The little white house on the corner

I can’t remember much about it, if you want to know the truth.

Oh, I remember some things. But those things probably didn’t happen but rather sprang up as half-truths from some place in my imagination, where monsters go to breed and acts of personal heroism to grow.

For instance: I remember sitting at the window in my bedroom, forehead pressed against the cold glass, my breath creating a fog that blanketed The Bottom. The bedroom I shared with my brother was on the second floor, overlooking the corner where the bus stopped to pick him up. He was two years older, meaning I often had to gaze longingly at his maturation into a man—his departure to kindergarten—as I remained helplessly caught in childhood.

I suspect younger siblings have this sort of experience all the time, living vicariously through your older brother or sister. It was different, of course, than living vicariously through someone younger, like a father does with a son who turns out to be a much better linebacker than dad ever was—a fact the dad never fails to mention to Joe Sixpack who sits with him under the lights on Friday night.

Yes, I certainly lived vicariously through my older brother. He remains, to this day, one of the great figures of my life, one that inspired, in turns, both fear and a deep respect. And those emotions still well up in me, some 30-plus years after the first time I looked out that bedroom window and watched him climb aboard that gigantic yellow bus, bound for whatever heroic fate awaited him on the other side of childhood—or kindergarten, anyway.

The thing is, I don’t remember that bedroom or the cold window or my brother getting on the school bus.

The little white house on the corner was one story; our bedroom was not upstairs because there was no upstairs. I remember the Buck Rodgers trashcan I once peed into because someone else was in the bathroom. Or do I just remember it because my mom used to tell that story to my aunts and cousins and friends at church?

That’s childhood, in a nutshell: random glimpses of a life you may or may not have lived. The big brown station wagon. The Dalmatian puppy that got hit by a train. My brother’s navy blue coat. Acorns scattered in the front yard. Werewolves roaming the neighborhood at night.