What follows I first offered exactly ten years ago on the occasion of my youngest brother's birthday. I don't feel bad about re-presenting it here; he is, after all, still having a birthday so what's good for one should be good for the other (I tell myself).
You don't need to be part of this conversation so I'll skip it. A decade ago I called it:
Madam I'm Adam
When you grow up in a large family keeping track of your siblings’ birthdays becomes a major undertaking. You can cheat when you still live at home because Mom worries about all of that, but once you’re gone, you can never come back when you’re out of the blue and into the black.
We grew up under one roof, or more precisely a series of different roofs, as six children in the same family but closer to being two clusters of three children reasonably close together with a pregnant pause (pun intended) in the middle (that may get me a pop on the nose from one or more of my brothers and sisters).
Evan Dolores, Kelly Christopher, Kara Melissa, Jill Marie, and Adam.
My mother hadn’t run out of middle names by the time she got to Adam, but the check engine light on the whimsy dashboard was burning brightly. Mom loved to tell of the day Adam, whose birthday today is, was being baptized and Father Stosh expressed (mild) surprise at his having but one name. Our mother explained to the good priest ‘he was God’s first and he’s my last. Pour the water.’
I’m not sure any of us kids gave any of that a moment’s thought. Adam was another Kenny Kid to be piled into the Chrysler Newport station wagon that was eventually replaced by a Ford Country Squire because in the pre-fab sprout era of America, what else could hold that many children?
I am inordinately fond of my youngest brother and make no apologies for it. I have my reasons and they’re not mine if I tell you. We look nothing alike but I suspect people guess easily that we are brothers (so much for the element of surprise). I'm the more handsome but also the more modest, while he has the talent and the wisdom (to not argue about the looks and modesty).
Adam has all the brains one of us older children suggested might be genetically possible without actually realizing it. We were the promise, he was the performance. He was my wingman at Rutgers College-too young, yet, for school himself, I took him with me to courses sometimes every day for a week or more. I never asked him what he made of his first college experience (he is a devoted RU football fan, despite being a CU Buffalo Alum) or what, if anything, he got out of listening to music on eight-track cartridges in my Pinto, at max vol, rushing cross-town in New Brunswick (before its renaissance) to classes on the various campuses.
I lied to him later, not so much a lie as pulling his leg, when I promised him an armadillo when I was going to Air Force basic training in San Antonio, Texas, or later, as I assured him I’d bring him back a penguin from my assignment in Greenland (I think he had long known penguins were found only at the other pole; I learned that only after having purchased a pigeon in a tuxedo six months after arriving at Sondy.)
The six of us Kenny kids are a rambling, shambling assortment of aspiration, inspiration, and perspiration but as long as we all continue to practice respiration we’ll never lack for company.
I'm not sure what our spouses make of us and we rarely enough ever get together so the danger of that is minimal. I'm still numbed how much more rapidly (in comparison to me), Adam has gotten older especially as today's celebration makes it official. Take a deep breath and have a Happy Birthday, Adam!
-bill kenny
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