Today marks the first time that I have ever traveled a long distance with my brother alone.
We are hitching a ride on an economy coach, to join our elder sister in New York City. She is flying in from Los Angeles to attend an academic conference for the next three-to-four days. And while she has committed some of her time to this professional get-together, she will be joining my brother and me as we gallivant around the city I know best. But he and I will be going it alone most of the time, a prospect that fills me with both excitement and dread. For we don’t see eye-to-eye on what is worth visiting.
As you probably already know, I lived in NYC for over two years, from August 2009 to November 2011. My brother has only ever been to the city once, and that was for my graduation last year. He came up with my dad and sister, who flew east for the occasion. For this trip, he has requested that we do “touristy” things, which I have always avoided as both a tourist and a resident. We haven’t worked out our itinerary just yet, but I can tell you that I have already knocked down the idea of visiting the Statue of Liberty. While the landmark boasts free admission, the ferry on which you arrive there costs upwards of $20, and neither of us has that kind of money. As a compromise, I have told him that I will take him to Battery Park City to look at it from across the Hudson River. I have also suggested we take the Staten Island Ferry. You know, for the view. But it does look as if we will take a tour of the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg for his benefit. (He will also see Williamsburg for the first time, a place he’d only ever associated with tacky, lived-in displays of colonialism in Virginia.)
The brief journey we’re about to embark on reminds me of the only other time that my brother and I took a “trip” together, all around our neighborhood. I may have been five or six, making him three or four years old. One morning, I awoke to find no one but my brother in the house. Panicking, I ordered him to get dressed and, as my dad loves to recount (though he wasn’t present at the time), I “took him by the hand.” And we knocked on door after door, asking the unsuspecting tenants, “Have you seen our mom?” What can I say? I had an active imagination and probably had seen too many movies in which parents abandon their children. I remember being scared. But I wasn’t as frightened as our mother, who eventually spotted us walking up our street, our shoulders hunched in defeat. She’d been looking “everywhere” for us. As it turned out, she had taken our older sister to Hebrew school, and Dad was probably in shul, too. It was autumn, and my brother and I were dressed too warmly for the weather, in shorts and t-shirts and without jackets. But what a relief we were reunited!
If I ever take my brother “by the hand” again, it won’t be because we can’t find someone. It may come Saturday afternoon, though, when I will be ready to drag him out of the Brewery—and probably just as we arrive.
The Rumination Refinery 