My oldest brother turns fifty next week.  His daughter Katelyn was able to get back to town from school this weekend so she asked her gramma to have Woody's birthday dinner while she was here, so Mom got a hold of everyone and last night we had a huge birthday dinner for Woody.

Now, it's never easy being the first kid.  You're the one who has to break the parents in on everything; what grades are acceptable, when you can go to the park or the lake alone, dating, fashion, music, you name it, Woody had no one to show him the way.  And seven little snots following after him, ready to complain that he did it all wrong.

Woody was an okay older brother.  He pretty much ignored me for twenty years.  All he ever wanted to do was play baseball and while he made all his brothers play every day, he left me alone because I was a girl.  If I'd wanted to play, I'm sure he would have let me, because I couldn't have been any worse than Billy and Andy were back in those days, but it was the sixties and the idea of female athletes hadn't occurred to any of us.  As the fastest runner in the neighborhood by far, I know Woody would've found something for me to do in those games had I ever asked.  He didn't talk much, at least to me, and most of the time he floated through the house as though the rest of us didn't exist.

He did have a temper, but you had to push him really far to find it.  It's a good thing, too, because he was the biggest human most of us knew for most of our lives.  Woody wasn't one of those kids who got tall and gangly.  The way I remember it is that one night he went to bed a skinny kid and when he came down for breakfast in the morning he was a grown ass man.  He could so easily have snapped any of the rest of us in two without his pulse speeding up one beat.  Most of us stayed out of his way.  JP and Joe were the only ones who kept getting in fights with Woody.  JP, because he was that stupid and Joe because he was that mean.

Once, I found Woody's breaking point and he ground a hamburger into my hair.  I don't remember what I had said or done, but I'm pretty sure I deserved it.  Just like Joe deserved it the time Woody yanked him out of the shower and tossed him soaking wet out into the back yard and locked the door.  In January.

Okay, Joe might not have deserved it at the moment, but he was such a rotten kid that cumulatively the threat of hypothermia was seemed reasonable to the rest of us.  And funny!

That was all a really long time ago and no one holds any hard feelings.  In fact, Joe made a cd for Woody featuring all the music that Woody brought into the house when we were kids.  As the oldest, it was Woody's job to become a teenager first and find out that Mom and Dad's collection of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass was not necessarily the last word in cutting edge music.*

Gordon Lightfoot, Hall and Oates, The Who, Yes, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Seals and Croft and Fleetwood Mac...it's an awesome cd!

Best moment of the night; Mom exposing her grand kids to the classics by making them all come in the house and listen while she cranked up the volume on Baba O'Reilly.

She's the coolest grandma in the world.

*yes, the Tijuana Brass do rock!

 

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