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The newest assignment my kids are doing is a descriptive memoir with anecdotes that leads to some sort of revelation. I'm pretty happy with the example that I wrote:



My brother Joe was born three years before me, and because of that, always managed to stay one school ahead of me. When I was entering Stonybrook in third grade, he had just left and was entering Pearl R. Miller in sixth grade. When I was entering sixth grade in Pearl R. Miller, he was moving on to ninth grade in Kinnelon High School. In fact, in our entire school careers from kindergarten through high school, we only had one year where we were in the same building, when he was a senior and I was a freshman.

I never thought there was anything unusual about my relationship with my older brother; we always got along “well enough” as we were growing up. As the oldest son, Joe always got first pick of anything, especially with toys. He was always possessive about being the only one in the family who had a particular item. He couldn’t stand it if I had a duplicate of anything that he had. He would throw fits if I ever got what he had or wanted. Some times, it wasn’t so bad, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys for example, because there was such a variety of action figures. Joe would naturally get the first pick, usually getting the meanest and coolest looking Shredder or Rafael the store had to offer, leaving me with a moderately cool selection of Donatellos or Leonardos. However, things didn’t always work out this well. Many times, since he was my parents’ first kid, he had been spoiled by them and relatives and had already amassed entire collections, like his He-Man toys, leaving nothing cool for me to call my own. Simply put, Joe just plain didn’t like to share.

While there certainly were many other types of toys out there for me to start to create my own collection from, he was still my older brother, so I wanted to be like him whenever I could; Joe thought He-Man was cool, so I thought He-Man was cool. However, I couldn’t show him how cool that I thought He-Man was because he would get mad at me if I had something that he didn’t have and thought was cool. Clearly, this catch-22 was a lot for me to wrap my four-year-old head around.

Young as I was, I wasn’t going to let this get the best of me. I thought I found a way around the situation in a spin-off series of the He-Man cartoon. Joe didn’t have any of these toys, and in fact, didn’t seem too interested in them, despite the fact that they were He-Man related. So while Joe continued his monopoly on the ultra-masculine He-Man series, I started my collection of his drastically more feminine companion She-Ra.

As an isolated incident, this wasn't a big deal, but this sort of thing happened all too often. Joe seemed to always first get to the 'boys' toys,' like My Pet Monster (complete with break-away plastic handcuffs), leaving me with the roly-poly and very yellow Popples (who were able to curl into a defensive ball to protect their cuteness) and the dainty Rainbow Brite (a little blonde in an iridescent multicolored space-suit). In hindsight, I’m surprised my parents weren’t a bit more concerned about me.

Naturally, we fought. Joe loved to punch me in the middle of my back because it made “such a great sound.” He also gave me more bloody noses than I can count and knocked out one of my teeth in the back seat of the car. He has since blamed those events on my finger constantly being in my nostrils and the tooth already being loose.

A mother of four, my mom was constantly bringing one of us to a friend’s house or picking one of us up from another’s, so there was a good chance I was around Joe and his friends for at least part of the day. I'd sit in the back seat of my mom's three row Suburban while Joe and his friend in the second row would turn their heads and endlessly pick on me until one of us got dropped off. To this day, I have several nicknames from that that stuck because of their constant pelting on day trips, though no one seems to remember their origins.

By the time middle school rolled around, our friends would mingle when we had them over at the same time. We would try to play nice, but there was clearly an “us versus them” mentality; they were bigger, stronger, and smarter than us, and they liked to remind us as often as they could. One of my best friends, Blake, has an older brother who is Joe’s age. Whenever we all got together, alliances were formed based on age, not family. In our old house, where we had a large, unfinished basement with exposed support beams and many kid-sized vehicles to ride over the concrete floor, we would all inevitably play Demolition Derby, smashing into each other or anything that was solid enough to hurt. Other times, Blake and I would run around the house for hours trying to run from our brothers who were going to ambush and beat us up. These often ended with Blake saving himself by helping them tie my hands together and lock me in a dark closet for extended periods of time. For unknown reasons, I still speak to him.

In the beginning of my freshman year, I was unfortunate enough to run into one of my brother’s largest friends, Tim, in the hall while classes were in session. As soon as he saw me, Tim grabbed me, threw me over his shoulder, ran to the nearest class with a teacher lecturing, and tossed me into the room. I was relieved when I didn’t see anyone I knew then flew out the door as fast as I could, just in time to hear Tim’s laughter echoing through the hallways.

