My Younger Brother’s Birthday

July 22, 2025 Journal No Comments

Preface: If you read the first story about My Adventure With Mickey, you have already been introduced to Dael, a younger brother. He was performing in a play in Muncie, Indiana, and Mickey and I met up there to try and surprise Dael. This is a continuation of that story. You see, we still had to get to the east coast with our parents so they could take us to the airport from where we would fly to Israel together.
The trip to Israel was filled with all sorts of adventures, but this story is not one of them. This story takes place just days before we flew to Israel.

Why Dael Was Born
In the late winter or early spring of 1958, Mom and three boys got off a train in Hastings, Nebraska. Dad, a Naval officer, had been transferred to land-locked Nebraska for an important mission at the Naval Ammunition Depot (NAD) in Hastings. Nebraska – not a boat in sight, nor a body of water to sail it on. As he had done before, and as he would do a couple more times, Dad went to Hastings ahead of Mom and us kids, to secure quarters. We three kids, by the way, were Mickey, the oldest, Joel, the youngest, and me, in the middle.

About four months after we arrived in Hastings, Nebraska, Dael was born. Why? We might speculate that Mom, who grew up on the east coast where she had lived all her life before meeting Dad, couldn’t find anything better to do in Nebraska, so she had a baby. But that theory can be debunked easily, because Mom found plenty of things to do while we lived in Nebraska. She didn’t need any kids to keep herself busy. Although, if she didn’t have any kids she wouldn’t have had much to talk about with all the other mothers on base.

Actually there was a more logical explanation. You see, Mickey and Joel used to gang up on me. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it. I’m just saying that’s what happened. My parents and everybody else who read Dr. Spock must’ve thought it was completely normal for the middle kid to get battered by both sides of the trio. But normal or not, they didn’t like it. So they had another baby to even things up. Voila, Dael was born so that I would have a buddy to play with, and to make me responsible for showing him the ropes in this new life of his.

As for showing Dael the ropes around this life, Mom and Dad did not make this very clear to me. More likely, it was not clear to me, but I let my parents believe it was, because at 5 years old, about to enter Kindergarten, I did not want my parents to think I was incapable.

As for Dael’s job being my little buddy, he came through in spades. He did his job well, indeed, for a few years, until he got old enough to make his own mistakes.

The Bicentennial
Fast forward to 1976. After the Regional Thespians Conference in Muncie, Indiana, Dael and I had about a week before we would travel together to Israel. With most of the family in the car, and a trailer hitched to the car, we took off on a camping trip on our way to the east coast.

In this bicentennial year, our aim was to visit Washington, D.C. one day, be in Boston on the 4th of July, then head to New York City, visiting relatives along the way.

[A little sidebar here]
Before going any further, I have a question for you:

When you have looked back at past events in your life, have you ever wished you had done things differently, approached a situation with different motives, or just plain acted differently than you acted? Have you ever wished you had been a different person?
[End of sidebar.]

Adventures in Washington, D.C.

The bicentennial 4th of July in Boston would turn out to be the stuff exciting adventures are made of. Some 400 thousand people would crowd Hatch Memorial Shell to experience the Boston Pops Orchestra playing the 1812 Overture with actual cannons and firewords at the end instead of the timpani. Rockets glared red and white and blue, darting through the skies like a real battle.

Dael and I ran through the streets for a better view of the fireworks, with the aim of getting a photo on one of our cameras. It was exciting, to be sure, but I chose a different adventure for this story.

When we got to Washington, D.C. Dad and Mom took Matt on a tour, allowing Dael and me to go off on our own. It would be the first time Dael and I would set up our own time table and explore a strange city on our own. We were fixing to fly off thousands of miles away, where English wasn’t spoken, and conditions were anything but unhostile. Washington, D.C. was a warm-up exercise.

Crucial Context

This paragraph and the next one are not essential to the telling of this story, but they provide a context you are not going to find anywhere else. In the summer of 1976, things were changing all around us. It was an election year. It was less than a year since Nixon resigned. It was just over a year since the fall of Saigon. The Montreal Summer Olympics were coming up. There was a hostage situation in Uganda where a hundred Israeli hostages were being held at an old airport.

