My Agent

{Prompt: What early memories do you have of your brother}

There is a ripple in the water. It isn’t an eddy — a water current. It is a ripple… from a critter.

“It’s a crayfish!”, my brother says, excitedly.

My brother is looking in the creek intensely, to see which way it goes. I’m not watching ’cause I didn’t even know there was a critter in there.

He’s focused on a good-sized, slimy, moss-covered rock.

“We gotta turn it over,” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Cuz it’s under there!”

A sizeable crayfish, in plain sight.

He Knew Things

I realize now that this is when… more or less, this is when I discovered that my brother had a store of knowledge… advanced knowledge… superior knowledge… that I could not imagine. He knew how to find a crayfish in a creek. He knew how to climb up into a tree house. He knew how to ride a bike, and more importantly, how to use the brakes.

He knew how to take a piece of unmown, seeding grass, in the Spring, bend the stem back on itself, and shoot the seedhead into the air. He knew how to take a rubber band, wrap it over the tip of his thumb and shoot it across the room. He knew how to shoot a BB gun. I guess he knew how to shoot just about anything. He was the ultimate source for practical knowledge.

Backyard (top). Front yard (bottom).

Of course, I had my parents, to teach me right from wrong. I guess they had practical knowledge, too. And I had TV, where I could watch the Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau to learn about creatures in the sea, and I could watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom to learn about creatures on the land. And we had umpteen volumes of the World Book encyclopedia, the Bible, and the Dictionary. We had a ton of written reference material.

But my brother knew things, and he was always around. He was like my handler… my agent. Or my personal bodyguard. He would walk with me to school, to the end of Wayland Drive, and across the crosswalk. He would take me along (or maybe he just tolerated me), when we went up the road to hang out with his friends. He was there to go to the swimming pool with me in the summer. If I ever went anywhere in the world besides my home and my school classrooms, it seemed like Mike was there to secure the ‘scene’.

When there was nothing else to do, Mike was in charge of the entertainment. He would come up with a game for every surface in the world. We played marbles on the patio, which was made out of cement. We played “World War III” with green, plastic army men on the oak tree roots and pine straw covered clay, in the back yard. And when there was nothing better to do, we went exploring the creek at the bottom of our neighborhood, after school.

Me, Mike and Grandmother, Emily Gallup - May 1971

Exploring the Creek

Let me tell you how water got to the creek, and what we would do, along the way. If it rained at our house, the water would wash down the gravel drive into the street. (The gravel driveway was one of the few places that we weren’t allowed to play. At least, I think we weren’t allowed. I just don’t remember ever playing there.)

The stormwater would run down the curb on the side of Wayland Drive. That’s where we sometimes would float a makeshift raft after a summer thunderstorm, and sometimes even during a summer thunderstorm, water coming down in buckets.

The water would wash into the opening of a heavy iron street gutter on the lowest part of Wayland Drive. If you were small enough, you could crawl into the street gutter, through the 2-foot round cement drain pipes, and out into the empty lot at the corner of the neighborhood. (Crawling into a street gutter is easy as pie when you’re a little kid. It gets harder as you get bigger.)

From the empty lot you had to walk through a probably tick-infested acre of brush before you got to the creek. After sunset, on the return journey, it got a little harder to find your way back through the empty lot to civilization. You had to look for the street lamps or listen for the sound of Daddy’s whistle, or his yelling, if he was getting impatient.

When we got to the creek, we always headed upstream. I guess the most interesting “rapids” were upstream, as the creek passed through a bed of limestone. The back of the shopping center — Glenwood Village shopping center — was also upstream, and if you went far enough (and started early enough) you could even trace the creek up to the cultivated lawns of the Raleigh Country Club Golf Course. (I felt like kids weren’t truly welcome on the golf course. Or maybe I just didn’t like to be so out in the open, in the middle of “fine” society.)

But we usually turned around well before we were out of earshot of our house. We mostly spent time looking for crayfish, or watching the water spiders, as they skittered across the surface. We kept a lookout for water moccasins, especially in deep water, but there wasn’t much deep water — really, practically none, in the heat of the summer.

We dug around in the pea gravel, or we poked around in the tree roots. At least once, we blew up a Hot Wheels car with the gunpowder from a cap gun… or with a firecracker… or something. I was only an innocent observer. It wasn’t me.

Naturally, we got into trouble, but mostly there was a policy of “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.” Our parents didn’t ask, and we didn’t tell. At least it seemed that way. Whether or not our behavior was condoned, I’ll never know.

I fell into the creek once or twice. Usually I just got my shoe or my socks wet, but once I fell in completely, and I had to walk back home with my t-shirt and my shorts sopping wet. Mom thought it was hilarious.

Making Mischief

As we got older, we went exploring the city, and we got into different kinds of trouble.

