Well, to be precise, I know a whole bunch of Daves, but there’s only one that I call bro.

Of the whole family, my brother Dave is the one I was closest to, emotionally speaking. He was the closest to me in age, only four and a third years older than me, and while it certainly can’t be said that we always got along (what siblings do? without one of them being in a coma?) and our relationship was very bad when I a wee thing, later in life we spent a lot of time together, watching TV or playing board games or NES games together, and we got along fine.

When I was a preschooler, he tormented me. Not all the time, but occasionally. He seemed to delight in getting me really mad, knowing that there was not much I could do to hurt him, being so much smaller than him.

In fact, one of my earliest memories is of being a very wee tyke in footed pyjamas, basically a onesie, and toddling around the living room when I stepped on a needle that had been dropped on the floor. It hurt like hell, of course, and I started crying my little eyes out.

And there was my brother Dave, laughing at me.

With the distance of years, I can see that he was probably jealous of me. After all, he had been the youngest until my unexpected and unplanned arrival, and I probably stole an awful lot of my parents’ attention away from him and my sisters, at least until my mother went back to work.

And what the hell, he was only four years old when I was born. I can’t get too mad at him for behaving childishly at that age. For a while there when were were both kids, he was pretty much my nemesis, which I understand is not exactly a rare thing between younger and older brothers.

I can’t say I hated him, exactly. I was too young and too soft-natured to develop grudges like that. But I sure as hell didn’t like him much.

He did save my life, though. It was our family vacation in 1978. We went to Ontario so that my father’s side of the family could see us kids. It’s funny that we have this urge to show our kids to our relatives.

We were staying at a cottage on Lake Ontario. It was great, there was at least several passles of kids there and we did everything as a bigass mob. I was enjoying this break from civilized life, and despite my Ontario cousins’ attempts to scare the life out of me with tales of the enormous spiders that lived in the area and were just itching to bite me on the ass and eat me when I used the outhouse, I thought the place was great.

One day, the whole gang was swimming in the Lake, and I had been left to my own devices in the shallow part near the shore because I didn’t know how to swim.

And I was happy. This was pretty much the same thing that happened when my family went to the beach, and I loved being in the water, so I was quite content with the situation.

But I also had a tendency to get in trouble when unsupervised, as I was not born with a lot of what one might call common sense, and this day was to prove no different.

I was happily wading around, figuring I was safe because the water was only up to my five year old shoulders, when I discovered what a “dropoff” was when I dropped off it.

Seems there was a shelf to the lake floor, and over the edge of the shelf the water got a whole lot deeper. So there I was, drowning, inches from death, when my dear brother Dave saved me.

I don’t remember that part. In fact, I am very lucky in that I don’t remember drowning at all. I remember wading, I remember falling off, and I remember being back on shore with everyone looking at me all worried, but the part in between is gone.

So anyhow, that proved to me that my brother did care about me, when the chips were down.

Then, when I was in elementary school, he and I were in different worlds. He had his friends, and I had my nothing. The closest thing I had to friends was my sibling’s friends would be over to visit. Sad, really.

But later on, my brother was around a hell of a lot more. I only found out recently that this was because he had no friends either. And so we hung out a fair bit.

Looking back, I feel like there was always a wall between us, perhaps because of our age differences, perhaps because I was still a little afraid of him, perhaps because I always felt so inferior that I considered any time he spent with me to be an act of charity on his part, perhaps simply because I had my emotional wall up by then and I could not see past it.

Later on, my parents sent him and I to college together. For me, that was right on time, but for him, there had been like three years between graduating from high school and finally getting to go to college.

And I am quite ashamed now of how absurdly dependent on him I was. I mean, sure, it was my first time living on my own, but it was his too, and yet the easiest thing in the world was to just defer to him and leave him in charge.

I feel bad about that now. That could have been a great time for us both to form our own identities, but I held him back some.

Luckily, we did eventually split off. I had my college friends, the Pit Crew, and he went off to form a band called Spot The Brain Cell with some friends of his.

Then, after my parents bounced the both of us out of college because they didn’t feel like paying for it any more, we ended up joined at the hip again when we were both living with our parents, unemployed, and adrift back in Summerside.

I love my brother very much. We are very much alike, so much so that people would ask if we were twins. (And for some reason, if they didn’t think we were twins, they thought I was the older one. I have absolutely no theories as to why that is. )

He never asked to be a father figure to me, but he was the closest thing I ever had to one. It’s not something I could have helped. Ever kid needs one and if the primary one is inadequate (and mine was), the kid latches onto the next best thing, and that was my brother Dave.

I miss my bro a lot. We were two lobes of the same brain for a lot of my life.

And he misses me, too, which always comes as a surprise to me.

I guess hanging out with my wasn’t an act of charity after all.

See you tomorrow, kids!