch Sesame Street which came on at the same time as The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I thought his show was pretty dumb, but pretty soon I discovered that The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was totally radical, and Sesame Street was for babies. When we pretended to be Ninja Turtles, I was Donatello, the purple turtle whose weapon was big sticks. Steven was... either Leonardo (blue with a sword?) or Raphael (red with two little knives?). I can't remember what he liked to be. But we both agreed that Michaelangelo (orange with nun chucks) was the coolest of the turtles.

We also loved to watch Johnny Dangerously. I don't remember what it was about, but we sure thought it was awesome.

As we got older, I drove Steven crazier and crazier. This, in turn, drove our mom crazier and crazier. We learned to fight quietly to stay out of trouble.

At our church, each year there was an annual one-day conference for kids who were 12 and 13. This was basically to make up for the fact that the 12-13 year-olds were part of the youth group but were excluded from the weekend-long conference that happened for the older kids. Ordinarily the conference was held at such a time that we wouldn't have both been the right ages to go, but the dates were changed. My first conference happened to be his third, which meant we would be going together. At the end of the conference there was a dance. We decided we would make up a dance to do together sometime in the middle of the dance. We spent weeks making up our dance. It was completely ridiculous. We composed it and performed it in front of our mom. I think she was probably just glad that we were getting along. We performed our dance during the dance. Nobody really seemed to notice.

We were champion wheel-barrow racers. One time we were having some activity with the youth of our church which involved wacky relay-races. Steve and I DOMINATED the wheel-barrow portion of our race, but I don't think either of us told anybody that we actually wheel-barrowed around the house reasonably often.

In high school I'm pretty sure Steven didn't really like me. But sometimes he would go out of his way to embarrass me, so maybe deep-down he really did like me.

Usually the embarrassment consisted of him "walking me to class." That is, he would wrap his arm around me and announce rather loudly, "Excuse me, please, coming through! I've got to get my little sister to class! Yes, excuse us. Excuse us. We're on our way to class! Don't want to be late now." And then he would deposit me AT MY DESK and sometimes even leave me with a kiss on the cheek.

We often went to church dances in the same groups of friends. He usually would dance at least one dance with me. We always sang really loudly when we danced to U2's With or Without You.

After Steven graduated from high school, I was suddenly pretty cool again. We did lots of stuff together. Sometimes he would take me to lunch at the restaurant where he worked. Sometimes people would think I was his girlfriend. This freaked both of us out. Sometimes people told us that we definitely looked related. Other people told us we didn't look anything alike. I tend to think somewhere down the middle.

As siblings we couldn't be much more different than we are, but maybe some people would argue with you. I know Rhonda used to always comment on things that I did or said just like him.

These days Steven and I don't interact together a whole lot. We certainly aren't as close as we were in my last two years of high school (and his first two years out of high school), but I often think back on these (and many other) memories, and I remember that I'm a pretty lucky kid sister.