When we were kids, I was amazed at Bill’s ability to drag his toes up the curbs in front of our house while catching a football, then hold on to the ball as he crashed to the curb lawn.
These days, on my visits to his condo, I admire him as he marches off in suitcoat, dress shirt and tie to make decisions that actually matter in the world, while I spend my days doing the digital era’s version of scribbling.
All this doesn’t mean we didn’t experience sibling rivalry. We did.
I barely survived his several attempts to crush me with his greater heft. Being smaller and hopelessly outmatched, I developed a method of resistance that in more recent years has been honored with a name: snarkiness.
One of the greatest moments in my personal snark history came to mind last week when the news broke that Don Featherstone, the father of the pink plastic flamingo, had migrated to the great plastic nesting ground in the sky.
You see, my brother is all about the questionable cultural spawn of Featherstone’s most famous figure.
Two nearly life-size specimens stand in the elevator outside his door.
One hangs from a basket on said door.
A thigh-high wire mutation draped with pink netting lends a regal feel to his fireplace and is under the constant watch of a phalanx of four flamingos on a nearby kitchen counter, two action-figure size, two one-third scale.
At the top of the second floor stairs a feathered variant, slightly faded, stands watch on the cusp of molting. Across the room, a string of flamingo-themed Christmas lights drapes over his sound system, though, so far as I know, the pink flamingo ascribes to no single creed but claims commonality with all people of goodwill.
Among flamingo believers, Brother Bill is a member of the Kitsch Sect, whose many members in Ohio and Michigan came of age during the 1960s under the spiritual guidance of a figure known as “The Ghoul” or “Ghoulardi.” Those of a certain age still remember the man who persuaded television stations to show movies and allow him to fill gaps in time nearly as wide as canyons in the movie plots with antics that included blowing up his plastic frog companions with firecrackers.
By contrast, my grandmother was a true believer in the pink flamingo as an artful expression of beauty. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where summer’s sole purpose is to allow mosquitoes and deer flies the opportunity to feast on human flesh, she managed to grow a beautiful garden, starting her flowers in a homemade hothouse. After decades of doing so, the appearance of Mr. Featherstone’s flamingos on the cultural horizon seemed an obvious opportunity to accessorize her garden.
To appreciate my historic moment of snark, it’s also necessary to know, as I’ve also mentioned before in this column, that my grandmother’s taste in music ran to champagne. I never saw her drink any, but the Champagne Music of Lawrence Welk, complete with bubbles, was something she drank in like a person whose favorite polka had 12 steps.
Because Welk-watching was compulsory during our childhood, when my brother as a high-schooler drove my grandmother to Detroit’s Cobo Hall to see Lawrence and his crew, I knew I could never again vie with him for her affections.
Like an evil-doer in a Shakespeare play, I bided my time, waiting for the perfect moment to bridge the gap between my brother and grandmothers’ flamingo sectarian differences with a sharp spark of snark. It arrived outside my grandparents’ farmhouse on one of the perhaps dozen days of a U.P. summer during his early college years.
Waiting until Grandma was in earshot, I mentioned something about her pink flamingos under my breath. My brother responded with the expected slur at a volume I could only have dreamed of.
For me, the next moment was as joyful as the one Ralphie experienced when he unwrapped the Red Rider BB gun his father had smuggled past Ralphie’s mother in “The Christmas Story.”
To her direct challenge, “What’s wrong with those flamingos?” he could offer no answer. He groveled in a way that, at the time, gave me great pleasure.
It ended in disappointment, of course, because I’d overlooked an unalterable fact: Our grandmother’s love for us was beyond all reason, strong enough to weather slurs against her beloved flamingos and forgiving enough even to overlook her younger grandson’s annoying tendency to snark.
All that actually came to mind two days before Don Featherstone’s demise last week when I watched the brother I’m so proud of march out the door, ready to make decisions that actually make a difference in world while wearing a suit coat, dress shirt and a green tie decorated with a pattern of pink flamingos.
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