Entry #2: My Brother's Genius

My brother was the middle child in our family and considered to be the smartest of the three of us in the world of Academia. My sister and I were no slouches in school and never really had trouble with any subject (except with Maths), but things just seem to come easier to my brother, problems sorted themselves out logically in his head, and when he was older, he was accepted to the local Science and Tech high school in our area where he did outstandingly well.

He was also highly creative and very good at thinking up ways to entertain himself with the materials on hand. His mind worked best bending around corners, like mine, and his room was usually the focal point of the house, as there were usually test tubes full of odd-smelling liquids on the window sill, books opened all over the floor with diagrams sketched onto pieces of scrap paper, bits of string dangling from the walls with things attached, and a hamster or two running in a squeaky wheel in a cage atop the book case. His mind rarely rested, and he was interested in everything. He drew comic strips, wrote stories, taught himself the piano, and organized his record collection by number so that all I had to do was call out a random number, and he'd play the song on his stereo.

Having a brother like that was a wonderful thing as a child because it kept me entertained and I was always willing to be a lab rat for whatever held his interest at the time. He got into movie making when my mom found, at a yard sale one summer, a 16mm camera, projector, and mint condition screen. From that moment on, he became completely absorbed with making home movies, mostly of his friends doing wacky things around the neighbourhood and using me to test different techniques, like fast motion, fade ins, fade outs, and anything else that struck his fancy. Once or twice a month we would gather in the living room, my brother would set up the screen, and we'd behold his latest creations.

In his 6th grade year, my brother discovered stop-frame animation and spent months preparing a film called The Very Strange Chess Game for entry in the local film festival with two of his friends. Hour by hour they'd inch pieces around the board, clicking the frames with a hand-held clicker connected to a camera on loan from the school library. I was under strict orders not to touch a thing in his room lest the board shift and disrupt continuity, but I was happy to help with the clicker, honoured that I was allowed into his creative process for a little while. His film won on the county level and placed second in the state. For an 11 year old kid, it was quite an honour, and we were immensely proud.

My brother was also quite adept at keeping me amused. There was a seven-year gap between me and my sister, and five years between my brother and me, so many times, it was difficult to keep me feeling like I belonged in the family because I was so much younger and so far behind everyone else. But my brother seemed to see it as a challenge. He created The Tape Game which we played, on and off, for about three years and which I hope one day to play with my own kids, if I can manage it.

To play The Tape Game, he would record on a hand-held tape recorder a set of instructions for me to carry out. It would take forever to set up, but once it got going, it was worth the wait. The first tape slid under my door, I'd pop the cassette into the player, and soon I was on my way. The tape instructed me where to go to find the next tape. Once I listened carefully and did what I was told (sometimes I was informed that I needed to pour a cup of water, drink it, pour another, and set it down on the counter before carrying out my task or something equally as esoteric), I was off to find the next tape which was usually in a flower bed or under a tree or even buried in a freshly dug hole in the back garden.

The Tape Game would last for ages, and though it may seem a simplistic concept, it was really a great deal of fun for me and my friends. My brother always tried to outsmart me, but I was not easily thrown off any trail. The Tape Game could go on for hours, even days and could encompass the entire neighbourhood.

One time, however, The Tape Game got interrupted for dinner time and somehow, it never resumed. About six months later, as we were having a Family Gardening Day and cleaning out a plant box, we all froze when my mom, having plunged her gloved hand into the soil, let out a yelp and sharply withdrew her arm, a mouldy, filthy tape clutched in her hand. My brother and I stared, aghast, and wondered if it would actually still play, but just as my sister was running into the house to find the tape recorder, my dad said he would ground her for life if she tried to jam a dirt-encrusted tape into their perfectly good recorder. For the rest of the day, I pressed my brother's memory to see if he might recall what he'd recorded so long ago, but alas, he could not and so, in some part of my childhood memories, there remains an unfinished Tape Game with endless possibilities.

Inventions were also another strong suit for my brother. Long before Rube Goldberg, he was creating cause and effect machines in his room, scavenging necessary parts from the garage, the toy box, old appliances that no longer functioned properly, anything that met his needs. I always had to be careful even entering his room, as the paper clip dangling before me from a bit of string was most likely attached to a lever of some sort which when triggered would tap a ball into motion, knock over a stack of green army men that would then cause a cup to over turn and cascade water down a chute...these inventions rarely resulted in the culmination of something productive, but in the end, that wasn't the point. It was a test for his mind, a game where he was competing against his own limitations and stretching his creativity to snapping.

I used to try and copy his inventions, but I lacked his scientific approach, and thus my endeavours were far more haphazard and destined to fail. So I was content to watch him attempt to think up a new way to sharpen a pencil or catch something on fire or cook a hot dog using the sun's rays focused through his bedroom window.

I once went to him complaining of a headache, and I remember his face lighting up with glee. "Sit there!" he exclaimed, pointing to the naugahyde desk chair and turning off the lights. He placed on my head a small purple bowl he'd won at a fun fair a few weeks before; taped to either side were two bits of string, one attached to the manual pencil sharpener, the other meant to be held in my hand. As I counted to three and closed my eyes per his instructions, he took a pen, tapped the bowl in four places, cranked the handle of the pencil sharpener enthusiastically, tapped the bowl again, then pronounced me cured.

And I was. For the rest of the week I told anyone who would listen how his invention had taken away my headache instantly, and how everyone should try it for themselves. Oddly, everyone remained sceptical and refused, and when they did, my brother and I would share a conspiratorial wink that said, "We know better, don't we??"

My parents were convinced he was an inventor, another Thomas Edison in the making, perhaps. As short-tempered as my father was, he didn't seem to mind if my brother took something apart, as long as he put it back together again. And whilst he was curious, he wasn't particularly reckless; he just always asked, "What would happen if...?" or "Why does it work THAT way and not THAT way?" For years my mother told the story of Blue Vakeen, an odd elixir that my brother had created as a young boy and added blue food dye to in an attempt to make it more appetizing. When one combines everything liquid in the fridge in an odd sort of sludge and discovers it's somewhat lacking in taste, surely blue dye will solve all the problems! My mother, used to finding odd bits of things stashed away in Tupperware containers, bugs frozen in ice cube trays (as home made experiments in cryogenics) and baggies full of frozen snowballs in the back of the freezer when winter has been over for 6 months, rarely batted an eye and allowed us all to experiment, within safety's reason, with nearly everything.

It is a sad fact of adult life that when one grows older, that sharp spark of creativity is dimmed for the sake of practicality, and ideas that come from books and spoken of in lecture halls upstage childish curiosity. I've managed to hang onto a lot of my creative spirit, honed and polished into something productive, but on days when my muse has left me or the jungle drums beat loudly in my head and I cannot recall any positive thing to cheer me on, I think of those afternoons in my brother's room, the ones that are caught forever in a golden light and which slip so carefully into a starry evening with the background noise of voices laughing and eyes lighting up with possibilities. I recall my brother's restless mind and ready laugh and the energy of his thoughts as they careened into each other, enlivening the air of our house and always asking, "What would happen if...?"

And it is then I remember how it felt to be a child, so easily amazed by simple things and staggered by Possibility. I can bring it back, if I remember it correctly, and I can pass it along to my own children one day. My daughter is 7 years younger than my son, and has spent most of her short life utterly in awe of her big brother carrying out even the most simple of tasks. I pray, in the parts of my heart that are not too damaged, that there will be golden, perfect afternoons for them both where they don't mark the day's passing in separate rooms or in silence but together, pulling books from shelves and plunging into them with gusto, always asking, "Why don't we try..." or "Maybe if we did THIS...".