One time we got run off from Glenwood Village shopping center, because we were peeking into the back of a strip club, trying to look at the strippers through the spinning blades of a ventilation fan. Someone saw or heard us and came out to chase us off, and we ran for cover, back to the woods. We were too slippery. At least I like to think of us that way.

We broke into my elementary school once. But it was entirely for a good reason. We were playing basketball on their basketball courts, which were open to the public. We got hot… and sweaty… and thirsty. So the logical thing was to go get some water from the water fountain in the hallway. I guess we were able to jimmy open the locked door, walk down the vacant school hallway, and have a sip of water. But we were caught, and we were detained.

I think Mike was forced to call our Mom by the administrator. Either that was our punishment, or he thought that we were hoodlums and vandals. It was all very innocent, and it got blown way out of proportion. I was just thirsty.

Mike took most of the blame. I reckon that was the cost of being the leader. Although in this case, I guess it was really my idea. But still… Mike should have known better. Why would he listen to me, a little kid? And why didn’t we have water in the first place? Sometimes I wonder if my brother was properly qualified to be my handler.

Another time, we got caught sneaking into the back door of a theater in broad daylight. We wanted to see the R-rated movie, Amityville Horror. Mike was old enough, but I wasn’t. So we hatched this simple plan. Mike would buy himself a ticket, and I would go around to the back of the theater. Then I would sneak in when he opened the fire exit door. As it turns out, opening a door in a dimly lit theater in the middle of the day is like shining a searchlight on an escaped convict at night. It was obvious to everyone in the theater what was happening. Although we sat down, only a minute or two passed before an usher came and escorted us out the door and off of the premises. Maybe a manager was involved. I don’t know. I was only an innocent pawn.

Getting Along

As we got still older, and a little bit wiser, we did a lot of things together that we couldn’t do as equals in the past. I was still new to the game in most cases, but I became a fast learner.

We started to play Avalon Hill strategy board games (like Blitzkrieg and Formula One). We were among the first wave of gamers to play this new game, called Dungeons & Dragons. My brother played in actual games with other players, while I mostly spent time creating characters, character names, and dungeon prototypes. I went on only one or two campaigns. I remember that the subtle downward slope of the dungeon walkways had a disproportionate importance, and every brick of a wall had to be inspected for secret doors or magical treasures.

We were in the Boy Scouts together. We learned to camp and set up a tent, split wood and start a fire, hike down a trail, and never, ever, take a turn that wasn’t clearly marked or found on the trail map. We learned to march stoically, for hours if necessary, to reach the top of the trail and reach the viewpoint. There was no turning back on a trail until we reached the lookout. At least that’s the way it seemed.

And the stuff in our backpacks. It was all so bizarre. A pack of aluminum eatingware, with an aluminum mug, that all fit together in a small metallic bundle. Rolled-up, blue foam bed mats and rolled-up sleeping-bags, wrestled into a bundle of fabric, above or below the central storage of the pack.

We developed an interest in medicine and veterinary medicine from our shared experience with pets at home, and visits to the Shenandoah Valley, to see our grandparents at “The Farm”. Mike expanded his understanding of animals, from the cats and dogs of our house, and the newts and the crayfish of our creek; to the raptors and livestock of the “Valley”. He went on to attend NC State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and became a veterinarian.

I ended up studying human anatomy, physiology, and pathology. I went to Duke University Medical School and became a family doctor.

We experienced the unimaginable; the death of our father together. We made the phone call to 911 together. We waited for the paramedics together. We grieved together.

We sat in the front pew at the funeral service. We stood out on the cold hillside at Raleigh Memorial Gardens for the burial. We spent our fury at the loss by splitting wood in our front yard.

A cringeworthy picture of our “family” in the early 80s

Everything Changes

That’s about the time that we went our separate ways. Shortly after his death, Mike went off to college in Louisburg, North Carolina, and I went off to a public residential high school, newly established by the state of North Carolina, the NC School of Science and Math.

We were back in Raleigh together briefly, when I transferred back to NC State University from Vanderbilt (where I had considered, and reconsidered, a major in Engineering.) We were both at NC State University in the Spring of 1983, when the Men’s basketball team went on a miraculous run to win the NCAA tournament. We watched some of the games together — I’m pretty sure that we watched the final together (when the “Cardiac Pack” faced the “Phi Slamma Jamma” team of Houston.) When the game ended in the perfect alley-oop “pass” from Whittenburg to Charles, we had a few minutes of unbridled celebration and then we headed for Hillsborough Street together, to be a part of the city’s biggest unsanctioned crowd of troublemaking youngsters to ever assemble.

My brother taught me back in the ’60s or ’70s, before the 1974 NC State national championship, that I needed to choose a college to root for, NC State or UNC. He knew that I should be an NC State fan, and he seemed to know all the reasons that State was historically the superior team. I took him at his word. And it finally paid off.