He Was All Right for a Hippie . . .

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I woke up Easter morning thinking about Brother #1. Years ago I told him that if he died and left me, I’d strangle him. He did. So, I guess he has that to look forward to when I get to the Other Side.

Because we moved so often when I was young, my siblings—two brothers and a sister–were my only constant friends. Other acquaintances came and went, but the four of us were squabbling in the backseat of one station wagon or another across America every other year or so until we left home.

Brother #1 was a true child of the Sixties. I have a picture of he and my sister-in-law on their wedding day in the backyard of friends. He had long hair, bell-bottom trousers, and a handlebar mustache. His bride had wildflowers in her hair. They were 19.

When we were kids at Mather Air Force Base, my dad dragged us to church an hour early every Sunday because our meeting was held in a rented Elks Lodge Hall. We had to sweep up the beer cans and cigarettes before we set up the chairs for Sunday School. Brother #1 complained mightily, but he did it.

After my dad was transferred to Selfridge Air Force Base on the southern end of Lake Michigan, our little branch met in a local elementary school. There were so few of us, we fit comfortably in a third-grade classroom. My siblings and I made up most of the youth population. In those days, our church expected even small congregations like ours to raise at least part of our own funds to build a chapel. The branch president gave Brother #1 and me ten dollars. We were supposed to make it grow like the talents in the Bible. We baked and sold homemade cookies to our military neighbors. They were suckers for chocolate chip and banana oatmeal treats—or now that I think bout it, maybe they remembered by dad was a major? Charging $1 to $2 a dozen, in the end we contributed more than $200 to the building fund after the cost of ingredients.

I went to college the traditional route; Brother #1 started at a little junior college in southern New Mexico where his roommates made their own wine, solving the bottling problem once the grapes were squeezed by spending the weekend drinking a dozen bottles of liquor store wine, so they’d have empties for their own product.

I got married at BYU. He and his wife joined a group of young marrieds and lived, sometimes camping, in a sort of “commune” with two other couples and producing cabinetry to finance their lives. My husband and I moved to Montana so he could manage a Kentucky Fried Chicken store. Brother #1 and his wife headed to Alaska to work on a fishing boat.

We both had kids. He and his wife got serious about college and graduated together from SUU. My husband got a second bachelor’s degree; both he and Brother #1 became teachers.

Though we didn’t live near each other, over the years, we saved our limited funds and saw Alaska, Hawaii, and Europe together. Brother #1 loved Amsterdam. He’d always wondered what it felt like to use marijuana, but he was a nice Mormon kid, so that wasn’t on his agenda. In Amsterdam, weed was legal, and every restaurant where we had dinner was full of folks smoking. Brother #1 would take a deep breath and wink at me. 

In Paris he took a vow to eat a croissant at every bakery we passed. He was a happy man when he reached the 100 milestone. (And no, he didn’t appear to have any side effects. One reason I always suspected he was part alien.)

Brother #1 called me the day he and his wife discovered during an emergency ultra-sound that their baby daughter’s heart had stopped beating. He was there at my son’s funeral.

He died, appropriately enough, in his 60s, of a massive heart attack. At his funeral I remember his Bishop telling us that when he heard the news, he walked into his office, locked the door, and wept.

There’s an old spiritual whose lyrics include these lines:
              If you get to Heaven before I do,
              Swing low, sweet chariot.
              Just drill a hole and pull me through.
              Swing low, sweet chariot.
 Not a lot of the usual commerce of Easter happening during a pandemic. But I’m counting on seeing my brother again. That’s the whole point.