I have an older brother who is 4 years, 8 months older than I am.  What is most odd about us is that although we look nothing alike in detail, almost everyone finds it easy to tell we are brothers.  We laugh in the same way and our voices sound similar on the phone.
 

It could also be that now that we are both over sixty, I am catching up to him.  It’s simple math.  Put my age in the numerator and his in the denominator.  The older we get, the closer the value of the fraction gets to one.  Unfortunately I won’t hit 99% of his age until I am about 396.  By then, I think it will be possible to think of us as twins.
 

At one point in the past, though, he was twice my age.  In those days, he was my hero.   I wanted to do everything he did and go everywhere he went.  I taught myself to read before starting kindergarten, using his grade one books.   I followed him when he and his gang went to knock chestnuts out of the chestnut trees all around our house on side streets off Yonge Street by throwing sticks into the branches.  On two occasions, he threw a stick with a nail in the end of it and when it came down, it stuck in my skull.  Oh, well, there were advantages and disadvantages to this older brother business.
 

My brother was really great to sleep with but in those days neither one of us snored.   I loved to cuddle up to him although I doubt he appreciated it as much.  We were always telling each other jokes but when we got into trouble with our parents, it was lights out in more way than one.  I firmly believe that it was always his fault for making me laugh.  After all, I was just a kid.  That was my story when my parents came into the room and I am sticking to it.
 

When we fought, he always found it easy to tease me.  This is what drove me to distraction.  “Rubin’s mad and I’m glad because I know how to tease him.  A bottle of ink’ll make him stink and na, na, na, boo, boo.”  To me at the age of 4 to 6, this was like a declaration of war.  I would sit on top of him pounding his stomach and he would never let on he was hurt. Instead he started giggling at the first punch and, by the end, was laughing uproariously.  Eventually, I had to laugh too at my own helplessness to injure him.
 

A couple of times, I got carried away.  Once I hit him in the head with a dart, which skimmed his skin and just lodged behind his ear and once I hit him over the head with my toy gun.  Besides the two chestnut sticks in the head, I was wounded when I put my head down and charged him while he was standing in front of cast iron shelving and he moved.  This resulted in another visit to the hospital to sew up my scalp.  My final visit there occurred after I fell backwards off a fence, trying to imitate my brother’s acrobatics and landed with my head on the curb.  The doctor was surprised to see me again.  My bald spot has developed around those scars and no amount of coaxing, massaging or praying to the rain god has helped the roots to sprout again.
 

I have now been the parent of three sons but have rarely had to deal with such serious incidents, although there was one time one son told his younger brother to pretend they were playing a video game and to run back and forth across the back yard while he tried to shoot him with his spring loaded beebee gun.
 

My brother and I are very close and so are my sons.   However, when I hear people wish that all men should be like brothers, I think, “Yes!  But leave out the mishigas.”