Joe and his friends kept picking on me, but something had changed by the second marking period. Suddenly, it was like a switch was hit. They would pull me aside by their lockers and see how I was doing just as soon as they would throw me into a room full of people. When they picked on me now, they weren’t doing it to be mean, they were doing it almost as an initiation; I was one of the guys. He and his friends would call me over to say hello or bust my chops, but it would always be with a smile, and oddly enough, they seemed to like it even more when I dished it right back at them. When Joe and his friends would be over, I wouldn’t have to leave the room anymore. In fact, sometimes I would be invited in. It blew my mind the first time I was actually invited to go out with them somewhere. Joe, who would yell at me for having anything that he had, was sharing his friends.

I think that high school has that effect on a lot of siblings, as if it’s a great equalizer of sorts; no matter how much someone is your kid brother or sister, by the time high school hits, everyone has done a lot of growing up. As we have both gotten older, this has only become more and more true. Since both of us have our own jobs and lives, we don’t have to see each other all the time like we did when we were kids. Now, whenever we are around each other, it’s because we have chosen to be. With every passing year, we have gotten closer, and, oddly enough, become less and less like brothers, but more and more like friends.

Today, I had my eighth graders bring in an important, personal object and write about it. I decided I'd write a model paper of something I'd like to get from them and read it to the class this morning. What I ended up with was something much more meaningful than what I intended. I ended up telling the kids that their goal should really be to write something personally meaningful, that they will be able to pair with whatever object they chose. I told them to write to make themselves proud. I don't know how they turned out yet, but I can hope that they will be as happy with theirs as I am with mine.

Here it is:

If I showed it to you, you’d just think it was an ordinary bowling ball. It doesn’t look special at all. In fact, it looks pretty beaten up and worn in. The gold finish is lackluster, the etched brand-name and illustration of a Rhino are starting to fade, and the rubber fingertip grips are starting to peel away from the holes. It’s desperately in need of a visit to the pro-shop to get refurbished.

Most bowlers have a way of playing that they specifically get a ball made for, like throwing left or right-handed curves. I, on the other hand, have gotten my style from my bowling ball.

I’m not a particularly great bowler, by any means. I’ve got a knack for picking up spares, but I’m inconsistent at best. The fourteen pound ball fatigues my arm within three games if I’m lucky, but I wouldn’t play with any other.

When my dad unexpectedly passed away about ten years ago, I inherited the ball from him. I remember going to Butler Bowl, where he would go to have his league games, and marveling not only at his two hundred plus scores and the sound of the pins shattering when he hurled the ball down the lane, but simply at the way he managed to do it with such ease.

I remember asking him once how much it weighed, and I must have misheard him, because for years later, I thought that it weighed forty pounds. This just added to the mythical abilities of my dad. When I was in a gym with lots of weights, I’d struggle and try to lift a dumbbell that heavy and wonder how my dad could throw a ball that weighed that much so easily.

For a few years after he passed, the ball sat our family basement gathering dust. No one else in my family was really interested in the sport, and I wasn’t big enough to use the ball yet; the distance between where the fingertips and thumb were drilled seemed enormous. I didn’t think I would ever grow into it.

As I got older, I got a bit bigger, and a bit stronger, and I would try to use the ball every now and again. I remember throwing gutter ball after gutter ball, trying to control a ball that was clearly too heavy for me. I’d switch to one of the balls they had in the alley, but I’d always give my dad's a shot, to see if I could handle it yet.

Over many games and many years, I got more and more comfortable with the “Rhino.” I don’t know how many years later or how old I was, but I will never forget the sound from the first time I really nailed the pins. I don’t know how often you bowl, if ever, or if you have ever made that classic “strike sound,” where all of the wooden pins smash into one another and echo throughout the whole alley, but it was something that I always thought was incredible, something only the grown ups could do.

If I showed it to you, you’d just think it was an ordinary bowling ball. It doesn’t look special at all. In fact, it looks pretty beaten up and worn in. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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It's interesting the way things like this manage to sneak up on me. I didn't even realize that my dad's anniversary was coming up so soon, five days from today, until I had finished the paper and looked over it a few times. I hadn't even really thought of the ball as something special until I sat down to think of something that was "special," and I had just used it this weekend for the first time in months. I find it so interesting how the subconscious works.

Go see Beowulf. Preferably in 3D.

Come September, I will be working at Pearl R. Miller Middle School in Kinnelon, NJ as a seventh and eighth grade English teacher. Huzzah!