My first word: da da,

My second word: a call for my brother,

(Or maybe I was just calling for ball,

But I doubt it,

It’s my brother that brings the fun-

A hacky sack, a Koosh ball, a challenge.)

He’s competitive, despite winning everything anyways.

Infuriatingly calm on the rare occasion he loses.

He’s funny - jokes probably at your expense.

He’s lost in thought again,

Thinking about how he’s always right,

Wondering if there’s anything he doesn’t know,

Looking around to see if he can find anyone smarter than him.

He can’t.

He has an engineering degree,

Types 100+ words a minute.

Avalanche training complete,

He snowboards the black diamonds,

Wishing someone else could keep up.

Maybe he doesn’t know it all,

Just enough to pilot the way,

To set the bar too high for me to climb over.

He is a quiet leader,

Guided by a strong sense of right and wrong,

(Mostly described as stupid or not.)

On his bachelor trip,

All his friends agree,

“He is one of the best men I know,

We are lucky we met him,

Lucky to hold on to a friendship with someone so special.”

Lucky to lose each board game,

Each competition of tossing sticks at other sticks,

Glad to be schooled at pool, or darts, or any other trajectory,

Just grateful to be part of the journey.

I watch him do a wheelie on his mountain bike,

And can’t tell if he’s forty like the calendar would dictate,

Or if he’s still a 10-year-old boy,

Testing to see if his friends can keep up.

They can’t.

And neither can I.

Not now, as adults, 

Not when I was a teen,

And his beer-bloated-college body

Could still weave seamlessly around me on the soccer field.

He says his knees hurt,

But no one else can tell.

Mind made of metal.

When I visit his house,

There are endless projects-

Woodworking in the garage,

Coding on the laptop.

He taught me engineering isn’t so much a career,

But an insistence to know how everything works,

To turn ideas into steps into something wonderful you can hold,

Show your admiring friends and leave them wondering how.

Master of taking schemes from conception to completion.

Priorities spelled out on the Trello board.

I think of my own projects piling up dust.

Does his energy know no bounds?