Schooled By My Brother John

 

Schooled By My Brother John

My brother, John is five years older than me.  He was very athletic and often wanted me to play ping pong or catch with him.  He pitched for our ward’s church fast pitch team, so he needed someone to play catcher for him.  He really burned the ball in there fast.  He chided me if I backed away from it at all.   I learned to catch his fast balls, though they made my hand sting in my inadequate glove.  I remember one day when we were playing catch especially.   He was burning the fast balls in, and I was catching most of them.  But one bounced off my glove and into the rose bushes.  My dad had a beautiful rose garden with maybe twenty rose bushes.  They were beautiful, but scary.  You didn’t want to go in there as roses have thorns and you almost could not avoid those thorns.  I remember my dad would go in and prune, fertilize, and spray them, but I didn’t want to. When the ball bounced in there, I was reluctant to go after it.  John encouraged me to go in and get it.  I finally did and got a deep scratch on my leg.  I was wearing shorts, and the bush reached out and badly scratched my leg.  It hurt and I cried out.   John wasn’t very sympathetic and said it was just a scratch and would heal right up.  I have often wanted to remind him of this and show him my still-scarred leg. 

But it was fun to be John’s companion and play with him.  We also played ping pong a lot downstairs.  John was very good.  Really no one in the family offered him any competition.  But I was the closest to that.  He would play left-handed, giving me a chance, but I never came even close to beating him, despite his left-handed play.

John also liked to play the board game, RISK.  He always had to be black.  He was very aggressive in this game, and that aggression paid off.  He nearly always won.  As he would take over a country with his little black cubes, he would sing a kind of victory song.  It was really pretty obnoxious.  But it was fun to have someone who enjoyed playing.  Again, I don’t think I ever beat him.

John was a drummer.  He had a full drum set downstairs in his room.  My sister Joan and I loved when he would practice.  We would go down there and jump on the bed to his drumming.  Those are happy memories.  Being a drummer, he would often drum out rhythms with his hands on the table, the seat back in the car, etc.  I learned these rhythms by listening to him and can still play some of the sets he would do. 

John served a mission in Germany.  My dad was so excited about his service.  He signed up the whole family to take German lessons from a man of German descent in our ward, Brother Petzinger.  We attended weekly classes to learn German.  Brother Petzinger also spoke fluent Russian, so we learned a bit of that, as well.  Though I don’t remember much of the German or Russian I learned, it is a happy memory for me.  My dad was so excited about it and was so pleased that we were doing it together. 

John came home, married Cindy and has lived a good life.  He served as a counselor in the stake presidency, as stake president, as a missionary to the Philippines with his wife, and now as a stake patriarch.  All my life, I have been schooled by my brother John.