How often do you witness something that makes your eyebrows lunge for your hairline as your eyes involuntarily widen and your jaw slackens while whatever your preferred “what the ….” slowly spills out of your mouth soaked in bewilderment?

The engineer, pedaling the bicycle, appeared to be late teens early twenties, the caboose, also known as your garden variety little red wagon, was occupied by a downy haired child that I’m sure hadn’t possessed the ability to sit unassisted long enough to appreciate all the ways the ride he was occupying could get sideways…or upside down.

I was driving north on a busy traffic riddled street, they were bouncing and lurching south on the sidewalk. Although our passing was relatively quick, it was quite apparent that the engineer had cobbled together some sort of duct tape hitch connecting his bicycle seat post to the handle of the little red wagon.

I’ve ridden in little red wagons. Their steering responsiveness, loaded with two knuckleheads rolling down a hill bobsled style, is quite twitchy and highly unpredictable. The handle gives you the illusion of steering, your little brothers high-pitched scream from the “backseat” paints a more realistic picture.

I don’t recall the name of the elderly lady that lived in the stucco house at the bottom of the hill next to our house in Palermo in 1978? I believe the stucco was painted yellow? I believe she wasn’t very pleased that pieces of her house broke loose and landed in our wagon on impact…all three times. I believe they held a parade in Palermo when we moved to Lignite? We weren’t invited.

When I saw the guy on the bike (with no helmet) pulling a toddler (with no helmet) in a wagon (with questionable stability) my first thought was, “does his wife know of the contraption her husband has devised?” My second thought made more sense to me, “the mastermind engineer is the older brother of the unwittingly unsafe little one.”

The hands of an older brothers are notoriously questionable choices in which to place the health and wellbeing of a younger sibling within. Those hands may be attached to an able body, but the whole lot is at the mercy of a brain that holds anyone that can light a fart on fire in the highest possible regard.

I am an older brother, and it is no small feat to convert a fart to a flame. As the old song goes…poetry in motion. Not enough to read by, but poetry just the same.

My brother Gabe is twelve years younger than me, and I was given the responsibility of watching him quite often while growing up. “Watching” him. Maybe adults should be more specific?

I “watched” me put him in the baby carrier on mom’s bike when he was about two-years old to take him for a spin around town. He loved riding back there, and I loved giving him rides.

It wasn’t my fault…My friends were jumping their bikes on our favorite ramp up a steep approach. As was always the case, some were jumping, and some were marking the landings so those that were jumping could see what mark they had to beat. The mark “we” had to beat.

Clicking through the gears on moms Schwinn, my approach speed was magnificent, the launch angle was near perfect, but I failed to take into consideration the impact my cargo would have on our flight trajectory.

If you measure the success of a flight by a landing that includes both wheels and swiftly riding away to the applause of your friends, then our landing, some would say it closely resembled a crash, was not a success.

But, like Orville and Wilbur Wright, we flew. If only for a moment, the eldest and youngest Ellis boys took flight together, while, in unison, the eyebrows of a handful of neighborhood kids made a hasty lunge towards their hairlines. It was glorious…then it wasn’t. So it goes.

I’m fairly certain Gabe got his first concussion that day. Happy birthday brother.