Baby Brother

I was watching a three-year-old sing to her mother this week while waiting for my daughter’s vanilla smoothie at the church coffee shop. She sat on her mother’s lap singing a cute children’s song that had hand motions to it. She had her mother’s undivided attention and was as pleased with herself as she could be. When I laughed, she smiled and waved to me. I’m sure she recognized me because I used to teach her big brother when he was in my second grade boys’ class.

Her mom turned and greeted me, and I asked how old the little girl was now. I sighed and said I remembered being three and how I was the center attraction as my mother’s first child. I dominated the attention of both mom and grandmother while my dad was overseas in the U.S. Air Force.

She asked me if I had trouble adjusting when my siblings came along. I truthfully told her that I was really too fascinated with my siblings to ever be jealous of them. If you remember “Chocolate Milk”, you’ll know that I was handed an orange little baby that came to be known as Bold One. I was convinced he was the cutest baby I had ever seen until Baby Brother came along.

Now Bold One will always have a special place in my heart. In fact, I remember having an imaginary friend named “Bongo” of all things, and had a definite picture in my mind of what Bongo looked like. I still remember. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that looking at my brother’s picture when he was about three, he looked exactly the way I had always pictured Bongo! Is that freaky or what?

So Baby Brother came along. This was a little blond ball of a baby with huge brown eyes that will always be one of his most remembered features. I used to look into those eyes while I had my mouth on the bottom end of his bottle as he ate. I would mimic his sucking as if I were helping him finish his bottle. I could have sworn he would begin to suck faster as his eyes would widen with astonishment at the thought of me taking his milk. I used to always put my forehead on his and look into his eyes until the vision became just a single eye. (Try that sometime.) I would say, “You only have one eye!” I later did that with Baby Sister too.

As I’ve mentioned in another entry, Baby Brother learned to walk and broke his falls by banging his head on the furniture, and when he was proficient and got his equilibrium back, he followed me around the house. When he was able to talk, he said the most gut-wrenching thing he ever said to me considering he’s in heaven with Dad now. He said, “You’re my bestest buddy!” That statement set the tone for the rest of our relationship.

“West Side Story” came on television one time when we lived in Suburbia. Bold One and I were so inspired by the fight scene under the overpass, that we took butter knives out of the kitchen drawer on a regular basis and had mock knife fights. Mom and Dad were never there when we did this of course! One of those times, three-year-old Baby Brother was so inspired by our antics that he poked me in the leg with a steak knife! It didn’t break the skin, though.

Another time a few years later, he actually stabbed me in the wrist with a jack-knife. I lay on the bed with my self-bandaged wound until the nausea went away. That took the glamour out of knife fighting.

As an aside, we siblings learned to cut down on a lot of the tattling that goes on between siblings. One of the younger ones would say, “I’m telling!” and then the threatened one would say, “If you tell on me for that, I’ll tell Mom you ate the chocolate chips cookies from Grandma!” “Oh, yeah, I’ll tell Mom that you went sledding off the roof!” An upgraded threat would then be countered only to result in a Mexican standoff. I always dreaded the day when one was mad enough to tell anyway and the whole pack of offenses be known at once. But there were a lot of things Mom didn’t know until years later.

For a while, it was Baby Brother and I that got along the best and Baby Sister and Bold One that seemed to get along together.

When I came home on leave while in the Air Force, I remember Baby Brother came up to greet me. He had grown so much, and he picked me up off the ground when he hugged me. I told him I thought he’d been replaced by a bear.

By the time Baby Sister was about to be married, he and I began sharing aspects of our personal lives with each other that we told no one else. He knew the Bible like I knew lyrics to songs, and he knew a lot of the songs, too. When I left the Air Force and lived with him for a few months that relationship continued until I moved out.

If I had been fascinated with my siblings growing up, Baby Brother took to my children likewise. My kids sure loved their uncle.

As time went on, we laughed and talked and had such interaction when we did get together that sometimes it was hard to feel included in our antics. Mom would have to yell at us to get our attention.

Everyone always remarked how alike Baby Brother and Dad were. Dad called him his clone. When Dad passed away, all my hopes were unspokenly placed on Baby Brother as the next vessel of Dad’s ministry and prophetic ability. I encouraged him every chance I could with stories Dad had told me that seemed to match Baby Brother’s situation. It was as if my relationship with Baby Brother never had the broken piece in it that seemed to exist between Dad and me.

It broke and bewildered me when he was killed by a drunk driver at just the point in his life when he would have been fully immersed in becoming a minister himself. I was without a clue of what to think of God or myself at this point of having lost my Dad and now my “bestest buddy”.

I thought, “That’s it, I’m done. I’m not sure who I am anymore. God, I’m sitting right here, and you’re going to have to carry me where I’m suppose to go because I don’t know or care anymore.”

As I allowed Him to carry me as a toddler gone beyond himself, I began to see more of who He wanted me to be.

He also gave me a task. I was to write a story that Baby Brother had outlined, but had no time to flesh out. I couldn’t write with the knowledge of what he had intended to put down on paper, but the Lord helped to see the story lines that I could write and needed to make accessible.

One Sunday morning, I woke up with a melody in my head. I quickly got up in the early dawn and grabbed my guitar and worked out some chords and notated the melody before I could forget. In my heart, the Lord said, “This song is “The Hinterlands.” The name of Baby Brother’s intended book.

As the days passed with writing on paper, I was filled with music from God that became the CD project “The Hinterlands.” I had never felt such collaboration with God before in my life. I felt like I had done my life’s work and there was no more. Not true really, but that’s the way I felt.

I had dedicated my first CD to my dad. Now I dedicated “The Hinterlands” to the “Gene Roddenberry” of “The McClaron Chronicles”, my baby brother.

My life has been changed forever.