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I have been told that the first child is like the first pancake.  It is always experimental, you almost always mess it up and you have to be ready to throw it away.  As the second child, that would mean that my parents were ready to do it right by the time I came along.  However, in my family, this wasn’t the case.  My older brother was considered perfect ever since I can remember.  He was smart, good-looking and athletic, did well in school and always had a steady parade of girlfriends.  He went to Princeton for his Bachelors Degree and Harvard for his Ph.D.  Imagine trying to compete with that!  With regard to his girlfriends, he’d go out with them, he’d bring them home sometimes, they’d swirl in and out of my life and I was just a passive observer; not even a fly on the wall.  As the little brother, I was occasionally allowed to tag along and that was trouble.  No matter who his girlfriend was at the time, I looked up to him and to her with adoration and always developed a crush on the girl, just because.

By my brother’s senior year, he had his real girlfriend, Barbara Blumenthal, also a senior and he had his emergency backup girlfriend, Cindy Barson, a junior at the time.  Because Barbara was his real girlfriend and three years older than me, she was beyond reach, beyond even having a meaningful conversation with me; but not so with Cindy.  She was only two years older than me and that meant that she was able to comprehend my existence.  We’d always laugh together. Everything I did and said, she’d say it was so cute.  When my brother went off to college, Cindy was left behind.  I made it my job to console her.

Trying to compete with a perfect older brother is, by definition, impossible.  I tried to find ways to exceed him but never quite succeeded. I joined clubs and activities just because my brother did but I could never achieve his level of excellence.  I would rise to a certain point and then give up and move on to another arena because there was no way to surpass his achievements.  Where he was an athlete, I was a manager.  Where he was the star of the Hi-Q team, I was an alternate.  The fact is I am still competing after all these years.  My brother got a Ph.D. so I did too.  My brother got articles published so I did too.  My brother got books published so I did too.  It was never the same though.  He always did it first and he always did it best.  The few times I tried to leap over his achievements, like getting married before him, I lived to regret it.  We still joke about him being the perfect son to this day only it is no joke.

I entered High School the year my brother went off to college.  Even though I was a sophomore and Cindy was a senior, our paths crossed quite often.  I think I got involved with the High School yearbook that year just be near her.  She was short, pretty, and intelligent and funny; more importantly, she always laughed at my jokes.  But the idea of us dating, that was impossible even to consider.  In High School, a two-year gap in ages might as well have been a two million year gap.  She never saw me as a male, just the little brother and fellow member of the left-behind club.  But I idolized her and cherished the time we spent together.  We fell out of touch after I went off to college.

Many years later, when my first ex-wife and I were buying a house, we happened to use Cindy’s husband as our lawyer.  One evening, for some reason, it became necessary to go over to their house to sign some papers and Cindy was there.  It was so good to see her.  She was as pretty and as funny then as I remembered from High School.  It made my heart ache.  Would that I could spend some time with her now.  At our age today, the chasm of a two-year difference would be condensed into just a tiny crack.  Maybe now she could see me for who I really am and not just the little brother.