Tuber

It was Saturday afternoon, and I had confined myself to the solitude of the basement in a hopeless attempt to actually get some work done. But, of course, things weren’t going anywhere. Saturday is the worst day to try and get anything accomplished. It is the day designated for procrastination, the one day to atrophy into a vegetable and sink into the ground. And here I was, under ground, trying to get momentum behind myself and move on. It was impossible.

I pulled the plug; I punted; I gave up. I took the steps two at a time, and threw open the door at the top of the steps. My dad and my little brother had entrenched themselves on the couch and were fixated on some rather important college football game. Feeling the beloved after affects of my great failure, I joined them without a care. I proceeded to question them about the course of the game, who had scored, how they had scored, what was working, what wasn’t. In mid-sentence my father stopped and sat quietly as the quarterback managed to hide the ball behind his leg from all twenty-one other players on the field and complete a touchdown pass.

My little brother remained in awe for all of about two and a half seconds, after which, he jumped off the couch, marched in front of the television, and reenacted the play. He did everything, with only one slight twist. As he pretended to hand the ball off to the running back, he declared, “I learned this from shoplifting”, and hid the ball. How could he do that? How could my little brother come up with something that funny, that perverted, that quickly?

A few days later I realized how it was possible for him to make his comment. My little brother was no longer my little brother. I should have seen it. I mean, it’s not like he stopped growing or getting older. He wasn’t going to remain twelve forever. I had just missed it until then. This feeling was terrible, knowing that you are only here for so long and neglecting to notice the important changes in both you and your brother’s lives. What a waste.

Maybe I hadn’t missed it; maybe I wasn’t completely worthless; maybe I was just blinded by his other actions. After all, is it really necessary for my brother, every time he sees two halves of a walnut shell, to prance around the house performing some sort of stylized Monty Python rendition?

To him it is.

I finally got pulled out of the ground, much like a carrot. I realized that the world, my little brother included, had changed while I was not looking. While I had missed some of the metamorphosis, I had not missed it all - and my brother still isn’t as tall as me.