I think I first noticed it as a child. I walked into the kitchen and saw my mother and older brother huddled over the counter top. Both were all smiles. My brother was downright giddy.
“What are y’all doing?” I asked.
“Look what your brother got,” Mama said.
He showed me the high school annual that he’d brought home that day. There it was, a picture of him with some lady, and the words Most likely to succeed. I was a bit too young really to understand quite what that meant that he was most likely to do, so I asked, “Huh? What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said, putting his book down, taking hold of me, and lifting me onto his shoulders, “that I’m gonna make it big one day. I’m gonna be successful.”
I still didn’t get it. “You are? Is that good?”
“You bet it’s good!” He started running around the kitchen with me astride his shoulders. He was laughing, and I was laughing. Mama wasn’t laughing.
“Y’all cut it out. Don’t do that in the house.”
My brother ran outside. I rode atop him, dodging the door jambs and fixtures, trying to compose myself enough to yell “Stop!” But I couldn’t. I was laughing too hard. I don’t know why. Mainly, I guess it was because he was laughing.
Once outside, he set me down. He was still beaming from ear to ear. I loved my brother. He was everything big brothers ought to be — protective, a genuine role model, and a bit annoying at times. It was a couple more years before I understood what “success” meant. That was way too distant a concept for a young child from a poor family.
All I knew was that my brother had been honored and was happy. I hadn’t gotten any such honor, but his being happy for some reason made me happy. I couldn’t have hidden it if I’d tried. I couldn’t help but open my heart and be flooded by my brother’s joy.
My brother died about twenty years ago. Colon cancer. It hit him fast and furious. It was just a few short weeks between the diagnosis and his death. He left behind quite a local legacy. He was an entrepreneur, who had sold insurance, owned and operated several private ventures (most of which failed), and finally was the proud owner of a local country store in the last year of his life.
He had married his high school sweatheart, a beautiful and intelligent woman. They had two kids, a boy and a girl. The boy looked just like his father, and the girl was an angel. She had a degenerative brain disease that left her incapable of speaking properly. Most people thought she was retarded because she sounded like a drunk. Rough childhood in school. But she always smiled, and was always kind and sweet. A couple years ago, she graduated from a local university Magna Cum Laude.
My brother left behind a lot of people who adored him. He was the kind of guy who dropped everything to help you when you needed it. When my first wife and I got married, he came over and replumbed our whole house. All by himself. He did stuff like that for everybody he knew. About a week before he died, the Lion’s Club created a special title just for him, Honorary President. None of us had even known about the work he had done for the blind for several years. Yeah, we knew he was involved with them. We just didn’t know how much until the funeral. Lion’s Club members came in carpools.
Yep, he succeeded. And he planted his success like apple seeds everywhere he went. His whole life. Our other brother is now a millionaire, mostly thanks to him. And hundreds of people, from the mill workers where he was the youngest supervisor ever to hold the job to the alumni of a local orphanage where he’d spent countless hours being a big brother to so many kids — all were enriched beyond measure by the constant joy, love, and kindness that he gave out so freely.
And he left me with this cursed weakness of character — this tendency to be joyful when others are honored, to celebrate the achievements of my friends, to be glad when someone else has succeeded.
One or two might have envied him his success. One or two might have huffed when he got his award. One or two might have cried foul when he won the vote. They are the one’s with strong character, of course. They are the one’s we all should emulate. For their sake, he should never have gotten any award at all.