Remembering my brother Dave

Sorry, Jim.

I only had one brother and he wanted to learn guitar and he did. I gave him my first guitar and showed him what I knew and he was into it until the day he died at 47 in 2001 from liver cancer. He would be 69 now.

I'm the oldest of three boys. My two younger brothers are more artistic than I am, though neither of them seemed too interested in learning to play a guitar. The middle brother played the trumpet for awhile in school, but gave it up sometime after finishing high school. He started doing detailed drawings with colored pencils, aquarelle markers, and other media within the last few years, and has won some awards for his work. My youngest brother started a drawing of a town on a roll of butcher paper around the time he was in third grade, and just kept going. There were rivers and mountains, and the town expanded from a business district to suburbs. He put in churches and cemeteries, and a few sketchy, dangerous looking areas. The quality of the drawing got better as time went on, and it was one of the things he submitted that got him a trip to our state's Governor's School for the Arts one summer near the end of his high school.

Of the three of us, my middle brother is probably the smartest and most generous, but he moved about three hours away and has pretty well made it clear he wants to stay where he is. He gives very thoughtful and fun gifts and would probably give you the shirt off his back. But since some of y'all are talking about losing your siblings, it's appropriate to say that he's the one of us that I'm most afraid will pre-decease the rest of us. Saying that he's morbidly obese is putting it kindly. He tended to get a bit heavy in high school, but he lost a good bit of weight when he first started college. He gained it back, but then lost it again when he got a job in a factory. That was several years ago, and he's since gained it back and some. I hate to see him destroying his health like that, especially since we're all now at an age where we can't get away with things the way we could when we were younger. I know that he has to see this as a problem and solve it himself.