Transition and Turmoil

With this turmoil all around us, both Dael and I were also in states of transition. He had just graduated high school and was getting ready to go to Kansas University. I had just attained a Master Degree in Education at the University of Connecticut, and was getting ready to start a teaching job in Yuma, Arizona. When Dael and I went off on our own in Washington, DC, we really did not know each other. We had not seen each other for a year. For four years before that I was away at university in Seattle while Dael was making his way through schooling in Kansas.

As brothers and former buddies, I guess it was natural for us to forget about all the turmoil in the world and just pick up where we left off. We horsed around so much, a couple mounted police thought we were running away from their teammates. Yet with all the horsing around, we got around, too. We didn’t just go to see places. We had activities, concrete things to do in the places we went to.

We went to the Senate. The lines were long but not unbearable, and we got seated where we had a pretty good view of what was happening on the floor. We saw a couple senators whose names we had heard of. I think it was Senator Frank Church who stood up and gave a speech when Dael leaned toward me and said, “That’s the guy I wanted to vote for.” (Revelation: That’s right! Dael would be eligible to vote in his first election, come November.)

While we were in the neighborhood, Dael decided to look for the office of one of his Congressmen. I think it was Bob Dole’s office that we went to. (Revelation: We didn’t go inside, but it was kind of amazing that, as residents of the senator’s state, the system we were under said we were perfectly entitled to visit our representatives. )

Dael & Duke: Dael has always been able to do things I am not able to do.

In the Library of Congress, Dael decided to locate a specific book. I believe the book was by or about one of Dael’s cinematic heroes, like Groucho Marx. It became like a treasure hunt. We had to find out where the card catalog was. Once we found the card catalog, it took a while to locate the correct drawer. With the correct drawer, Dael was delighted to see a card or two with his specific book listed. With information from the card catalog, we journeyed to a higher floor in a different section of the library. Then we located the set of rows, and from there we found the specific row, and from there we found the book. And again Dael was delighted. And so was I.

We must have gone other places and done other things that day. But these stand out to me because Dael wanted to go to those places and do those things. I did too, but prior to doing them, I had no great connection to any of it. I didn’t know that we could stop in on our representatives whenever we chose to. But Dael knew that. I had heard of Senator Church, but I had no idea what he stood for or why he quit the presidential race. But Dael seemed to keep up with these things. The Library Of Congress was an awesome monument to behold. But Dael made it more by engaging with the library.

When I was growing up, the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” always stumped me, and I was really glad they did not have that question on the SAT’s. One minute I wanted to be a scientist, another minute I wanted to be a fireman, the next minute I wanted to be a musician, and once I wanted to be a lawyer so I could deliver passionate speeches in front of an audience. When it came down to it, nothing held my interest long enough for me to follow through.

When my first grade teacher asked, the class one by one, what they wanted to be, when she came to me I said, “teacher.” It just came out, I had no idea I was going to say that. But once said, I felt commited and years later I became a teacher.

Now Dael, like me, has an enormous curiousity. Unlike me he is able to focus in on the things he is curious about and act on them to a productive end. Me?-I rarely if ever finish anything I start. This is something I didn’t even realize about my own brother until many years passed, and I had an occasion to think about it.

There is another thing that got by me at the time that I wish it hadn’t. The whole time Dael and I were together in Washington, D.C., and after that, wandering around Israel – that whole time, Dael was more in the dark about where he was heading than I was. He was off to university, but he had no idea what he was going to do there.

I had been in that situation before. I could have stepped in and shown Dael the ropes, so to speak. But I didn’t. In our travels, time and again, opportunities arose for me to step in and have one of those conversations buddies are supposed to have about their futures, but I never did.

Have you ever looked back at your life and wished you could have do-overs? Not to get better results . . but to be a better friend.

Today is Dael’s birthday. I know why Dael was born. It wasn’t just to be my buddy. Thank goodness he realized that right away. It was to be who he has become.