A Nocturnal Hero

My brother is the one who always listened; the one who muted the volume of his own self-interest and offered his time freely. He is a savior to the dejected and a friend to all. When he speaks, he grabs you with his impassioned speech and gestures madly with his hands, but when he listens, his solemn eyes never leave your face until you’re finished, considering each word as carefully as biblical text. He taught me many things and I may not have survived without him.

When I was a child living in Raleigh, my father’s job required him to travel around the country extensively, meeting with business clients and discussing whatever financial advisers and their associates chat about. Every Sunday evening my mother, my sister and I dropped him off at the airport, and at the end of each week we’d retrieve him and, if we were lucky, attain a new Ninja Turtles action figure upon his arrival. Because of this, my father seemed more as a regular visitor than a stable part of my life.

My sister Jennifer and I were in elementary school, while my oldest sister Michelle went to UNC Chapel Hill, and my brother Eric was a proverbial idler. Nowadays, Eric is wildly successful, having lived in Honolulu and now Los Angeles and working for Sony on many movies as a graphic artist, but back then he had about as much motivation to leave our parents’ house as I did to eat our mother’s zucchini casserole. Fourteen years older than I and the product of my mother’s first marriage, Eric had graduated high school only to realize that college was not for him and returned home to continue living in our finished attic.

To my young mind, he was a mystic figure, a rollicking mockery of social convention. His style was a cross between Jesus and Jim Morrison. Rarely did I see him with a shirt on, and as I was preparing for school, he would just be getting to bed. And when I sat down in the afternoon after school to watch Power Rangers he’d usually say good morning and join me on the couch. Not only was he full of eccentricities, but also talent. Most often, I’d find him nestled in the back corner of his room near his window, plucking his guitar with the precision of a surgeon. Or if not than hunched over a canvas with charcoal, pen, pencil, or brush in hand. Creating art, for him, was effortless. He would play music for me for hours, always asking which notes I thought sounded best.

I watched him live through pain as well, but he always shared comedic wisdom from his experiences. When he broke his collarbone preventing a clumsy girl at a party from falling down a flight of stairs, thus tumbling down them himself, he said the next day with a grin, “I’ve always fallen hard for pretty girls.”

Eric never denied me the truth. He taught me how to care for people and how to respect the fragility of life. When he lost his fiancé in a tragic accident, he kept on living. He didn’t conceal his sadness, but it was outweighed by his understanding that his life hadn’t ended yet. That first and only time I saw him cry he held me as though I were the older sibling, there for his security, opening emotional doors and inviting me into a new religion of the spirit. When his wrecked voice stammered “without love for each other we are nothing,” I believed him with more gravity than I’ve yet felt. He made me feel like his equal, like someone with a voice to be heard. Without my father constantly around, I needed another male figure to guide me. He provided my childhood with entertainment, insight and understanding.

Eric moved to Hawaii when the rest of us moved to Charlotte, the summer prior to sixth grade. Losing him from my every day routine had the emotional impact of a car crash, though I quickly came to see that he had prepared me well for life without him. And as years pass and the memories of childhood fade, his face remains in reflective moments of youth and freedom, forever my guardian, my brother.