Good To Be King
By King Harris
April 9 is a special day in our family. That’s when in 1948, my younger and only brother James was born. So he’ll be 69 (closing in on 70), which is difficult for me to believe, as I still consider him as a scrawny young kid.
So I’ll call him up and ask him how it feels to be old, and he’ll reply with something like “You’re still older than I am, brother.”
I haven’t seen him in quite a while because he lives back east. So phone calls back and forth will have to suffice in our attempts to keep in touch. Most of our conversations these days involve the extended family — my sister Ann, countless cousins, including Uncle Tommy who is in his mid-90s, even grandchildren.
That’s a long way from playing cowboys and Indians with cap guns. Until the day we both pass on, my brother Jimmy (nee James King Harris) and I will compete with each other, although not as tenaciously as we did when we were growing up.
Sports came easier to me that it did to James, not because I was more athletic, but probably because he was less coordinated, evidenced by one example when he once broke his leg going up a ski slope on a rope tow.
And since I was 22-months older and heftier, it was no sweat to toss him around a pool, and I just about always beat him in football, basketball, and baseball, which might have caused him constant despair but only made him more competitive, to such a point that when he finally defeated me in tennis for the first time, his glee and excitement were such that it was as if he had knocked off the reigning Wimbledon champion.
Actually, I think all Jimmy ever really wanted was my admiration, and when he didn’t achieve that, he tried to get my attention. And in this he succeeded, either by doodling on my bedroom door or in my school yearbooks, or by sacrificing me up to some big errant bully whom he dared that I could beat up.
I decided I was better off if my brother hung around his own friends and got in trouble on his own, which he had no problem doing. Like the time he was a passenger in his friend, Tim Wood’s sports car convertible, and made a reactive gesture to some young toughs along the nighttime streets of Chinatown, who promptly clomped him on the head with a chain and caused a few stitches, although it looked a lot worse than it was.
Or like the time he got into a car accident while visiting Europe one summer, injuring more than his vacation.
Not that Jimmy was born under a bad sign. As a kid, his reputation seemed impeccable, at least to our Uncle Larry, who always referred to Jimmy as “Clean Man,” a mystical moniker if there ever was one considering he was often anything but.
I think Jimmy was just searching for adventure, like any kid delving in the dirt, and he would find it at various times in his life, either as an apple picker in the orchards of Colorado, a taxicab driver on the streets in San Francisco, an advertising man in the State of New York, and a humorous writer with no boundaries whatsoever — all of which led to a position for many years as director of communications at the lofty, Berkshire School near Great Barrington in the Western part of Massachusetts.
For quite a while now, this Norman Rockwell-part of New England has been home to my brother, his two grown children, living their own lives now, and his wife, who goes by the name of “Shadow.”
Not difficult to observe here that my brother was also something of a romantic. During his latter college days at Ripon, Wis., so the story goes, James is singing “The Shadow of your Smile” at a local tavern when in walks fellow classmate, Debra Shumar, who knows a good tune (at least) when she hears one.
Before the night was over, the right chord was apparently struck. Debra was renamed Shadow, and as harmony would have it, they’ve been together ever since.
I’m sure my brother and I will talk about these things when we connect, which isn’t as often as I’d like. I’ll tell him that, too. I figure that if we spend more time together, we’ll have more stories and memories to share, whether it’d be rock ‘n’ roll favorites or rock climbing along the shores of Lake Tahoe, or playing Marco Polo in the Jackling Swimming Pool, or cheering Stanford in the Rose Bowl.
Or maybe we’ll talk about his latest soiree into cooking? According to Jimmy, Julia Child would be proud. Why doesn’t that surprise me?
