Brother Rogers
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Brotherly Love

_ Brotherly love is a theme that ran through my childhood.  My brother Frank is only 22 months older.  We often fought but trouble united us, such as the time we shattered my mother’s antique spinning wheel into shards while tussling. 

When I moved back to Starkville in 1990, Steve Davis asked me, “Weren’t you and Frank the kids who caught your bed on fire with sparklers and your parents had to carry a burning bed outside to save the house?” Uh, yes, that would be us. 

Frank was always protective, but especially after I was shot in my right eye with a BB gun and lost my vision.  It happened in the spring of 1973, while I was in second grade in Eupora.  One Saturday, we went to a friend’s house to play with G.I Joes. 

When Frank and I started to leave, my friend began shooting at both of us with a BB rifle.  Frank grabbed me and pulled me behind a giant oak tree.  He was only nine, and I was seven.  He said, “Stay behind this tree.  Don’t panic and don’t look.” 

Ignoring his wise warning, I looked and then BAM.  It felt like a cannon ball hit my face.  The BB entered my right eye in the red area where sleep accumulates at night.  I instantly fell to the ground, unconscious.  Frank thought I was dead.  He charged the shooter and started trying to kill him with his bare hands.  The boy’s screams brought his mother out to pull Frank off her son. 

One of the things that often irritated me later was when cousins or friends would mistakenly say, “I hear your brother shot your eye out.”  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Of course, Frank and I continued to fight for the rest of our childhood, as brothers do.  He was bigger than me (still is), but I remember hitting him in the face on those rare moments when I could get a lick in.  After my accident and two surgeries on my eye, my mother told Frank, “No matter how mad you get, you can never hit Brother in the face.”  He never did. 

In 1979, I was running for junior high student council president.  At the height of the campaign, I was hospitalized in an oxygen tent with double bronchial pneumonia.  On the crucial day of the election, candidates gave their speeches to the student body.  Frank volunteered to give my speech and said, “Vote for my Brother.”  I won the race thanks to him. 

Some people ask me why I never dropped the childhood nickname “Brother.”  Maybe it’s because my brother Frank, who gave me that nickname when he was learning how to talk, was the central character in my childhood.  Dropping the name would seem like a betrayal. 

We still argue, of course.  He roots hard for Mississippi State to beat my alma mater, Alabama.  He’s a Republican in a big city, and I’m a Democrat in a small town.  So sometimes it takes a mother to remind me of brotherly affection.  Not long ago, I was complaining to my mother about my brother, and she said, “You know, he never says a negative word about you.  Never.”  That’s true brotherly love.

This column appears in the December 2011 Town and Gown magazine under The Last Word column.
 

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