threads

This is the speech I wrote for my brother’s wedding. It took me a surprisingly long time to write.  I’m posting it here because it represents, to me, the triumphant accomplishment of being able to find words for a concept that I’ve been grappling with for most of my adult life.  And, of course, having a chance to say it in front of my family.

Growing up, Thad and I were close.  Two years and two days close, to be exact.  And in childhood, proximity leads to comparison.  Thankfully, growing up, our diverging interests allowed us to overlap without really stepping on each other’s toes.  An avid monkey growing up, he branched into climbing and biking and donned the style and speed of a sportsman, while I delved into literature, writing, and theater.  In high school, however, occurred the first of two intersecting events that would strongly shape the way I thought about Thad.  I had just finished two strenuous years of Advanced Placement English.  Thad was, at the time, taking a writing class from the same teacher.  In this class he’d been assigned a piece of creative writing, and had decided to ask me to review it.  It was a little thing, half a page of descriptive writing for a fairly innocuous assignment, and it should have taken me a few short minutes to review it.  But twenty minutes later, there I was, staring at two paragraphs of what could only be described as flawless, thoughtful, and inventive creative writing. I’m ashamed to say that my first reaction was one of throat-catching despair.  I knew writing, and I knew good writing, and he was not only good, he was better than me.  A torrent of questions flooded my mind.  Was this a breach of our unspoken agreement?  Was I now obligated to excel at one of his strengths, just to even the score?  

This feeling sulked in the back of my mind for the next few years.  Now, the roles were reversed.  Thad had finished his bout at community college, just as I was being admitted.  Since he’d just finished the Spanish program I was about to start, I shamelessly employed his expertise on every major Spanish assignment over the next two years.  We spent hours talking verbs and vocabulary. We discussed, I wrote, he edited, and it was fantastic for my grades.  And although I knew he was better at Spanish than I was, I found that it didn’t bother me.  And midway through my final term, I began to realize why that was.  The sober realization that he was a better writer than me had descended in a time of relative closeness, and had ended up being a point of painful comparison.  But the older we got and the farther apart we drifted, those intersecting points became rosier and more sacred.  It wasn’t about comparison anymore, but rather about finding common ground. Shared hobbies became reminders of a shared heritage, and a warm reminder of the ever-invisible threads that bind us to the ones we love.  Thad and Corrie, in all their strengths, remind us of that. Their wedding, then, is an opportunity.  An opportunity to celebrate family, community, and a chance to have something new in common.