Circles
My family seems remarkable to friends who struggle with troubled or otherwise distant relations with siblings . In retirement, all four of us kids have settled in the same small town, with which we had no relation until 18 years ago. When my brother moved here, l already lived in the town, along with both of our sisters.
Although my brother and I had grown up in the same room in the family home in a suburb of New York City, I realized that, as adults, we had lived across the country from each other and, despite occasional visits, I no longer knew him. So a couple of years ago we started a weekly “mocha club.” At a certain time each week he would pick me up and we’d do coffee at a nearby shop. Then we doubled our weekly meetings of the club.
We didn’t seek out each other’s company because we were the same or agreed on everything. He was more the engineer (like our father); I, more the writer (though since the inception of the club he wrote a wonderful memoir called A Life in the Air). He was more the competitor (several hot-air balloon championships, national and world)); I, more the conciliator (including an opportunity to help the complex effort to end the Cold War, at least version one). My brother had some of the political attitudes typical of business (with his wife he started a small manufacturing firm); I, more those of a progressive (expressed through non-profit institutes and a philanthropic foundation).
I suppose we share some valences for which we have our parents to thank. For example, we both value what the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” and in fact we were each influenced independently by his book of that title. We have both sought to define challenges, even ones thought to be “impossible.” We are both curious about how things work.
My brother is more physically courageous than I. At an age when many guys are retiring, he took up paragliding. When he appeared on a weekly TV interview show that I was hosting, he described glancing to one side, while riding up in a thermal, and seeing an eagle just beyond his nylon wing. With a characteristic show of humility, he imagined the eagle thinking, “how amazing, he almost knows how to fly.” In fact, he rode the air to a distant mountain and back.
With his partner, he often invites one sister to go along on trips, whether to Alaska, the Big Island (Hawaii), or China. What a gift our parents gave us, of treating differences as an occasion for exploring. We have each found a path different from the others. True, both sisters taught in the Hoffman Process, a week-long workshop on family of origin, but in their twenties one was an artist, the other a scientist, and even their lives abroad were in very different countries, Nepal and Japan.
Thanks to our mother’s pre-marital insistence, all the siblings were supported through college, with no crushing debt as we started out in adult life. Instead of our parents giving us the answers in childhood and later, they would respond to questions by asking, “how can we go about finding out?” When I wanted a bicycle, Dad said he would pay for half and help me earn the rest. As for my brother, Dad sensed a fellow soul and got him a summer job at the small manufacturing company where he invented and sold electrical devices.
No doubt our parents did some things wrong. They had their own programming to overcome. I recall my Dad’s mother, who spent much of her life on a farm, responding to new information by saying, “well, I’ve never heard that before.” Even as a child, I remember thinking, “what a horrible life, for new ideas to be so scarce that you would note each one.”
At best, my brother’s reaction to something new has been quite different: “what does that have to teach me?”