Mr Smith-Park and I are each the youngest of our siblings. There was no one below either of us to tease or boss around who was biologically inclined to tolerate us. Maybe that's why we were so sarcastic and silly with our kids, but for sure that's why it's so much fun to have a younger BFF who is always around us to be our younger brother/sister and fulfill that role for us. Recently, I accidentally got to have a chat with the first guy I really considered our little brother, decades ago. He scrolled too close to my avatar on Facebook Messenger and it called me on his behalf, without deliberate prompting. I missed the call, but wrote him when I saw it, surprised that he tried to call me from London, out of the blue. We hadn't talked in two years, and it was nice to catch up, even if it wasn't on purpose.
The person who holds that current position of little brother for us, reluctantly the butt of all our jokes, is our neighbor T. He knows that we tease him from a position of love, but we are all aware that it can get out of hand sometimes. It got there tonight. To back up a bit: at last week's D&D game, our role play got pretty serious, with his character "Ron" giving in to paranoia over having heard rumors over and over that there were cannibals along the coast where we have now been shipwrecked. My character "Miriam" wasn't about to see more people vanish from the band of survivors of the wreck, so she refused to let him run off toward the horizon, with the wall of clouds approaching that indicated the eye of a hurricane was about to move off of us. Ron is a tiny man, the size of a thin hobbit. Miriam is an amazon, more than six and a half feet tall. She should have been able to overtake him easily, but he kept finding ways to escape in his abject panic. He couldn't believe we wouldn't just let him go. Miriam was committed to her vow that no one else would be at risk, and never gave up. She eventually tackled him, and we sort of got him calmed. He was still breathlessly whimpering about cannibals, but we made a promise that Miriam would protect him at the risk of her own life.
We started tonight several football fields' worth of distance up the beach from where we intended to be, with Miriam suffocating Ron while trying to get him to listen to reason. He's still really twitchy about cannibals, especially since the strange little man who rescued us made some sort of "meat is meat" comment that strikes terror in Ron's heart. After hours of play, we still aren't sure Ron is able to handle the fear, or even the jokes that all of us heaped on T as a player for three full weeks of games (including the day he heard all the rumors, four times over at least).
T's birthday was this past week, so I made a fancier dinner for everyone than usual, and hid a birthday cake from him in the upstairs fridge. (I was really glad I used that one, when the first place he went upon arriving tonight was the beer fridge in the garage.) We ate while we played the first forty-five minutes of game time, and then I sent my kids upstairs to retrieve dessert. On his cake, below the happy birthday greetings, I had spelled out in candy letters, "Beware of cannibals." Poor little brother. Teasing will never stop. It's our way of letting him know he is our family, even if we don't share a speck of DNA.
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