The Milkman's Son

before the Leppard show in 2005

According to my mother—who should know; she was there—it was a dark and stormy night. The pipes at home had frozen and flooded the flat. My older older brother, a toddler at the time, was staying with his maternal grandparents, so rather than help Dad clean up the water, Mum went into labour. She says she was still cold at the maternity hospital, but at least she was dry, and at the end of the night she had her second little boy, my younger older brother, the self-proclaimed Handsome One, so she figures all was worth it.

On paper, he doesn’t fit the family profile. Four of five kids were born in September. He was born in January. Four of five kids have green or hazel eyes. His are blue. Four of five kids have brown or black hair. His is auburn. In fact, he looks so much like our maternal grandfather that a family resemblance to the Greigs would have to reveal itself in personality … and I’m unsure that it does. His deadliest charm is his sense of humour – razor sharp, lightning fast, screamingly funny, and practically identical to the wit of our mother’s father.

Hmmmmm …

Wedged between my older older brother and my older sister like the jam in a sandwich cookie, he was, quite simply, the brightest splash of comedic colour in my growing up. Six years lie between us, so my earliest memories are vague. I remember a fairly active temper, mostly when I was goading it, but when there was laughter in the house, he was usually in the middle of it. He and my older sister were the perfect comedy team, recording their own radio shows on the old reel-to-reel in the basement (he asked me to provide Indy racetrack sound effects for one skit). He taught me to tackle him like a football player on the front lawn. When he wasn’t putting together models of them, he was downstairs with his pellet rifle, shooting at pictures of old WWII airplanes. He took me to my first hockey game (the Victoria Cougars vs the Medicine Hat Tigers) and drove me to the record store so I could buy my first Elton John album. He’s the headbanger in the family, gunning his electric guitar like a Sex Pistol while my older older brother favoured the folksier acoustic form of modern music. He’s crazy-ticklish. And he’s a one-man Goon Show, able to mimic any of the characters made famous by the British radio troupe of yore.

Actually, I can voice a mean Bluebottle, myself. My brother and I carpooled with Dad for the course of a summer in the early 80s; Dad drove, bro and I bantered in non-stop Goonese. My (our?) father is not a morning person, so getting him to think of cracking a smile is monumental. On those mornings, he’d sometimes take the role of ultra-slick Grytpype Thynne or the frazzled Major Bloodnok, and we’d howl with laughter all the way to town. Those hysterically happy rides to work would never have happened without my younger older brother.

A lot of good times would have been missed without him. The family trek across Canada in 1971. Riotous suppertimes when my arthritis was brand-new and raging. Attending a Def Leppard concert in 2005. Trash talking hockey with his son and recognizing his deeply affectionate nature in his daughter. I don’t recall any serious moments with my younger older brother. I’m afraid that if we tried one, we’d both burst into tears and drown in each other’s arms. A mother lode of passion is packed pretty deep within us; if avid support of our respective NHL teams isn’t hint enough, I suspect that our similar senses of humour are employed in precisely the same way for precisely the same purpose: to deflect and disarm incoming missiles that might otherwise reduce us to emotional rubble. I think sometimes that he and I are more alike to each other than we are to any of the other sibs – that’s why it seems appropriate to wish him a happy birthday today in a language I know he’ll understand:

YING-TONG-IDDLE-I-PO, bro!