Monkling’s Blog

Today was supposed to be my brother, Mike’s 48th birthday. What’s funny is if he were alive, I wouldn’t have given his birthday much thought. People in my family are lucky if they get birthday cards from me. I usually claim to have given them an invisible one. No one bought that story so now I do send cards out, although they’re typically a month late.

When we were kids, Mike used to make up names for people. There was some older man in the neighborhood who used to wander around. Thinking back now, I suspect maybe he suffered from dementia but what do young kids know about that sort of thing? Mike used to refer to him as Machine Gun Mattalli. I have no idea where Michael came up with that name. My brother, did, however, improve with the naming as he got older.

His names for people progressed to foods. He would name people a food that he thought fit them and somehow, the names did seem to fit the people. The person named Cream Soda did have hair that was the color of cream soda. The guy he referred to as Clam Chowder had a rather milky complexion.

Mike ran into some problems in high school. I was 3 years older and was in with a different crowd. No, wait. I wasn’t in with any crowd. Anyhow, Mike used to come home with some funny stories. There was the time someone brought a radio to school. The person turned the volume up really loud and then put the radio inside a locker and locked it. In our school, the lockers weren’t in the hallways. They were in the back of the classroom. Another time, someone bought some white mice from the local pet store and let them loose in the classroom. We didn’t find out until years later, that the “someone” was Michael.

Ah, yes. We are seeing a pattern here. The entire family is nuts. I wonder if they do birthday cake up there. If they don’t, I think mom would have made sure things were a bit different today.

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