Growing pains

The Old Guy has many memories of a childhood spent as a younger sibling. Some of them are more enjoyable than others, for competition between unequals is always a painful thing to watch. One that springs to mind is a kind of paradigm for all the others: The Incident of the Bookcase.

Being five years older than I, the Older Brother was naturally a more capable person in most many respects. Nevertheless, he generally tolerated the ability gap quite well and we shared our living quarters with only sporadic difficulty.

During one summer vacation, however, he decided to build a kind of bookcase/utility shelf for the area beside his bed. He found some 1-by-2 inch lumber strips from somewhere in the basement, and collected a number of identical empty cardboard boxes which I think had been used in some school Christmas-card fundraiser to hold the merchandise.

The 1-by-2s he nailed together so as to form an open vertical frame into which he dropped the empty cartons on their sides with their flaps cut off. Thus he constructed a series of five enclosed shelves. The whole unit stood about six feet tall when finished.

Placing it beside his bed, he filled it with various treasures that had hitherto occupied the floor.

Up to that time I cannot recollect having felt so visceral a pang of jealousy, but I could not help myself. I was transfixed by envy. I vowed to build a better unit than his.

For all my obsessive efforts at discovery, I could not locate similar, let alone superior pieces of wood. What proved most devastating,- the matched set of cardboard cartons had been depleted. There was only one left, which I assume he elected not to use because of his intuitive awareness of the principle of "center of gravity". (Understand, dear reader, that this was in the Jurassic Era, long before Red Green and The Handyman's Secret Weapon -- Duct Tape).

Many years later, in going through the attic, I discovered that same cupboard. This time, however, my feelings were quite different. I admired the ingenuity of its construction: light, strong, capacious and dirt cheap.

There were several other achievements by the Older Brother, appropriate to his scientific engineering curiosity and mathematical aptitude. For example, I have a picture of him standing on a ladder helping me to put rafters on a shed in Thunder Bay. He calculated the exact angles for the pitch of the roof using trigonometry. I probably would have wasted several dozen pieces of 2-by-4 in an attempt to cut matching angles by eyeball.

It's all in the perspective. A talent that once provoked jealousy now evokes admiration. Could this be a sign that I'm growing up? We can always hope.