I always wanted a brother. When my mom remarried, one year after my dad died, I got three instant-stepbrothers. Donny, the oldest, was an interesting cat, and during our 20s we played in some of the same sandlot tackle football games, served nearly parallel time in the Armed Forces and eventually drank a few beers together. But we were never really close.
My two younger stepbrothers were just that, younger, and seemed like little kids. I had a sister. A nice girl. Someone I love. And I'm fairly friendly with one of my two stepsisters. But that's it. I never had that male familial bond based solely on blood, and I never will.
My father, on the other hand, was the eldest of five, and two of his four siblings were brothers. They grew up together in a German immigrant household in Cincinnati, and whatever they had been like in childhood, they were close by the time I came on the scene. My Uncle Joe, the middle brother, lived out in the country. But I still saw him at least once a month. And the Baby Brother, my Uncle Bill, lived on the other side of the duplex I grew up in. I saw Bill, at least passing by our living-room window after work, every day.
The three Wilken boys were both peas in a pod and very different. My dad was the biggest, at 6-0 and 190 pounds. He had a deep enough voice that his nickname at the corner tav was Frog. He boxed a little during the Depression. Both of his younger brothers were thinner, more wiry, more like their nephew Dennis. And like Dennis, and unlike Frog, they both wore glasses.
Joe married and had three sons. Bill never married and lived next door with his mother, my paternal grandma, until she died at 80. My grandfather, the immigrant postal worker, had died a few years before, also at 80. Bill had been changed by the war, WWII, was how the family explained his lifestyle, an abhorrent-looking thing to the fairly social younger version of moi. He worked at the downtown post office sorting mail. He came straight home, every day for 40 years. As far as anyone knew, he never had a date after 1945. He never had a real friend either. After Grandma died, he socialized with nobody except his brothers.
Joe was family oriented, too. But he liked a beer and had a wickedly droll sense of humor. Like Bill, he deferred to my dad, but his deference was always accompanied by a smile. There was respect but none of poor Bill's hero worship. Bill had been marked by World War II, but the other two, more normally influenced, had been marked by the Depression. Neither had a great job: my dad was a policy loan clerk for a large insurance company, and Joe was a foreman for a machine shop. Neither of them would miss a day's work unless they were dead. Both of them worked for the same companies for more than 40 years. Both were also somewhat disappointed by their sons, me included, who were made of softer, self-indulgent '60s stuff.
My father died young, at 57. At the time of his death I was hospitalized at a VA drug treatment center for Vietnam-era vets. Feeling very guilty when I got my shit together, as we quaintly said in those same Sixties, I determined to get to know my uncles. Bill resisted my intrusions, stiffly, complaining to my mother that I was "harassing" him. An unfair and untrue accusation of a worse kind of misconduct, concerning drugs, made in a loud voice in front of the neighbors, led to me putting my own uncle on his back in the front yard we were sharing - I'd moved back into the duplex after my mother remarried and moved out. He, too, died young at 60 - from cancer, not me knocking him down. We weren't very close, or even very friendly by that time.
I did better with Joe. In the '70s, while a late-blooming college student, I used to take my then-3-year-old daughter Vanessa along on the long drive out to his country house. The place I'd remembered as huge turned out to be a tiny, just-bigger-than-a-cottage house, sitting in the middle of one acre of land.
We'd drink the six-pack I brought with me and watch Vanessa play in the mud while Joe told me about his brothers, when they were all young, before World War II. Joe was much funnier than either my dad or Bill. And he was smarter in a way, not driven argumentative by job-induced bitterness like my father, and not angry, beaten and deeply afraid of other humans, like Uncle Bill.
Environment and heredity had made the three Wilken boys seem similar on the surface. But they were not similar. And all three were also very different from today's corporate and jargon-influenced American-made male models.
I respect their abilities to work hard, and I envy them their relationships with each other, and I miss Joe and Father Frog quite a bit as I age into their shoes.
I didn't ask any of them, even poor Bill, enough questions, and now I never will.
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