Being 9 years younger than my brother, he was a very strong influence and inspiration to me growing up. My brother was always into something science related and we knew early on that’s where his career was headed. He got straight A’s in physics and math without even studying. How in the world does one pull that off? I said “huh?” then, and I still say “huh?” today. He was just a natural. He was my polar opposite. English and the arts were my forte. These are the non-money making subjects in case you’re extremely lucky or independently wealthy. My brother made it into Who’s Who in America, and he received a letter from the Israeli government after we left, asking him to come back to the country. This came with promises of working at a Think Tank, large salary, great title – some fancy job where he could use his Math and Physics superpowers to save the world. He did not accept, and I’m very grateful for that, because he might not be alive today with all the wars which have ravaged that part of the world. Rockets – my brother would build rockets and on weekends, my father, mother and I tagged along in silence to the local schoolyard to watch him shoot them off. It was a very weird ritual, and there wasn’t much discussion about it. When we arrived at the schoolyard, my brother bent down on the grassy field, and I suppose lit the rocket so that it would go off in 30 seconds or so. Then a quickly ran away as to avoid any rocket related eyeball injuries. Ninety percent of the time, the launch was a success. We’d here the little hissing sound which got louder and louder, and then WOOSH – the miniature rocket would take off into the sky, and then arc out into the distance, and land somewhere far away. Sometimes it was retrievable, sometimes not (like an errant golf ball). Then we’d quietly walk back home. It all seemed so serious and I always thought that there should be a Part 2 to the event, but there never was. The photography phase was also fun. My brother started buying some of the best cameras around – Nikon, Minolta, Canon…the rotating lenses were at least 6 inches long on each of these. Much different than today’s cell phone cameras, and definitely not designed for selfies. To this day, my brother is not a “selfie” sorta guy. That’s a good thing, I think. He built a darkroom for himself down in our basement. That darkroom not only had photo development, processing materials and chemicals, but also shelves with piles and piles of Modern Photography magazines. It also had some of his old high school physics and math notebooks, where each page was covered with scribbled formulas, equations, theorems, and solutions. Sometimes I visited that room. It was like entering some mad professor’s laboratory. Then there was the chess phase. My brother got seriously into that game and sometimes he and my dad would play a drawn out match when the chess board would sit in the same spot for weeks, until the player’s move was made. Chess strategies were pored over and analyzed on a daily basis, and Karpov, Fischer, and Spassky were (our) household names. There were often chess tournaments on weekends, and the trophies would accumulate. Once or twice, my dad or my brother would try to teach me how to play. They didn’t get much further than explaining the way each piece moved. I was most fascinated with how the knight moved in an L shape. I didn’t understand why they made the horse move in that way. It seemed so unnatural. After that novelty wore off, I quickly lost interest. The astronomy phase was one of my favorites. We lived in New Rochelle, a lovely little suburb 30 minutes north of New York City. My brother decided to order all the parts to build a pretty humungous telescope. We saw everything out of that magical white tube which sat upon its massive tripod – Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Orion, Andromeda, Perseus, Pegasus, and all the rest. But what I mostly remember is having to crawl inside that tube (my brother couldn’t fit) and screw in the huge mirror from the inside. That’s all I did to help construct this space gazing contraption, but it made me feel so important! How else would that mirror have been secured into place?! That was all ME! (I’ll take what I can get). Besides this, there were aquariums with tiny turtles and small creepy crawlies, there were miniature models of airplanes, trains, and battleships, there were tiny volcanoes made from clay which spewed out lava, and speaking of lava – there were lava lamps, plasma ball lamps and let’s not forget the time my brother almost brought down the entire house (in Israel) when he wanted to know what happens when you heat up glue. Is it any wonder I simply adore the smell of glue? Maybe it’s all the memories it brings back. And maybe all that glue sniffing has enabled me to more easily enter the 5th Dimension.
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