Recent tweets have reminded me that I have three brothers with very different personalities. And we all four play off of each other with humor. I have showed a few people the more original sounding tweets and they just look at me. They say, “Yes, those are your brothers. It must run in the family.”
Of course my youngest brother isn’t on Twitter. He is holding out. I think he is busy enough with clients he doesn’t want yet another way for contact. But I include him here because, well, he is part of it.
So, if I get a tweet with “Pardon me sir? Is that the Chattanooga choo-choo?” I don’t panic. I am calm. I do hear the song in my head and I might start humming along. I just know that, well, he’s on vacation, and possibly bored. So the tweet in reply from a different brother, “ Don’t sing along. You’re wreaking the song,” just reminds me of all those long trips together smushed in the back seat between two brothers arguing or telling me the same thing.
And when I get the tweet with “So today I spent all day thinking about it and concluded the shadow on a sundial does go clockwise, but only goes half way round.” I am reminded that my brothers think like me and probably not like the normal run of people. There is always something comforting in being reminded I fit in somewhere. My cousin used to tell me, “We are normal, and everyone else is strange.”
The other day I was trying to text my brother and got a tweet. When I sent the text I realized fairly quickly that I had sent a reply to twitter instead of a new text. Oooops. Of course, I have it connected to my Facebook. I tried to delete it. But ended up just mentioning that I had fixed it.
Imagine my surprise and delight in knowing that the next generation shares this odd sense of humor when my niece entered a comment on Facebook. “Wow – Dad fixed it telepathically, that’s new.”
I tried to raise my children with that feeling of friendship. Living so far from any of my family has made it hard to foster traditions, family history and a sense of heritage. My hope for my children is that they have the same closeness I have with my brothers.
And remember, just because I am the youngest doesn’t mean I can’t be the biggest pest!
