Phoblography: Family

I just want to note that this is the 100th blog post for Black Sheep Diaries. It's quite an accomplishment, considering that in the first year there were only 10 posts. I've come a long way, baby. Anyway, I'll get on with the matter at hand.

The Bourne Trilogy

My grandmother, the sweetest woman in the world, decided early on that she would document our lives by taking pictures of our shoes. Every so often Granny would grab our shoes and a camera, and we'd follow her outside where she'd line them up in age order and snap away. My shoes are the pair in the middle, since I am a middle child and all that that entails. I'm not sure how many of these shots exist. I also have no idea when this one was taken.

The pair on the left belongs to my older brother. If the three of us represented high school cliques, he would be the Prep. He's the family clothes horse. His closet was the reason I was in the running for Best Dressed in my high school. He has a keen eye and impeccable (albeit pricy) taste for anything that requires coordination. Probably equal parts ladies' man and rebel, he was a tough act to follow. He was, however, an excellent trailblazer in the sense that being known as his little brother proved to be a useful calling card for the one year that we went to school together. He was also a good foil, making me look even more studious and well-behaved. In general, he has always been popular with people of all ages, the favorite in most cases. Fast-forward to present day and we are flatmates. As adults, we haven't managed to identify any more similarities, but we have found that our differences complement each other quite well.

It's hard to imagine someone more different from me than my older brother, until you figure in my younger brother, the owner of the shoes on the right. My younger brother is the family Jock. He inherited the bulk of my father's athleticism. As children, we did almost everything together and had big fun doing it. In fact, we were raised almost as twins, because we were about the same size until a couple of uncontested growth spurts secured his status as the tallest and brawniest of the three. He was the secondary ladies man and the primary rebel. He was just as popular as my older brother with his peers and also a snappy dresser, although he has always leaned more toward urban fashions. Actually, he gravitated toward all-things urban, in spite of our mostly suburban upbringing, and insisted on calling my college-prep high school "The Wellington School of Etiquette." Nowadays, he's an Army MP with a wife and four kids. A meat and potatoes kind of guy, to balance out my older brother's "champagne wishes and caviar dreams." Unfortunately, we've yet to reach the same detente of complimentarity in our differentness, but I'm still holding out hope.

I round out the group as the Brain. And, in case you were wondering, I lost the Best Dressed title and instead ended up as Most Likely To Become President.