Friday, January 12, 2007

No memories

I've already mentioned the olive tree incident, and I've been working hard to remember other things my brother did. I'm not having much luck with remembering specific incidents.

I mostly have memories about him. When we were little, No said Oreos were good for you - they tasted so good, after all. He loved Steve Austin of The Six Million Dollar Man and he loved Speed Racer. We watched Star Trek together on a black and white TV while he wore 3D-style glasses for his vision therapy. His favorite color was green. He liked to ride the elephants and watch the whale shows at Marine World (much different in those days than it is now), and to visit the shark exhibit. When we went to Camp Beaverbrook, No always took the sweeping chore in his cabin.

He liked graham crackers in milk for breakfast (he would pile five crackers on top of the bowl and, crying "hee yaw!" break them in half with a karate chop) and baloney sandwiches with ketchup. Our family went out for dinner most Friday nights for awhile, rotating who got to choose the restaurant, and No always chose Joky's Burgers, a small place near UCSF. When we went to the Sizzler, he always got the steak and crab legs.

When he graduated from fifth grade, he wanted attend Herbert Hoover Middle School, but Mom sent him to Discovery Center instead. No is loyal, and still spends a lot of time with people he met there, including his business partner. In high school, he signed up for Latin so he wouldn't be expected to speak the language in his regular life, and later lived - and spoke in Spanish - in Mexico for several months. He's about to get married, so he's finally finishing his university education by completing a paper on opportunities for his event-planning business, Perfect Party Plans.

When they were small, No and Saj always wore baseball caps, often backward, which seemed to annoy many of the adults in our lives. One year for Halloween he was Fonzie, wearing his glasses over the mask. In high school, he was usually fashionably dressed and even had one of those red jackets like Michael Jackson wore in the "Thriller" video (though I'm not sure he ever wore it). His pants were '80s tight, he had at least one thin tie for school dances, and owned several Theo Cosby-style sweaters. He got a letterman's jacket for Saint Ignatius, where he wrestled and played football.

No has Mom's curly hair and wore it long as a very small child and again in his mid-20s. The first time around I remember his hair blowing around, coming out of the pathetically small plastic barettes Mom would put it in. His hair was light brown, with blond streaks... Now it is dark brown, with red highlights (and some grey in his beard). When he had long hair as an adult, he usually wore it back in a ponytail, but one morning a friend and I saw him with it down. His hair was halfway down his back, falling in sausage curls all the way, and my friend exclaimed, "He looks like one of the patriarchs!" He did - all he needed was a staff and a long robe to complete the picture.

Here is a memory of No, doing his job as he saw it: In March 1998 I moved back to California with a man, and we planned to live together. The day we arrived, No looked at this man, who was a foot shorter than he, and asked, "What are your intentions toward my sister?"


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