New Member To Our Family

09.23.07

Today my brother had his first baby. He stayed up probably 30hrs or more from Saturday morning till Sunday early afternoon waiting for the end to come and for the start to begin. I still can’t believe he has a kid now when just yesterday I remember us being kids ourselves. The impact of it all isn’t about the new life that has just arrived for us and not about how he is looking out into the world with different eyes now, but it’s about us being no longer two retarded Asian kids battling out our pathetic whims with our imaginary games and our pretended play wrestlings everyday. It’s about me closing my eyes and seeing just yesterday - what seems so recently for me - of him practicing shooting basketballs and me being jealous of him riding off on his new moped or us at Myrtle Beach swimming or us trying to catch crabs on a bridge somewhere in Charleston, S.C.. We were just kids and now he has a kid himself. He used to create all these imaginary worlds for me when I was little, where I was Fredric Hollings in the army and we would run army drills or battle scenes with our water-filled Windex guns, or when we would play catch and he would create a whole game where the batter would hit the ball and I would be the catcher, and if I missed, he would vocally reel off about how the batter was rounding first and going to second and he would physically run from base to base as if he was the batter running. I would then have to throw it to him as hard as I could, being so small, and he would then automatically turn from being the running batter into the base catcher and would choose my ball’s fate. Exciting times for me were when the bases were loaded and he would throw the ball as high as he could and it was up to me to make it an official out or a huge loss on my end. We used to toss the football around too and played similar scrimmage games with football as we did with baseball, but that was harder to deal with, figuring out how to handle tackles on the asphalt ground, which always tore me up, so we ended just playing catch with the football at the end. We used to play wrestling where I was ‘Nature Boy Rick Flair’ and he would change characters as he felt. Sometimes we would be tag team buddies and we would be the ‘Rock-n-Roll Boys’. We would reenact what we watched on the WWF that previous night. He created all these fantastic worlds for me and I fell into them passionately and wanted it recreated everyday again and again. And we played everyday too. And now, I wonder how he did it all, how he created all those wonderful, imaginary worlds so that everyday it seemed like something new and fun that I never did before. Maybe I was easily convinced or maybe he was just very convincing or maybe he really believed in it like I did and we were really part of a different world when we played. Somehow he never created one where we didn’t win the ball game at the end nor ever created an army battle where we didn’t come out on top. He was either careful not to upset a small child’s fun, or overall, just caring about me and my psychological state. Whatever talent he had creating for me all those wonderful worlds when I was not yet knee high in height, he’s got it in him so that he’s going to create a beautiful world for his new baby girl, Jaela, to live in. And most likely, she will forever cherish it just as I have. He’ll be a good father and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t cry or get teary eyed when he first laid eyes on her too, as I did when he called me to tell me he was a new father and I’m a new Aunt.