baby brother

my brother, brent, was here thursday and saturday. he came to stay with us while on a work trip. it was good seeing him. he was relaxed and was cutting up. no disrespect to his family, but i liked having just him here this time. he seemed like my brother the way i remember him when we were kids.

that's one of the sad things about growing up. you miss just being a kid sometimes. you have a spouse and kids and responsibilities like a job and bills. i was waiting on him to ask janelle to pull his finger like he did when she was little. she used to giggle and giggle when he'd let one fly.

we had a lot of fun as kids even though he's 6 year younger than me and 5 years younger than suzy. we saved him from a lot of whippings, but there was one we couldn't get him out of.

we used to have a drive-in theater here. one of the radio stations would have $5 a car admission price which was great for our family b/c we didn't have a lot of money. mom and dad would pile us in the car and take us to the drive-in. we would be in our pj's b/c we usually fell asleep before the movie was over. dad would light up the mosquito coil and sit it on the dashboard to keep the pesks away. he or mom would go to the snack bar and bring back a big popcorn bucket to share and drinks. i think we took in kfc a couple of times too.

dad drove a '67 ford galaxy. that car was the bomb.dot.com. it had big wide seats so me and suzy could stretch out on the backseat. brent was small enough to fit in the back window. we had our snacks and drinks and had gotten all settled. this particular night there was a double feature. i can't remember what the first movie was, but the second one was north dallas forty with burt reynolds. mom told us we could go to sleep if we wanted to or we could watch the movie.

i think i fell asleep right away. the next thing i know something plopped on top of me. i hear giggling and it's brent. he'd rolled out of the back window on top of me and suzy. mom fussed at him and told him to get back in the window and go to sleep. he did it again and we hollered. mom told him again to get back in the window and quit rolling over on top of us. she warned him next time it happened, dad was going to take us home and brent was going to get a whipping. things seemed to be quiet finally. pushing his luck, brent rolled on top of us again.

my dad said "that's it! we're going home!" he practically threw the speaker box off the window back onto the stand. we went peeling through the parking lot to the exit. brent started crying and apologizing. he knew he was going to get a whipping as promised.

now let me make a note here: my parents whipped us, but they didn't abuse us. usually a whipping was like five licks with the hickory stick. it might be 10 if we were really bad, but we had to be really bad to get 10. just the threat of seeing the hickory stick was enough for us.

when we pulled in the driveway, dad barely put the car in park before he yanked my brother out of the back of the car. suzy and i were right behind him saying he didn't really mean to roll over on us. even though he drove us crazy, we didn't like to see our baby brother get in trouble. needless to say, brent got 10 licks that night. and you better believe the next time we went to the drive-in, he stayed in the back window without falling out one time...lol. we laugh about it to this day.

and you know to this day, i have never seen north dallas forty. go figure...

kisses...