Today was my big brother’s 75th birthday. He lives in Templeton with his wife, Evie. They’ve been married for 55 years.

Our Dad–brilliant, volcanic, alcoholic– was not easy to get along with, and he was hard on Bruce.

Once he slammed the car door on Bruce’s hand and yelled at him for bleeding. When, on Huasna Road, we had a bent pasture gate, Dad attempted to reshape it using a sledgehammer, with Bruce holding the bottom end, like John Henry’s shaker, and Dad taking big and not-always-accurate swings.

Bruce and I didn’t get along. I was a pain in the ass–I have just realized in the last few years that I am profoundly ADHD, and was given to manic episodes, repeatedly rolling a hassock across the living room floor and tackling it, as if I were an NFL defensive back, and spontaneous bouts of dancing for no particular reason.

So I sucked a lot of the air out of the family dynamic, and Bruce had to live with that. So he rode me pretty hard.

And then, suddenly, when he was about eighteen and I needed to learn how to drive a stick shift, everything changed. He was the best and most patient teacher I could ever hope for.

When he went to UCSB, I’d play hooky from AGHS just to visit him and Evie and maybe sit in on a real college class. I was entranced.

He met Evie when he was the editor and she a reporter on the Cuestonian, the Cuesta College newspaper. I inherited Bruce’s job four years later.

We are so much alike in one other way: our voices are indistinguishable over the telephone.

I have never known anyone who works as hard as my brother does. This was the way he dealt with Dad. He worked harder than any of us because, I guess, he wanted to prove himself.

I have only met one or two people who are as well-read as he is. He is a wonderful storyteller and comic–quirky and delightful– but he is serious about things like personal integrity.

This has gotten him, like me, into trouble with authority figures.

His college education was interrupted but he went back to UCSB, years later, to finish his English degree.

The man is determined.

He loves motorcycles and sometimes that worries me. But on a ride a few years ago he rode up to our grandparents’ farmhouse in Williams, Colusa County, and sent me back a photo.

My earliest memory is falling down the farmhouse steps and cutting my knee and having my Grandpa Kelly sweep me up in his arms to comfort me. I still have the scar on my knee. But I had long forgotten what the farmhouse looked like and Bruce’s photo brought Gramps back to me again.

We are not close–our lives as children were chaotic and sometimes dangerous, and so we are emotionally reserved.

But he is close to our wondrous son Thomas, the one given to spontaneously buying ice-cream cones for homeless people, for adopting and raising, including bottle-feeding, at 2 a.m., homeless kittens, for occasionally, to our surprise, putting up temporarily homeless friends on the sofa in our garage and sneaking out microwaved pizza to feed them, and like me, given to being a pain in the ass.

So on his seventy-fifth birthday, there is no adequate way to tell you how much I love my big brother.