Big Brother Goes Off into the World

The Boston Herald

He cried when she was born. "You have a baby sister," his grandma told him and he flung himself on the family room couch and sobbed. He was seven and he'd wanted a brother.  A sister was something he already had, something that didn't collect baseball cards and never wanted to play whiffle ball in the back yard. Another sister he could live without.

He visited the hospital reluctantly, only because his grandmother told him he had to. He was certain that he wouldn't like this female person who was coming to live at his house.

He stood before the nursery window, tears in his eyes, his hands stuffed in his pants' pockets and stared at the long row of pale blue blankets. Why couldn't one of those babies be his? Why couldn't his mother have had a boy?

And then he saw her, a tiny thing wrapped in pink, a pink bow taped to her blond hair, her face a little like his.

And he fell in love.

"Can I hold her?" he begged, and pouted when a nurse said he couldn't. "Then can I hold her first when she gets home?"

He held her first, last and always, picking her up when she cried, amusing her when she was sitting in her infant seat. He'd come home from school and race into the family room and play with her, showing her all his baseball cars, reading her all the stats, then holding up the players' pictures so she could see. "This is Tony Perez," he'd say. "He's a first baseman and he plays for Montreal.”

She's never gonna remember," his other sister said smugly from the couch where she sat playing with dolls.

"She will so," he insisted.

She must have remembered, if not the specific names and faces of the players, the intent of the game because she grew up loving baseball, watching  it on TV, begging her brother to play with her. “Please, Robbie, please, let's play in the back yard. I can catch. I can hit. You taught me." 

He was 12 when she was five and he had a million things to do, but he always made time for her. He taught her how to hold a bat, how to keep her elbow up, how to field a ball, when to throw, and he did this gladly, as if he had all the time in the world.

When she was old enough to play for a team he came to her games the same way she used to go to his.  "Don't you get bored  sitting and watching  your brother?" her friends would ask.

But she never got bored. She loved him. It was as simple as that.

He wasn't just her baseball pal. He was her pal for all seasons, the one who would walk her to the store when no one else would, who'd go in the pool with her when it was freezing, who never tired of video games and who, when he got his driver's license, didn't complain about taking her to her friends’. 

When he left for college two years ago she was devastated. But he called that first day and asked for her and gave her his address and she wrote to him.  And then he came home for a weekend, and then another weekend. And soon he was home for vacation and then it was summer and he was home all the time.

But now he is leaving again, for Florida, for Disney World where he will spend his first semester. This time there won't be any weekend surprises.  This time he is leaving for months.

"I'm gonna miss you," his sister says hugging him. "You're the best brother in the world.

"And you're the best sister," he says, fighting tears.