Jubilation...

The other day I was riding in my co-worker's car and Simon & Garfunkel's "Cecilia" came on. And then it was like I wasn't even in the car at all. All of a sudden, I was 13-years-old again.

Around the time I was 13 and my brother was 17, he used to turn that song up full blast in his bedroom in our old house in Shawnee, Kansas. My bedroom was right next to his, and, although I generally screamed at him to turn his music down, I loved that song too. When he played it, we would meet in my room or his, belting it out at the top of our lungs.

Even though that was 15 years ago, I can picture it clearly. Both of us with our eyes squeezed shut, neck veins popping out, as we yelled:

"Cecilia, you're breaking my heart
You're shaking my confidence daily
Oh, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees
I'm begging you please to come home
Come on home...

Jubilation, she loves me again,
I fall on the floor and I'm laughing,
Jubilation, she loves me again,
I fall on the floor and I'm laughing."

I was lucky, I know, to get the brother I got. Oh, of course, we fought. I hated to lose, and he was four and a half years older than me, so I lost a lot: at tetherball, soccer, football. Inevitably, when we played burn-out (throwing a baseball as hard as possible at the other person to see who called it quits first), I burned out, shaking my beat-up glove and glaring at him from across the yard.

But mostly we got along. We loved each other. More important, we liked and were loyal to each other. Although he threatened to, he never told our parents about the time he heard me say "Jesus F*cking Christ." And I never told them about the countless times he drove me to the bank so I could withdraw money from my savings account to pay his speeding tickets.

Our best friend tells this sad story of how every time our families got together and it was time to say good-bye, he would agonize over the fact that while he rode away in the backseat of his parents' car by himself, my brother and I got to ride away together. Sometimes we rode away talking and laughing. Sometimes we rode away bickering. Sometimes we rode away just doing our own thing next to each other. But it's easy to see our friend's point: we were together.

My brother and I live in different states now. It's not often we get to sit next to each other in a car. But that doesn't really matter. We were on the same road to begin with, so we can't get too far apart.