My Sibling Rivalry

On Saturday I sat in my apartment in Dallas watching the U.S. Open tennis matches in New York when my brother called and invited me to lunch. I had to miss Djokovic’s match, but I never miss an opportunity to see Don and Mary. 

I do not see them often.  They are both busy people.  Some people refuse to retire, saying “I don’t want to sit around all day doing nothing.”  I say, “After I retired, I was involved in so many things that I wondered how I ever had time to work.” 

Don and Mary are like that, too.  Or perhaps Mary wants to avoid the lively “discussions” that Don and I have.  She does not realize that Don and I can disagree without really getting angry with each other.  

Don is a retired engineer.  When he worked for Turner Construction, he supervised the construction of big buildings all over the World.  From their offices in New York, he traveled to places like Berlin and Sao Paulo and Tokyo to supervise all the mechanical (heat and air conditioning, plumbing, and electrical) in sky scrapers.  Recently he was hospitalized in a brand new hospital just a couple of miles from their Garland home.  A group of “experts” from came into his room and asked his opinion of their facility.  They expected praise for their radical new design.  Instead, Don said, “I’ve built over 100 hospitals, and you made a lot of mistakes here, starting with these high windows above my bed.  When the sun comes up, light bounces off the wall opposite and right into my eyes.  You need blinds on those windows.”

At our lunch typical Texan Don ordered chicken friend steak with mashed potatoes and cream gravy.  I had chicken breast with spaghetti marinara.  We had a very pleasant meal, carefully avoiding any mention of politics and religion. 

Mary is a fundamentalist Christian who believes that every word of the King James Bible was dictated by God (in English, of course).  Evolution is some crazy theory that Darwin thought up with no scientific basis, and the World was created by God in six days in 6,000 B.C.  

Don is one of those gun-toting Texans who believes every word put out by Fox and the Koch brothers’ propaganda machine.  He knows nothing about economics and history.  He quotes the second amendment without knowing what it meant to the men who wrote the Constitution.    

Looking for a safe topic to talk about, I mentioned that I had been watching the U.S. Open on television.  That’s when Don surprised me.

 “I built that new stadium,” he said.  “They wanted to fill the seats in both the new stadium and the old stadium.  At the same time that we built the new stadium, where the most important matches are held, we took off the top of the old stadium, just like slicing an orange in half, taking off several rows of seats at the same time, so television viewers would see the old stadium filled with people for the secondary matches.”

My brother.  He may be ignorant when it comes to politics, but he is an amazing engineer.  Here I had been watching Federer and Serema Williams fighting for the men’s and women’s championships, completely ignorant of the fact that my brother built the stadium where they were hitting balls over the net.