Out of car parts, a raven made a nest inside my skin

[sovay]

My brother's coming over tonight. Despite the fact that he lives in West Hartford, i.e., forty-five minutes away, our combined schedules ensure that we don't see each other as often as we might like. He's an engineer. He's on an eternal quest to make his 1991 Pontiac Bonneville into a sexy and barely street-legal piece of machinery, rather than an fender-dented steel boat with a stuffed Cthulhu in a Hawaiian shirt perched up behind its rear windshield. He had a ponytail and a mustache from mid-high school up until this summer, when he did away with both in the same week and promptly looked like the less consumptive and more romantic kind of Romantic poet. He also looks more like our grandmother than anyone else in the family, and he has her talent for visual art: he does spray-paintings of women who look like proto-Kandinskys or God knows what, black-eyed with blue pupils, intersected with arcs of red and yellow hazes as though they're only passing through this spectrum's field of vision. He wears a lot of black. We listen to some of the same music. I'm very fond of him.

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

None of my business, but since this is such a neat "Introduction to my brother", I will ask the question it sparks for me: older or younger brother?

The strength of my feeling of "how could you possibly have omitted this essential pierce of information?" probably reveals more than I would wish about me, my family or my place therein...

[sovay]

Younger by three years and change: I'm October 1981 and he's August 1985. I always forget there's even that much difference; I tend to view him as contemporary. As a result, I'm always asking him if he wants to order a drink when we're out to dinner and he's always looking sarcastically back at me: if only . . .

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

Don't start me on your drink laws...

[sovay]

Don't start me on them either . . .

[sovay]

The strength of my feeling of "how could you possibly have omitted this essential pierce of information?" probably reveals more than I would wish about me, my family or my place therein...

May I ask where you fall in the continuum of siblings (if you have them)?

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I'm an eldest; I was afraid I was showing that, in my concern for these questions of hierarchy!

My sister, who was the youngest, died seven years ago (good lord - seven years) this week; my brother is the middle one.