The Maurice
Maurice was always fair. It’s hard to be unbiased when talking about your own brother but in my eyes he was bigger than most people. Not in a physical way, but inside. I remember when he was young him telling me that when people brushed past him they could sense his secret power. He meant in a Spiderman, Superman kind of way and coming from such a scrawny fellow it was laughable! Despite his weights and chest expanders his basic shape remained lean and unimpressive. As a rather overweight younger sister, I used to joke, “imagine how puny he would be without the exercising!”
But there was always something special about Maurice. People told him things, people respected him and in all the years I knew him I never heard him say a bad word about anyone. It was as if he was a big sponge soaking up all the badness that life threw and yet never allowing one drop of that acid to seep out or to corrode his own soul. Maurice didn’t get into fights. People liked him; you couldn’t really help yourself. I liked him and it was mostly his quietness. I’ve read that excess of speech is a deadly poison and can believe it. Perhaps a lot of Maurice’s character came from his silent observations. Mind you he was talkative at times like when playing you at table tennis. Then he’d pretend to be the commentator and would crack you with his psychological ploys, “She’s looking tired!” or “It seems as if she is losing her stride in this game”, and sure enough these tones would gradually wear away at you and reduce your ability to play against him. Of course my contact with him was limited. First there was the age gap and then to compound matters I was a girl. My brothers, Maurice and Karl, were close in age and were a team and I howled my loneliness all through my childhood. Those two were close in a way that no one else could comprehend. Football, card games, conversations, jokes - they shared confidences, experiences that I was not a party to. They were never alone. They always had each other. I felt like a spectator watching on, always wanting to be a part of their relationship but never quite making the grade. But from my vantage point I could see Maurice was an honourable person. Such an old fashioned phrase but so apt.
As the years have passed and I’ve travelled and lived abroad in foreign climes and met so many people from so many different places, I’ll have to admit I’ve never met anyone who came close to Maurice. Our lives had led quite separate paths and gone in completely different directions so that conversation between us is sometimes awkward. I no longer know his life, what’s important to him, his experiences, his tests. How he thinks, what is his view of life – all these are a blank to me. It used to be that when I would visit home from abroad I would be full of goals to really link up with my brother again. Touch base, get through the stilted chat and know him once more. But with every passing year it would get progressively harder until somehow I felt we were on ships sailing far, far away from each other, gradually reduced to basic semaphore to communicate anything. But when I close my eyes and think of Maurice, still to this day I feel a sweet sadness and rare privilege that he is my brother. An honourable man in a world full of mire that somehow never managed to pollute him. In all our family photos he always struck a ridiculous pose, shoulders raised really high as if impersonating someone bigger. We all teased him about it. But he has always stood tall. Much taller than he appears.
Now his gentle weariness worries me and makes me want to ask, “Are you happy?” But we will not have such conversations in this life. Communicating with flags has its limitations and anyway he would dismiss it with an anal comment and laugh. So how shall I end this? In life things are rarely what they seem. We sometimes build people up only to knock them down. I would not have that happen so I’ll not throw small stones under the feet of someone in order to watch them fall. Sometimes our compliments are just that - designed to bring a fall to those we feel have gotten higher than ourselves. So I’ll finish with his faults just to protect him. He suffers from gas and farts indescribably awful, “slow and silent deadly ones.” He has to lie down after he eats – something to do with his stomach. He isn’t a good conversationalist; it’s akin to wringing a quilt getting words out of him. He’s always tired to the bone and tends to look disappointed with life and the hand he has been dealt. His anal complex is a constant irritation and his nose is invariably blocked. He will not throw away anything, letting old cars fall to dust rather than be parted from them. He hates change profoundly and even changing wallpaper is a perceived threat. Now do you want to meet him? Well, I hope you’re lucky and do. Everyone deserves to meet the Maurice.
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