Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2004 - 7:29 p.m.
It's my brother's birthday today. Adam turned 35 which is SO OLD! We were close when we were younger ... we lived with my grandparents for about 4 years after my mother got divorced and it wasn't always easy coping with my grandmother. We used to play stupid games in the garden and entertain ourselves for hours. He is a very shy person and I think we were each other's best friend for many years.
When we came to Australia in 1985 he went into middle high school and found it extremely difficult to make friends due to his shyness and being an immigrant. He latched onto a young guy nicknamed "Fabs". They did everything together due to their common interests of computers and role playing games. They helped each other cope with high school and then remained close afterwards.
When I met Wayne (David's father) my brother hated him from the very beginning. Adam said to me: "As long as you are with him I don't want any contact with you". 13 years later I contacted him and said "he's dead". Adam burst into a rendition of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" and we have now slowly started to rebuild a relationship and saw each other earlier this year.
He has had it tough. Dropped out of Uni 6 months before the end due to some female lecturer he fell in love with. Then at 29 his best friend Fabs rang him to say that he had cancer. Here was a perfect catholic boy, never smoked, never drank and rumoured to be a virgin ... dying of lung cancer. Diagnosis to death was 6 weeks. Adam rang Fabs in the morning and said "We're driving up to Brisbane to see you, we'll be there in 9 hours". Fabs hung up the phone, told his Mother that Adam was coming to see him, closed his eyes, and died. I didn't go to the funeral (I was still with Wayne) but apparently Adam was completely distraught. Even now I ring him on Fab's anniversary. I don't think my brother is gay but he and Fab's were still soul mates.
He now lives with a friend's Mother as a boarder and has been accepted into their family. He is Godfather to their three children which he absolutely adores.
Up until the middle of this year, he worked for a subsidiary company of NASA. Lockheed Martin has a space station at Uralla in NSW where Adam lives. He used to call himself a "Satellite Parking Attendant" because he would work on missions which would accept satellites from NASA when they entered the Southern Hemisphere and then park them somewhere in space away from space junk and gravitational forces. He has recently returned to Uni to study and I really hope he makes it this time.
My brother has two major faults. He is incredibly stubborn and he's an intellectual snob. He constantly sees me as intellectually inferior with comments such as "Oh I'm studying a REAL IT degree" or "Whats the point of knowing databases when no-one uses them?" Apart from being rude and hurtful comments they're also blatantly incorrect. I am constantly caught between correcting him (knowing he'll never admit he was wrong) and just swallowing my irritation to keep the peace (which I don't do with anyone else).
It's one of those situations where if they weren't your family, they wouldn't be in your life. But then I remember that I'm lucky to have a brother. David will probably always be an only child and whilst I can scratch around and find some good points about that, the bottom line is there is nothing better than having a childhood spent with a sibling. It teaches you social skills that can never be taught in school and also gives you a "partner-in-crime" for those stupid childhood pranks that we were perhaps too chicken to do alone.
Happy Birthday Adam. You are frustrating, stubborn, insensitive, brilliant, hilarious, kind and you hold a title that no-one else in the whole world can claim ... you are my brother.
t.