The time my brother gave me Thoreau as a peace offering

My brother tormented me when we were little. He was my hero, I was his albatross. While I remember him pinching me if I dared sit next to him in Sunday school, where mom dropped us off for free English lessons (a clever, clever move, I've always thought... leave it to my genius mom, a high school drop out, to hunger after giving her children opportunities she did not have to the point of dropping us off at a church that offered free English lessons for children... we were not Christian, but hey, free English lessons! But that is a different story for a different day)--

As I was saying, while I remember him shunning me, my brother remembers me chasing after butterflies and leaving behind shopping bags that were my responsibility (mom always believed in everyone pulling their own weight). Though he is only 20 months older, my brother, always the responsible eldest child, collected the shopping bags that I'd left behind, and hated me for it.

We were night and day. He was the favored child, I was (allegedly) the ill-tempered one. He was measured and calm, I was emotional and crabby. He was focused, I was a space cadet. He was responsible, I was a free spirit. He was aware of his surroundings, I was absorbed in details that took my attention away from my immediate surroundings. In other words, he was a Jedi master, and I was a nobody.

To teach me a lesson, my brother would steal my Smurfette or Chuck E. Cheese wallet to see if I noticed. To test my reflexes, he'd practice his latest martial arts moves on me without warning. My mother did not intervene. (Back to the favored child and only male status.) Once, when my uncle and aunt were visiting, my brother stealthily attacked my aunt, mistaking her for me. I was outraged when he did not get in big trouble as I had hoped he would.

It's not surprising, then, that sometime during high school, I reached my breaking point. I was sick and tired of being his unwilling whipping post, sick and tired of my parents not intervening. So, I stopped speaking to my brother.

If you ask him, he stopped speaking to me because I declared he would never, ever get into college. (That he took anything I said to heart was a revelation to me.)  

About a year and a half into our silence, in his junior year of high school, my sophomore year, completely without warning, my brother left me a present under the Christmas tree (no, really, we are not Christian), wrapped in light blue packaging paper, addressed to me in his distinctive masculine cursive. My eyes teared up as I unwrapped a Bantam Classic edition of Thoreau's Walden and Other Writings. 

Just like that the icy silence melted. 

In the time we did not speak, my brother did not stop noticing my love for the written word. Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately. My brother's deliberate act of calling a truce changed the course of our relationship; he was far more magnanimous than his angry teenage sister.

When we met up in Europe as grad students, I saw for the first time the dark side of his favored child status: he internalized much of the burden of being the first born child, the bearer of the hopes and dreams of our parents. In childhood, I was so busy protesting the inequities between us and feeling sorry for myself that I never noticed his burden.