SHOULDERING One of the best things about having a lot of brothers is not something that people with lots of brothers talk about much, but I think we should speak of it this morning, for I miss it, and I doubt I will ever feel it again in quite the same way, and it mattered enormously to me, and somehow contributed to making me who I am in all sorts of ways, so let us think for a moment about brushing up against the bulk of brothers in the kitchen, and bumping gently into brothers in the hallway, and being crammed against brothers in the back seats of cars, and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with brothers in basketball games and tense moments, and having the arms and legs of brothers draped over you like thick vines and cables as you sprawl on floors and couches and beaches, and having a brother’s chin suddenly plopped on your left shoulder from behind as you sleepily make coffee. Things like that. We talk about collisions and battles and fisticuffs and hugs and handshakes and sharp elbows when we talk about lots of brothers, and well we should, because you cannot have a lot of brothers and not crash into them in every imaginable way including sometimes headfirst both with and without helmets, and sometimes we talk about the gentler brotherly touches, like a big eloquent hand on your shoulder when you desperately need a large tender hand on your shoulder, or a huge hand extended to help you up when you are down and dazed, or the way that bigger brothers hold the hands of littler brothers sometimes, which every time I see that I cry at such a shimmer of love right there in front of me at the bus stop or the train station or the schoolyard or the chapel, but we hardly talk about the slight brotherly brushes, the wordless hey of a brother deliberately leaning into you for no reason whatsoever as he shuffles past with his sandwich and tea. That’s a way to say I love you. Yes it is. There are a lot of ways to say I love you, it turns out, and two brothers cheerfully shouldering a third brother away from the plate of cookies and deftly boxing him out without undue effort even as he sets his feet and tries to leverage his way through and they are all grinning is an excellent way to say I love you, and I miss that, I miss that fiercely this morning. Just for a moment to shuffle back into the kitchen sleepy and discombobulated and instantly be confronted with a gentle elbow to the throat would be immeasurably sweet; and then an ever-so-infinitesimal hip check, and then when I reach for the bacon a massive form interrupts and I find myself reaching for air, and I hear several large men chortling, one of whom is our dad, who is the captain of the bacon, and if you think you are going to move him out of his front-row seat by the stove, not to mention he has the epic old spatula and he knows how to use it, you have another think coming, young man, although every one of his sons this morning will shoulder up against the chieftain, and lean strenuously against his brothers, and in a moment our mom will come in and glare wordlessly and we will get the message and retreat to the table like civilized beings, but just for one last delicious instant I lean against one large brother, and a taller thinner brother is leaning on us two, and the biggest of us all is leaning on the three younger brothers, and we are all leaning on the chieftain, who is laughing but immovable, and the bacon is almost done, and if you listen carefully you can hear all five men in the kitchen chortling gently. Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine, and the author most recently of the sea novel The Plover.
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