Growing up, my brother and I were complete opposites and bitter enemies: I wanted chocolate, he, vanilla; I was fat, he was skinny; I was brains, he was brawn. If we weren’t fighting, we were strategizing against one another, and my entire childhood I remember hating my brother. I was his infinite pestilence, and he was my eternal tormentor. Our fighting had actually escalated to the point to where we had to move into a new house so that my brother and I didn’t have to share a room, because if we lived in each other’s space for one more day, there would have been a dead Broderick (and I think it would have been me).
Cameron left on his mission, and things had become a bit better between us, which meant that we mostly just ignored each other for the majority of the day. Communication was limited to grunting and head nods, and I was ready for a vacation from our interactions. The last thing Cameron said to me before he left on his mission was, “Brothers gotta hug.” Which he said at six in the morning, while I was leaving for a week long hiking trip. I’m not sure if Cameron was still par-asleep at the time he said this, but we parted with an awkward hug at the end of a dark hallway.
Two years later, I was uncertain to how our relationship would be when he came home from his mission. I had gone away to school, and didn’t really make much of an effort to keep contact with his on his mission, possibly sending him two emails throughout the entire duration of his time in Guatemala, and one he responded with, “I’ll punch you in the square.” So when my family went to go pick him up from the airport, I was apprehensive to the whole thing. We didn’t say much to each other the week that he was home, and then I took off for school leaving for four months.
When I came back home, it was Thanksgiving. And while we did have a Thanksgiving meal, it was really a Thanksgiving lunch because we had been invited to a Tongan wedding for dinner. I had no clue of this and brought no church clothes back from Utah. My dad, being as helpful as he could, offered me a white shirt and tie from his closet. We had been the same size at one point of my life, but due to a sudden weight loss of 70 pounds for me, his clothes fit me as well as a tent would. My only option was to wear the classiest of clothes that I had brought: an orange t-shirt with a fox on it, trouser cut jeans, and neon pink, spray painted boat shoes. My mother nearly died of embarrassment when she saw how I dressed for a wedding reception. The shoes really did it, and she would sooner die than let me go to a wedding reception in such tacky things; so instead, my mother thought it to be best to have me wear my late grandfather’s shoes, because that was the better option for the night.
My family arrived early to the reception, with the exception of my sister, who magically disappeared with her boyfriend the hour we were going to leave. So my mother, father, brother, and I sat at a table in the middle of the room, waiting for the festivities to start. Of course, because my mother and father are very close friends to the parents of the bride, my parents were whisked away to the table of honor, leaving my brother and me alone at a table.
Tongans started to file in and nobody would even look our way. Why? Probably because we were two skinny, white kids, dressed in t-shirts and jeans, but I can never be sure. Not only did nobody talk to us, nobody would even sit at the tables adjacent to ours, separating the Tongans and us by a good 15 feet. Cameron and I had to forge a friendship, or certainly die a lonely, segregated death. After we were strange, sibling friends, Cameron decided that we had to prove our worth to the Tongans, and the only way to do that would be to out eat them.
Cameron and I went through the buffet line and got everything we could, in Tongan sized portions. Did it matter that we just ate a Thanksgiving sized lunch an hour before? No, because we were determined. And the first round of food went well enough, until Cameron got up to get more food. This of course meant that I had to get up for more food, because I was not going to let my new found friendship go to waste because my lack of appetite. We went back up and got a large plate of teriyaki chicken and some grayish purple slice of nasty. Apparently, it is like taro root, but my brother and I identify it as purple butt cheek: This can either be because it tastes like a butt cheek, or because the Spanish word for it is very close to the word for butt cheek.
I was able to finish my chicken, and Cameron was able to push down his purple butt cheek. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not get my butt cheek down my throat. After one swallow, I was sure that I had just eaten the most bland, dense thing on the planet. Cam looked over at me, “If I eat your purple thing, will you eat my chicken?” We switched plates, and have been great friends ever since. I’m not sure if we gained any prowess with the Tongans, but we did receive a blanket when we left, which is essentially like getting a trophy anyway.
Somehow, food has become the bridge that has brought my brother and I together, and so Christmas, I bought him a mini-deep fryer. The things that were fried could be considered nightmarish: m&m’s, raw sausage, assorted chocolates. We ate all of it anyway and left the house smelling like a fish fry.
More recently, Cameron and I treated ourselves to a beast of a sandwich called, “The Junkyard.” This sandwich includes “Two Handmade Patties, Provolone and American Cheese, Ham, Roast Beef, Pastrami, Bacon, A Fried Egg, Onion Rings, Chicken Strips, Avocado, Lettuce, Tomato, and Onion on Grilled Sourdough.” The sandwich, itself, is probably around six to seven inches tall, and is impossible to squish down. So I chose to use a corn cob nibbling method to eat my sandwich, while Cameron tried to squish and cram the entire sandwich in his mouth at one time. This was surprising to me because Kathryn is the sibling known to cram massive amounts of matter into her mouth at a time, but Cameron must have picked up a few pointers from her.
I didn’t want to be the first to finish the junkyard, so I slowed my pace down, making me seem less of a fatty. Cameron, too, decided that he didn’t want to be considered a fatty, so he slowed down. I would wait for him to take a bite before I would, and the junkyard seemed like it would never end. Right after we finished, we looked at each other and said, “I slowed down to your pace so I wouldn’t be the first done.”
It’s amazing that Cameron and I have made a friendship out of food, but somehow a miracle happened. And the person more dumbfounded than I is my mother, who probably expected to bury one of her sons after a fight between brothers. His friends are now my friends, and we choose to be in each other’s presence now, rather than simply dwelling in each other’s vicinity. I think it is because on his mission, and during my schooling, we became more like each other: He and I are both brainy and brawny (although we excel in our respective positions), he and I are both skinny, and we have mostly given up ice cream and have decided that slurpees are much better anyway (so screw chocolate or vanilla).
