It is the Monday before Thanksgiving. Today is my youngest brother’s birthday. I was six when he was born, and 14 years later I took him to a Phish concert in Wisconsin, where my boyfriend at the time overdosed on LSD, lost his shoes, and ended up in the psychiatric ward of the nearest major hospital. I sold our tickets for the following night’s show and took Paul home to Chicago, not super eager to explain to our parents what he’d been exposed to: no actual drugs, but the afterschool-special-type results of mixing jam bands, camping, and irresponsible college students who had too much disposable income.

In hindsight, perhaps it was an important formative lesson.

The boyfriend didn’t last, but my brother and I continued going to concerts together. Bob Dylan, REM, Modest Mouse, The National, Maceo Parker. Our music history is long, and has included no further drug drama, unless you count that one Widespread Panic show in Berkeley when Paul was 17, but I don’t really count that. Everyone sleeps in a hallway at some point in their lives.

Now my brother is in San Francisco for the month, so I got to celebrate his birthday with him tonight, just as he was at my birthday dinner earlier this month. We haven’t actually lived in the same city since he was 11, and I like having him around. He babysits, and watches football with us. We talk about books. Tonight at dinner, everyone shared Paul stories. The time he fell asleep in his bed during a game of hide-and-seek and my mom couldn’t find him. The time he ran out the kitchen door and fell off the back of our house when the deck was being redone. The time his name in the preschool yearbook simply read P.P. Corliano—and no one knows why. Read More>