My brother has always been one for the bizarre, elaborate plan.
About the time he was six, he decided that the best way to discover whether Santa Claus was real was to catch him in the act. Unlike most children, who find a place to sleep in full view of the drop off point, my brother decided that the best plan of attack would be, yeah, the attack part.
He spent months drawing elaborate schemes filled with booby traps. None of them ever made it to reality, but as soon as Halloween was over, it was time to start planning.
When he was eight, he decided he was going to grow up and live in a vast underground mansion. The entrance would be located under a vacant lot. The point of the plan, you see, was that living underground and having the entrance on a vacant lot would allow him to live tax free.
Certain snags in this plan developed his desire to grow up and be a hobo. I can't count this one as completely bizarre because it's probably similar to my on again off again desire to be an ancient hermit philosopher: freedom, isolation, etc.
When he was twelve, he decided that he wanted to die in his thirties. Why in his thirties? So he'd still be good looking enough to send to the taxidermist and be stuffed. After he was stuffed, the plan went that he be set up in a corner of my parent's living room. I've often thought that this would be a wonderful concept for a play, but I can't quite bring myself to use it.
When he was in high school, he wanted alternately to be a porn star or a crow bar wielding super hero. I was in college by then so I never really worked out the motivation behind these or how they manifest themselves in real life. My mother says that he bought himself a mirror and spent a lot of time in front of it every morning. She's never seen Boogie Nights, but I've often wondered if he has.
Once he quit college, he decided that he was going to be a plumber. He had the pipefitter's union sending him things. This went on until he discovered there was a math test, and he decided he wanted no part of that.
Most people who know both of us can't quite accept that we're related. They agree that we sound almost identical, and we look alike, but other than that, we're from two separate planets. Except The Boy, who says that neither of us could possibly be related to anyone but each other.
In 1993, a few years after my father's dog died (she wasn't a collective dog- it wasn't quite Hank Hill and Ladybird, but she was my father's dog), we ended up with guppies. My father wouldn't get another large pet (strange considering we used to have the dog and three cats), so my father bought three guppies and an algae eater.
The algae eater promptly died and was never replaced. The three guppies reproduced so quickly we finally had to add another tank and my brother and I pretty much lost any interest we'd had. If they didn't have names, they weren't pets. And anyway, these were fish. You could hardly call them pets no matter what stories my mother would tell about how much personality her mollies used to have.
The fishtanks were kept in the basement. This wouldn't be so strange except that our basement was an unfinished basement. We hung the laundry down there in the winter time (to this day my parents don't have a clothes dryer), it was a repository for projects my father hadn't quite managed to finish, and the dog slept down there. (The dog had a preference for cold hard places. She preferred to nap on the linoleum upstairs instead of the kitchen mat.)
But for some reason, the fishtanks ended up down there. I think my father liked the way they glowed in the dark of the basement. My brother ended up taking on the task of feeding them. And he fed them. He really did.
One day, this during my sophomore year of college, I had reason to go down to the basement for something. Bicycle, maybe, but probably laundry. I happened to look in the fishtanks. I had to look closer. No, nope, there were definitely only snails in both tanks.
I asked my brother if he'd been feeding them.
Oh yes.
Did he notice there weren't any fish in there?
There weren't?
No.
Oh.
We have no idea how long he'd been feeding the empty tanks. My father guesses it must've been months. It's also hilarious that neither of my parents noticed, especially after their insistence that fish were wonderful, interesting pets ten years ago when we purchased the first generation.
Every now and again, I think of getting some neon tetras or something. We even have a very small tank that used to belong to The Boy's father's pet turtle. Then I remember this story.
My brother had better luck with two pet albino hedgehogs. The first he got when he was in second grade, so 1995, and was named Maxwell Norman Prickle: Maxwell after a local radio DJ, Norman after Spiny Norman from Monty Python, and Prickle because what could be a more appropriate last name for a hedgehog?
It lived three years and died unexpectedly while my brother was at summer camp. He was heartbroken.
The second came the a few years later. I suspect he didn't really want another one, but my grandmother knew someone who had some and for once in her life remembered my brother.
My grandmother had four sons and two grandchildren, me, and my brother. My brother was just another boy, but I got a lot of undeserved attention. He was always treated like a naughty little boy- she once gave him the corner of a twenty dollar bill for his birthday and told him he could earn the rest of it by being good. My dad had a few words with her on that. Though she doesn't recognise either of us anymore, she will react if my father mentions me, she doesn't do this about my brother (could be because her husband, my grandfather who died two years ago, and oldest son, my father, share this name and she's not certain what reaction is appropriate). I'd say my brother decided to take the attention while he had it.
The second hedgehog was called Christopher Norman Spine. Christopher was my suggestion. My brother doesn't know it, but I got the idea from the younger brother of a friend of mine. I thought he looked rather like a hedgehog. At the time, though they were the same age, my brother didn't know him. They met in high school and my brother took an instant disliking to him. I've always thought this was funny. The Norman, of course, after Spiny Norman, and Spine because he couldn't be called Prickle since he wasn't a relative of the dearly departed.
In 2001, that hedgehog managed to stay alive just in time to die a day or so after my brother returned from the Boy Scout National Jamboree in Virginia.
The boy doesn't have good luck with pets.
Currently, he's working in some restaurant in DM and living in my grandparent's house. My uncles are unwilling to sell the house until my grandmother passes away, but since she's not living in it, the insurance has decreed that someone has to live there. My brother got the job. He pretty much hates it because since he's living there, my uncles take that to mean that they have that much more time to clean up the house, and except for the layers of dust and my brother's things, it's almost in the same condition it was when my grandfather died.
I've said before that if there was any possible way, I'd love to buy the house. No one not in our family could possibly appreciate the strangeness about it, and the whole was built by my relatives.
The thing is, it sits on a huge lot (it could be a double but for the drainage crick in the back), that's a chore to care for. It's got tonnes of problems- termites, the basement floods, the plumbing is all incredibly old, the electrical isn't much newer, and it's probably about time to have the place re-roofed again (it's maybe been done once in my lifetime). That's just the troubles I know about.
On top of that, it's in DM, where my entire family lives. I've told The Boy that we'll never ever be living in CR because that's where his family lives, so I can't very well do the same thing to him. Besides, chances of him finding a job in DM are very slim. Better for me, but not much.
Still, that's the sort of house I'd like to have someday, and now that I'm presented with the best possible way to have it, it's basically impossible.