emilyrems.com

sandler on 3rd ave, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

While all over Gotham, police and fire peeps can be spied in their dress uniforms, making their solemn way to and from the myriad 9/11 memorial services taking place today, I woke up comemorating something else this morning. My little bro Daniel (who now bears an unsettling resemblance to the Adam Sandler poster pictured above) was born 27 years ago today. He and I were very close from the time he was born up until around the time we moved from NY to VA. When we moved though, suddenly our house was much bigger, there were TVs in multiple rooms so we didn’t have to fight over the remote, and he didn’t really need me to babysit him anymore. I was boy-crazy in public school and he started going to private school and then boarding school. Then I went off to college and we never lived together again. Somehow it never really occured to either one of us to call the other very often once we lived apart. Not because we didn’t like each other, we have always just been very different in terms of our interests or whatever, so slowly our relationship mellowed into that of friendly acquaintances who happen to share parents, and who say hi to each other at Thanksgiving and funerals.

For the past five years, I’ve felt bad that my bro’s birthday happened to be on 9/11, and always tried to make a point to remember it more conscienciously than I did before. This year, I emailed him an Amazon gift certificate to his work (since I don’t really know what he likes), and then called him on his cell from my office to make sure he got it. We had a nice, if slightly awkward, convo before we both had to go back to work, and after we hung up, I spent a few minutes reflecting on how nice it was to hear his voice. Then I got an email from him. I won’t paste it here since that would be kind of a skeevy thing to do, but basically he thanked me for the present, told me he loved me a lot, and said he felt lucky to have me as a sister. I was so caught off guard I started crying at my desk a little bit, and had to take a minute to collect myself before writing him back. I’m just so surprised. He’s never said anything like that to me before. It was just really, really nice.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 1:10 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.