Headlock

When I was growing up, my family always spent a few weeks every summer in West Palm Beach, Florida where my grandfather and his wife lived. We hated going there, from what I can remember. It was incredibly boring, having to spend so much time sitting around in a house that smelled like mildew and old people. There was a strange saltwater pool at his country club, where sometimes we were allowed to go and play. There was also a bathing suit ringer at this club that looked like a torture contraption from the early 18th century.

Rather than swim in the pool like normal children usually would, my brothers and I would attempt to fill the pool with green berries we picked from the bushes lining the pool's edge. We would throw what seemed like thousands into the pool, and sometimes they would push me in and force me to retrieve them. We would also throw the patio furniture into the deep end and then have a pretend picnic complete with pretend food and pretend tea. We loved to throw furniture into pools; there's something incredibly satisfying about watching a table and four or five chairs sink, winding and turning as it drifts effortlessly to the bottom with one last thunk. We would see how long we could hold our breath while hanging onto on the lounge chairs that also got tossed in. One of my brothers always wore a watch with a timer on it that beeped. He always held the record. I could never beat him. He was like a fish, that one.

Eventually, our parents would come by and yell at us for having put the furniture in the pool. They would ask us to get out and change into our clothes for dinner. And so we would move from the pool to the changing-room area where the bathing suit ringer was located. We would then pick aloe plant leaves and run each one through it, cheering as the plant oozed its contents on the barrel of the ringer. We would throw them at each other and we would stab each other with the thorny edges of the leaves. We would leave the ringer covered in slimy green aloe juice and walk away, giggling like the school children that we were. We would leave a trail of disaster when we left that country club; we would leave our family mark.

I have a lot of fond memories just like these, of the days when my brothers and I vacationed together, of when we played together, of when we lived together and shared everything together, not because we necessarily wanted to, but because we had to. Because we were family.

This past weekend I talked to one of my brothers for close to two hours. This is the first time we had talked in several months, not because we don't like each other, but because until a few weeks ago he lived abroad. The time difference and the expense of calling overseas made it difficult to talk often. We talked about many things: the gossip going on in the family, the sad news I had to bear, the confusion that life has handed us, the excitement, the joy, the pain. And although this is the same brother that used to pin me down and fart on my head, or blow burps in my face, the same brother who would wake me up by throwing objects at me from the doorway of my bedroom, this conversation transcended everything up to that point. It was like all of the sudden we stopped being children and put on our adult masks. And it didn't strike me hard until we eventually started talking about very "adult" things: about how best to handle our crazy mother and about him becoming a father, and about true love, romance and bliss. It was then that I realized perhaps for the very first time that we weren't playing pretend. We actually are adults. We are...adults?

Somewhere between West Palm Beach and New York City and Venice Italy we both grew up and became adults. And not that I didn't think it would happen, I just didn't expect it to happen this way. Yet underneath all the confusion and situations that adulthood bestows, I know that if he had the chance, he would headlock me and hold me there until I begrudgingly scream out ...mercy!