Chaos File 004: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Before chaos had a name, it looked a lot like this: a bench, a brother, and a pair of flip-flops.

I am thrilled to be in the thick of the memoir writing process. The little girl sitting on that bench 40 years ago wouldn’t have dreamt that the first “chapter” would be written about (and for) the little boy on that bench.

An excerpt about Brian:

As a child, my brother Brian was never just a kid—he was a performer. Anytime he could gather a crowd, especially one full of women of a certain age, Brian seized the moment to launch into his rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." He was utterly fascinated with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, an admiration that quickly spiraled into a lifelong passion for all things Judy Garland. In Brian’s kindergarten school photo, he was proudly wearing a blue gingham shirt our grandmother carefully sewed, determined to fully embody Judy Garland. 

His obsession reached new heights when, inspired by Garland's well-known struggles, he climbed into the medicine cabinet during one of my mom’s lengthy phone calls, dramatically attempting to overdose on Flintstones vitamins. (Meanwhile, I once polished off an entire jar of mayonnaise during a similar unsupervised moment—an act that probably says more about our childhood personalities than either of us care to admit.) Brian was dramatic, and quite probably the only ten-year-old boy in Port Arthur, Texas, in the 1980s who regularly trekked to the public library in search of Judy Garland biographies. 

And whatever he was into, I was into—partly because that's what siblings do, and partly because I had no choice. I’d heard him practice “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” or, oddly enough, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” enough at home that I was never quite as impressed with the performances as everyone else because he was my brother. But he was also one of my only friends. The older I get, the more clearly I see just how lonely we both were as kids, two weird siblings wandering together through library aisles filled with other people's stories, desperately searching for our own.