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from "LOOSE ENDS"

I am not my brother's keeper, but I am the keeper of his flame. You see, my brother Bob is the consummate story teller. In bars and living rooms, at reunions and weddings, he can be heard spinning some historical yarn. He prides himself on telling true stories, with authentic details and complete genealogical charts of all the characters. His friends invite him on long drives across the country because he is more enduring than cassettes and CDs, more animated than top 40 radio and more prolific than Homer and Garrison Keillor put together. My brother can tell stories non-stop from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This is not to say he doesn't repeat himself occasionally. Lately, his prodigious memory for the details of stories oddly enough does not keep track of when and to whom he's told a story. However, this repetition doesn't matter because his audience is generally the older crowd whose memory is less than sharp.

My role in all this is a bit unusual. As I said, I am the keeper of my brother's flame, though we mostly communicate long distance. As keeper of the flame, I, on occasion, write down my brother's stories, like the time he recognized a kindergarten classmate he hadn't seen in 60 years. Her drunkenness couldn't disguise those unforgettable eyes. Bob remembered the costumes they had worn in a school musical; he remembered the song they had sung together. As he sang to her in the parking lot of the bar, she cried as if memory were a birth trauma.

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