Friday, December 25, 2009

ONE FINE DAY FOR FLYING

Trying to face the reality in each day that you live is a tough assignment for everyone. It would be an easy dismissal of all things hard and uncomfortable and just do the fun and less stressful. I would always tend to find the boredom in the easy stuff and just gorged myself on the difficult. It would give me the ultimate high to prove I would do it and most assuredly show the ones who said "no you can't do it" my final approach. I lived for the moment to prove someone wrong, only now I realize that I had to prove nothing to no one except myself. To seek accreditation from someone other than yourself is just a lame excuse for puffing your ego. Only thing is when you are young you don't know what ego is. About the best idea you have of ego was the "stud" in school who loved to gavotte in front of the mirror. The word at that time was conceited.
You know there was one in every school . They placed themselves high above everyone else, only now I realize they were covering for insecurities way beyond what we had information on. In retrospect it is a whole different perspective when your older.
My brother was the cool guy. The teenager who played sports , had the girlfriends and participated in all things cruel to people who did not play by the male rules. It unfortunately became my fate to test those rules to the limit I could push them. By the time it was over, all you would find were shards of misinformed rules all greatly smashed to smithereens. As in all families, sibling rivalry is very common, although you would like to think that your particular family was unique. Well step into reality as every family is dysfunctional in some way, that's what makes it all so wonderful. you either bend with it or you remove yourself from it altogether.
In my case, I just had to stay two steps ahead and would always emerge the winner much to my brother's unhappiness. First off, let me state that even though I don't know my brother well, I feel the love one has in sharing the same parents. He began his teens years by sensing the immense differences that we did not share. He made it his mantra to pick on me as often as possible. It seemed, at the time, to never end but frankly it was only for a few years. I preferred all things gentle and girl like and he would label me with whatever name he would use for the day. I learned very quickly to stay aware of his every move in order to put out any fire he may have tried to start. It would stay with me to this day. I could see the separation of parental influences occurring, Mother was his support staff and Dad was mine. Dad and my brother had many difficulties in liking each other and that only help to end my parents marriage in the future.
All things that seemed difficult would surprisingly show a silver lining just when you least expected. In the middle of one of our sibling fights and while holding one of my albums hostage, while waving it all around he noticed information on the back of the album cover that was a PO Box address. When I asked what it was he explained that you could write a letter to that address then went back to keeping the album away from me. When I got it back he had drawn a couple of moustaches on the faces on the back of the album but the mailing address had been saved from his devilish art work. It was only a matter of weeks later that in school one of the things that we would learn to do was to write a letter and to learn how to address and return address an envelope. With the aid of my teacher and my Mother I began my quest to write the perfect letter to that PO BOX on the back of that Decca album. It would soon become a daily letter writing ritual and one that would last for many years and a pay off , that only one could dream of. I would use some of my milk money to buy the stamps and mail a letter every morning on the way to school. On the weekends I would have two days on information to insert. I had begun writing a journal and had no idea that's what it had become years later. There was so much written in those letters to that PO BOX and in years to come I would have the opportunity to reread some of them. I would then become overwhelmed in doing so as there were the lost memories that were reignited just by the strokes of a pencil.
The childhood sibling torture I endured for a while paid off in the end. He never knew what he set free when waving that album around. Even though he was being youthfully mean it was a big lesson in good things coming from bad situations. In this case it would become monumental and life changing forever. While at this time communication is limited between he and I, I will owe him a debt of gratitude for the moment he discovered my PO BOX address. As I sit here and conclude this post, what I realize the most is that while we were genetically linked we would both wind up having the same DNA qualities of the parents that we were most not wanting to be like.
I have the qualities of Mother and he is very much like our Dad. We all lived in one hangar but our flight plans took separate paths.

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