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My Life With Patrick

December 25, 2013

I have no memories, save recent ones, in which I do not have a brother named Pat.  My memories begin at around 4, and yep, he was already there.  We are 15 months apart, numbers 2 and 3 in the birth order.  Sister Terry Sue was first.  I was a stick and Patrick was round.  I knew right away that he was funny.  He could do Bill Cosby’s bits from the Revenge album as a kindergartner.  He totally nailed it.  Made me laugh.  “Right in the side of the face, with a slush ball.  I hate you, Junior Barnes.”  Good stuff.

We shared a lot of stuff.  My girl cousins left a bicycle behind when they moved to Pendleton.  We both learned to ride that bike.  The road above our house in Annie’s Acres was level so that’s where we started until we got some nerve, then down the hill on Bridges Street we would pedal as fast as our nerves would allow, and at the bottom of the hill we’d slam on the brakes, and try to leave a long swoosh of a gravel skid mark. I went first but left a short timid swoosh.  Pat left a big sweeping swoosh, laying the bike down and tumbling off.  Band-Aids are for the brave.

At Grandma and Grampa Weaver farm house at Rice Hill we shared a bed.  There was only wood heat so all of the bedrooms were cold;  three quilts cold.  I remember the smell of two unwashed boys under the covers. 

Much later, around sixth grade for me, Mom bought us a guitar to share.  Dad’s oldest brother, Myron had recently died.  This was 1971.  Thegenerations gathered for the funeral, Dad’s brother in law, our Uncle Gene showing up with a child sized nylon string guitar that belonged to my cousin Charlene, or Charlie as he called her.  He showed Patrick and me a few chords.  The next thing I knew Mom had enrolled me in a class.  I would go to the group lesson and when I would go home Patrick would get my papers and learn the lesson too.  The next year he took the lesson and would show me his papers.  Patrick was always a quick study and more confident than I was.  We got along mostly.  I genuinely liked and admired him. 

We played hours and hours shooting baskets, playing catch in the yard, and just talking about everything under the sun.  It really only got weird when I dated girls in his class.  When I was in the eighth and he was in the sixth we lived out on Coffee Flats between Drain and Yoncalla.  A girl in his class, Jan Dean, liked me, which Pat reported to me.  Through Pat we arranged to meet at the Grange Hall a mile from our house toward Yoncalla on Sunday afternoon.  She and her parents square danced there.  I went in hopes of holding her hand and maybe stealing a kiss.  At the dance of course I mainly held hands with everyone else, spinster aunts included but did manage one kiss.  Later Pat and our friend, Hutch, pestered me “what was it like?”  I told them it was kind of wet.  The next day Pat reported to me that she said I was “no Robert Redford either.”  No more square dances with Jan Dean. 

Then there was Wendy Mack.  I was a senior and Pat was a sophomore.  Pat liked her first.  He asked her to Homecoming in the Fall, and she said no.  Ouch.  In the Winter, the bus coming back from a varsity basketball game, there she was in her cheerleader outfit sitting all alone, reading a book so I sat by her and asked her what she was reading.   Soon after she was wearing my class ring and Pat wasn’t talking to me anymore.  That was the only time in our life we didn’t talk.  Pat talked to Dave Heaton about his troubles.  Then when I broke up with Wendy after basketball season Dave dated her for a while.  Men are idiots.  I screeched the tires on Dad’s Dodge Dart in front of her house while Dave and Wendy sat in his Maverick “talking.”  Patrick, Dave and I went on a camping trip not too long after that, just the three of us, three guitars, two mules, and lots of canned food.  We were friends again.  Bros before . . . well you get the idea. 

Pat really came into his own when I went off to college, at least in my eyes.  I remember coming back after my first year.  Patrick showed me songs he had learned to pick right off the radio:  Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot and Van Halen’s Ice Cream Man.  Wow, pretty cool.  He was lifting weights and getting pretty cut too, and had that giant afro.  By then we had very separate lives, different cities, different women (yes that was better).  Our talks were fewer and farther in between.  As men we talked mostly on the phone and as our children came the visits began to be years apart.  It was always sweet to be together.  We talked easily and understood each other.  He never gave me advice that I recall.  If I ever gave him any I don’t think he followed it.  He was his own man and made his own path. 

We continued to share a love for music and I’m glad we had that.  One year in the 80s he invited me to downtown Portland to hear his college friends, the Boys Next Door at Key Largo.  Pat had taught one of them to play guitar and then when they started taking the band seriously Pat by then had family responsibilities and became their sound man.  Dang, that was a good dance band.  I got to see him in his Karaoke castle at Lenore’s Ghost.  He was a great host and clearly made a lot of friends.  Glad to say I got to see him play with the Shinkle Band too.  He was firing on all cylinders, playing guitar, bass, ukulele, and singing parts.  In June of 2012, two months before his “graduation,” our family gathered to lay my dad’s brother, Loren, to rest in our family cemetery there on Coffee Flats.  That was a nice full circle for us.  My band played the memorial and afterwards at the social hall Patrick, brother Steven and our cousin Scott joined us for a jam.  Uncle Gene was there too watching over our shoulders.  I don’t remember what we played, only that we did.  We had no unfinished business.

Rest in peace, brother.

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