Happy Birthday Mark

Dear Mark,

In honor of your special day, I thought I would regale everyone with stories from our childhood. The stories which feature you tormenting, torturing, and just otherwise terrorizing me. You know, the good stuff. So here is your birthday roast, with love:

Let's begin at the beginning. I was a newborn in my crib, you were nearly two, climbing into my crib. Mom walks in, you hop out, and in the process you fracture a bone in your foot. Karma, maybe?

I am a year and although I want to, I have yet to walk a single step. Mom says I never took a step because every time I pulled myself up to the couch, you would buzz past me and knock me down.

My first real memories of the two of us were when I was about 3 1/2 and we were in the back yard. You had a bug collection and I was your assistant. Your job was to stab the bugs with a sewing pin through a block of Styrofoam. My job was to catch the bugs for you to impale. On my own, I would never have thought of picking up a bug. (I still don't like grasshoppers or preying mantises. They were the most abundant of all of our back yard bugs, and the most prone to flying into my face and hair.)

We had that nasty little dog. We could never go out in the backyard because whenever we did it would chase us and nip at our fingers and feet. (I suppose I have that dog to thank for ending my career as your bug-catching assistant. Thank you little dog--whose name I cannot remember.) That poor little dog, absolutely neglected there in our equally neglected backyard. It escaped one day when Mom was taking out the garbage cans (at least that is what we were told at the time) and I remember crying and crying for the loss of our dog--that dog I never touched, if I could help it. You sat me down and told me the dog was dead. You remembered seeing a big RV drive past our house with the mangled blood and bone remains of our dear dog on the front wheel.

We would go to the beach, Morro Bay, and I would spend hours collecting rocks. These rocks were absolutely the most beautiful beach rocks to ever roll ashore and I grabbed them up by the hand fulls. You would ask if you could see them. I would decline. You would promise to hand them right back to me, you only wanted to look at them. I would want to believe you, yet I knew from past experiences that you would just chuck them back into the ocean. You would persist, and grudgingly I would hand them over. And off they go, into the surf. Then you would ask about my sand dollars...

You sat me down one afternoon to deliver the double blow of the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I ran crying to Mom for her to tell me you were wrong, only to have my heart ripped out of my six year old chest. What?? The Tooth Fairy Too?

But it wasn't always you spoiling my childhood. I can also remember:

You would take me with you to the ditch. We would ride our bikes there in the 95 degree San Joaquin Valley heat (we would go in the cooler morning hours) and fill up my bike basket with baby toads the size of our thumbnails and ride back home. Then we would put the little guys in the pool with us.

Those hours and hours we spent building a dirt fort out of the mountain of dirt that was displaced when Dad made our above-ground pool an in-ground pool instead, sort of.

Those hours and hours we spent in the pool. Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo! Fish out of water! No! (You liar. You were always out of water and you know it!)

You would always let me hold Kingfish, your king snake, whenever you were cleaning out it's cage. Also, you would let me hold any blue-bellied lizard you were lucky enough to find.

You would let me help you type in code on your Commodore 64, a process I neither understood nor was good at, but it was something I was just proud to be a part of.

You were always nice to my friends and still are--although it must be acknowledged that Kelly, Christi and Apryl were absolutely beautiful girls--and still are.

So thanks for the memories. Thanks for being my older brother, my tormentor, and now as grown ups, my friend. Have a great Cinco de Mayo. (Much cooler birthday than Cinco de Marzo, I can assure you.) I love you.