Through 30 years of birthdays, vacations, Thanksgivings, job promotions, the passing of a father and beloved pets, the birth of grandchildren, the change of seasons, my brother and I didn’t speak.
Why, I’m not really sure. We didn’t have a fight over politics or money or anything consequential. I’m older by two years and, while we were never best friends, we had a serviceable relationship growing up.
We did the kinds of things most brothers probably do together: played basketball after school in the Goodmans’ driveway, played Stratego and a weird electric football game that had a vibrating metal field that made the players move in random directions, went to Knicks and Rangers games with our father, skied and played tennis on family vacations.
(That said, our early years together may have been a harbinger. When Andrew was born and came home from the hospital, I yelled to the baby nurse, “Hey, Miss, you forgot your baby!” Not happy that she had left him at our house, I threw a heavy, metal fire truck into his crib. A few years later, I guess because I deserved it, Andrew threw a dinner fork at me which almost put out my eye.)
Our time living together in our parents’ house ended when I went off to college. Our last activity I remember was a draft we held with our pretty impressive record collection. Back and forth, we chose the records each of us would keep. “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos went to me, “The Royal Scam” by Steely Dan to Andrew, until we worked our way through hundreds of records from A (Allman Brothers) to Z (the Zombies).
Andrew went off to college two years later, and it was as if he went off to Mars. We rarely spoke, not about girls, classes, frat parties, food fights, lawn frisbee. Nothing. I think we may have visited each other once in the two years our college years overlapped, but maybe not.
Over the next 30 years, our lives hardly crossed, although there seemed to be good enough reasons for us to reconnect. We both had two good kids, second homes, a series of dogs, cats, or both. But, in hindsight, there were probably more powerful reasons not to.
I moved to Manhattan, near where I had grown up; Andrew stayed in Boston, where he had gone to college. I got married to a woman he thought was fantastic; he married a woman I told him he shouldn’t. I went to work in advertising and got to the top of my field; my brother changed midlevel P.R. jobs frequently and hated them. I lived large, he much smaller.
I don’t know if he was envious of me, or if he just didn’t like me because I was an unbearable New Yorker. Given that he was much smarter than I was, I think I was disappointed in him.
Then our sister got sick. She’s seven years younger than I am, five younger than Andrew. She drank too much. Given the state of her liver, the doctors said she had drunk way too much. Why she did is how Andrew and I started speaking again.
We spoke often about her rehab and her therapy. We talked about our father’s role in her drinking, our mother’s, and the boy’s who lived next door. We discussed the impact on her husband and their twins.
Our conversations began to expand. Which professional sport has the highest percentage of Jewish players? Who was the best jazz saxophonist? What pasta shape is best to use for carbonara? Best series of all time, “The Wire” or “Breaking Bad”? Sometimes we talked until one of our phones ran out of battery.
I turned 70 last November. To celebrate, my plan was to rent a house in the Caribbean on a small island with a deserted beach. I was going to go with my wife, my two kids, and their spouses and my two grandchildren. I found the perfect house on Bequia, a small, little-known island in the Grenadines.
I was disappointed when both of my kids said they couldn’t go. My wife and I didn’t want to spend two weeks alone (well, at least she didn’t), so we talked about friends we might invite.
When we set up a Zoom call with Andrew and his wife, they asked us if we were getting divorced. (I told him that, at least from my perspective, I didn’t think so.)
I talked about the last 30 years. I told him I was sorry and that it was more my fault than his, which I think is true. I said that I felt guilty and angry that I had wasted those years, especially knowing what I know now: that we have more to talk about than a phone battery sometimes allows us.
I told Andrew and his wife that we wanted them to join us on my birthday trip to Bequia. Partly as an apology, but more as an opportunity to keep talking, about stupid stuff like the wisdom of replacing human umpires with electronic ones, and serious stuff like why our sister drank so much.
The four of us just returned from Bequia. And we did talk. A lot. About how the seven turtles that live on the property get up and down the 53 steps between the house and the beach. About whether Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell was the best songwriter of all time. We talked about our kids’ futures and our parents’ pasts. We talked about our sister’s recovery. We talked a lot about our dangerous, deranged president.
Andrew is a musical savant. Along with his encyclopedic knowledge of any genre, starting with early jazz, he’s also been singing in an a cappella group since college. Because of his predilection for music that’s highly structured, he prefers jazz to rock. (My tastes are much simpler and undoubtedly less refined.)
On Bequia, he was the house D.J. and chose the music throughout the day. Often, we listened to obscure jazz tracks featuring, at least to my ear, discordant piano solos, out-of-tune sax riffs, and sad, aimless plucking on a bass.
But mixed in was another sound that cut through clear as Fitzgerald. When I heard it, it found my ear and drowned out all the others. It was Andrew’s voice. “Yodels or Devil Dogs?”
We could’ve had 30 more birthdays together. But who knows, maybe we would’ve run out of things to say.
Jonathan Cranin is a retired advertising executive. He lives in Water Mill with his wife and rescue dog.