My brother Jarvis’s birthday is coming up in a few weeks, so I thought my gift to him would be to tell a bunch of people what a pain in the butt he was growing up. He was born on Friday the 13th , which pretty much sums up the way things usually go for him. Since there is only 18 months between us, due to an apparent sale on fertility drugs at Berg’s Red Owl, we always got a lot of matching gifts growing up.

The only difference in the toys we would get for Christmas was that Jarvis’s were usually broken. Mom and Dad would order us the exact same toy, possibly in hopes of eliminating one more thing for us to fight about, and as I played happily with mine Jarvis’s would be whining about his not working.

Which upset me horribly prompting me to give him my toy….yeah right. The only thing it prompted me to do was parade around in front of him displaying how much joy and happiness one could get from playing with the ‘working’ model. Do I feel bad for that now? No, not at all, I was well within my rights as an older brother.

There was one gift that we both got that his worked better than mine, a scratch and sniff coloring book. He was scratching and sniffing away, yelling out, “strawberries”, “apples”, “bananas”, and each time I would look up puzzled. I scratched and sniffed like a cage full of monkeys….nothing. I figured my book was broken.

Then I thought he was some sort of prophet for awhile. We would walk in the house, and Jarvis would say, “We’re having lasagna.” Sure enough in the oven would be pan of lasagna. I was baffled and amazed how he new that the glass of ‘Mt Dew’ I offered him wasn’t exactly ‘Mt Dew’ and refused to drink it.

What powers does this boy possess? Hmmm…the power of smell perhaps? Yeah it took me awhile to uncover the mystery and realize that I had absolutely no sense of smell. The broken scratch and sniff coloring book, the lasagna prophecy, the umm ‘Mt Dew’, of course it all adds up now.

When you’ve never had something how are you supposed to know that it’s missing? I had a full head of hair at one time, so I know that’s missing. So did Jarvis, by the way, and since we’re now mature adults I won’t make any jokes or smart comments about his hair. He’s had a good year in therapy and I would hate to see it go to waste.

Jarvis lives about 50 miles from me, so we get to see each other from time to time. We don’t fight and argue anymore, we leave that up to our kid’s now. Jarvis has learned to control his temper, a little, okay, not much. I must admit that I do still enjoy seeing him in the throws of a good fit, nobody can loose it like Jarvis.

I guess as brothers so close in age, we weren’t really expected to get along growing up. I’m glad that changed.