Remembering my brother

I heard from a friend last summer about how hard it was for her to lose her grandmother; I could empathize even more when lost my older brother. This is an entry I wrote in another venue about him; I post it here on his birthday because I want to save it somehow.

In some ways, I'm grateful (but not at all glad!) that he was something of a loner and a hermit; I'm not tempted to pick up the phone every day or two to ask how he is or to tell him the news in my world, as I did my mom several years ago when she died. On the one hand, that's nice; I don't have that hole in my heart. On the other, it kind of sucks; why didn't I talk to him more?

I've thought some over the past few days about what I could say to give you a bit of insight into just how crazy and wonderful this brother really was, but a couple of others have done it for me, and probably better. (See our nephew Chef Bruce's blog at http://thebranchrestaurant.blogspot.com/2008/08/ogg.html and our niece Stephanie G's nice notes at http://sdfgarcia.blogspot.com/2008/07/don-ogg.html, then follow the link to the notes his Buckskinner friends made at http://www.buckskinning.org/2008_ogg.htm.)

But Don and I shared a lot: of five kids in our family, we were the two whose names began with D; his dyslexia (and even his left-handedness) gave him legitimate reason to feel as if he didn't "measure up" to our parents' standards for years, so he understood that I never felt as if I "measured up" in comparison to our two sisters; we both loved being outdoors and both had life memberships in scouting (and both had camped out in the year before he died—although his skills were immeasurably greater than mine!); we both loved handcrafts—the only two left in our family who actually made things on treadle sewing machines; we both knew that we had a special bond neither of us would ever share with the others.

He was different from me in many ways, too: I loved to read from the time I first figured out words on a page, and I made a career of writing and teaching writing, while he found both of those arts painful and only learned to love them as an adult, when he finally realized the treasures of knowledge in books (especially old ones) and that all of us loved every word he wrote to us, even when he broke every grammar and spelling rule we knew. He never had children (he shipped his mail-order bride back to the sender six months after he met her), and he scraped by for most of his life on a meager income that would never have accommodated them. He was an inveterate tinkerer; if he wanted something, he often managed to build it (or to modify something close enough to make it work), although some of his efforts were remarkably more or less successful than others.

I miss him, but I love the blogs his niece and nephew and friends have built to preserve his memory. My former mother-in-law volunteered to pull together some of our memorabilia of him (pictures, copies of email he sent us, the web pages linked above) into a scrapbook that I hope will one day enter our family archives.

One thing is sure: He'll never leave our family memory.