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.

Brian Wilson died today, June 11, 2025. This was written two years ago.

I knew a little about Brian Wilson’s struggles, but I had never heard of his illness, called schizoaffective disorder, before the documentary Long Promised Road.

The Wilson brothers’ father contributed to his son’s emotional disorder, I am sure. He was abusive and a hearing loss in one of Brian’s ears has several explanations, but the most reasonable one, to me, is that his father hit him hard upside the head with the flat surface of an electric iron.

The blow to Brian’s ear was about the time the hallucinations began. Brian didn’t see things. He heard them. They were voices telling him terrible things about himself and suggesting that he do terrible things. I’ve heard those voices, all my life, but they were inside my head. Brian’s voices were out there in The World, and they were very real.

I did enough research to establish that the link between mental illness and creativity is nonsense. I still believe, though, that Wilson’s music is so beautiful because that was how he fought the voices. The only place, I think, where he could silence them was in the studio, recording music with his brothers and cousins and friends and with his wife and her sister.

I could not watch the rest of the PBS special because Brian is now so wooden. I lost my nerve. That was a bad decision on my part, but it was because The Brian Wilson that impacted my life made me all rubbery and jiggly and happy. You can’t NOT dance to, for example, “Help Me Rhonda” or “I Get Around.” I still remember, at Branch School, three lovely eighth-grade girls—Patsy Silva, Marilyn Machado, Carolyn Coehlo— (all of them from Azorean stock, by the way) dancing to Beach Boys 45’s in Mr. Lane’s room at lunchtime. I had crushes on all three, but I was just a punk kid.

That was a long time ago. As the documentary revealed, even if he’s seemingly diminished, Brian Wilson is very much alive.

And the fact that he’s even around—upright, breathing, performing, even though he’s tentative, afraid, monosyllabic—is a kind of miracle. I think the first three adjectives I just used are far more important than the last three. “God Only Knows” is the kind of music that vaporizes demons, both Brian’s and mine.

The “genius” stuff can take a back shelf. Wilson was not compared, in the documentary, to Mozart. The conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic chose Mahler and Schubert instead.

That’s labeling the man with not-very-faint praise. But what counts isn’t Brian Wilson’s genius. It’s his courage.

And those harmonies…

Brian could still Bring It many years later. With Al Jardine.

This song was just plain fun. From the TV show American Bandstand.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: The Beatles answered “California Girls” with this song, a little more arch but just as fun. Paul McCartney in Red Square more than a few years ago.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Part II. A lovely song from Foxes (young women) and Fossils (guys my age).

Imitation is the sincerest…Part III. This live Fleetwood Mac cover of Wilson’s “Farmer’s Daughter” is haunting.

Thank you, Brian. Say hello to Sly Stone from me, will you?

My friend Wendelin van Draanen just won a well-deserved award for her Young Adult novel The Peach Rebellion, and her writing made me reflect on the illustrators who influenced me as a child and ‘tweener. The one who doesn’t belong is Sendak, but I included him because there has never been a book that gave me greater joy to read aloud.

And “Classics Illustrated,” true, was an industry, not an artist, but their “War of the Worlds” scared the bejabbers out of me when I was ten. I don’t think I could’ve handled the Spielberg version unless they needed another screamer to give poor Dakota Fanning’s vocal chords a break.

My brother Bruce had an entire drawer in our bedroom full of neatly-stacked “Mad” magazines, probably in chronological order, which I, the messy one, raided.

We also had two enormous pull-out drawers beneath our bedroom closet stocked from keel to gunwales with Disney comics, “Classics Illustrateds,” and a long-forgotten anti-Commie series, “Blackhawk,” about an international cadre of fighter pilots who did cool tricks like standing up in the cockpit to lasso Russki jets in midair.

We even had some Dick Tracy comics. When one of Dick’s fugitives refused to come out of his motel room at the end of a wing, Dick simply used his tommygun to inscribe a capital “Z” in the exterior wall. End of fugitive. I don’t think he was Mirandized.

I’d forgotten how bluntly charming Garth Williams’s Miss Bianca illustrations were. Sadly, Disney made a cartoon version with Disney art at its low point–The Rescuers were two-dimensional cutouts and Bianca’s voice was provided by Eva Gabor, who was charming in “Green Acres,” a low point for American comedic television but several notches above “Gilligan’s Island.”

I have a brief Gabor story somewhere. Remind me.

Most of these artists have one thing in common: When you’re a little boy, you can get lost inside their work. They take you to another place.