Father’s Week #4: The Last Man I Worshipped

Jim and Peg, about 1970

Jimmy is my brother. My half-brother, really. Eight years older than I am, my father’s son from his first marriage. I adored him. He is the first male I trusted and the last one I worshipped.

He taught me to make a monkey face for family photos. He told me slightly twisted fairy tales at bedtime. And I can say with confidence that Jimmy would have done anything for me – I once had the photograph to prove it: a black-and-white snapshot of 14-year-old Jimmy sitting on a coin-operated rocking horse outside a tourist stop in the Smoky Mountains. The humiliation is clear on his face. He endured it only because six-year-old Peggy begged him to do it. In the photo I’m standing on tip-toe beside him, a goofy grin on my face.

My brother didn’t live with us. When we took him back to his mother’s house on Sunday evenings, I would stare through the back window of our ‘58 Ford Fairlane until the house where he lived disappeared, stifling sobs.

Jimmy became Jim. He joined the Alabama National Guard. He became a husband and father. Somewhere along the line he became a man of faith, a man who refused to be the kind of father our father had been.  Today, Jim is also a stepfather and a grandfather and, not the least, an honorable, kind and loving husband. 

My brother is still my hero, the finest man I know. He turns 67 in September and one day, I suppose, he will be gone for good. When that happens, even though I’ll know he is safely home at his Father’s house, I will be as inconsolable as that little girl watching him disappear through the rear window of the car.

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