Growing politely apart

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Mary Fan

That's happening more and more often between my brother and me. College does that. And every semester is just another good-bye in the airport with weary strangers all around coming and going and we just another couple of bumps in the stream. A clap on the back, say hi to what's-his-name for me and the flight numbers sounding over the speaker. A foreshadowing more eloquent than fears expressed of what is to come.

Families blessed enough to have multiple children in college face the tiny blip of a curse: This is where the tiny nucleus of a family begins spinning apart. People are not static, certainly, and over the years you do see your brother grow from the androgynous twin in the bathtub with you to the pudgy boy on the toilet reading as you count to ten, waiting for him to get off.

But at the college crossroads, this dynamism, this molting of personality and physical form into tempered adulthood is done in the far periphery of your vision, that blind spot where you cannot see.

Unsettling. Now home on vacations, you knock on each other's doors and count to ten for the bathroom with face pressed against the locked door. You take college habits home with you. Polite and friendly to all, family-familiar to none.

And the time it takes from talking on the toilets to knocking on the door? A semester. Not even the time it takes to finish a full sequence in chemistry.

You see your uncle and your father, your mother and her brother, all calling before coming to dinner in their company-bright voices. Is it convenient for me to come by Thursday? How's work? How's Eric? The impersonal blind searching of people grown apart and not sure how to bridge the sudden gap.

I feel this rift starting to open beneath me during the unnaturally formal, unnaturally adult airport good-byes between my brother and me. Like a ritual of being adult today, enveloping us like some ugly, inborn instinct or involuntary mechanism to keep the ugly modern invention of the nuclear family intact by immediately reclassifying all potential extended family members as bridge and tennis friends. Until one day your kids can't tell Uncle Josh, who is mom's brother, from "Uncle" Steve, who is mom's boss.

The living institution of the extended family is already laboring heavily on artificial respiration today. If brothers and sisters keep growing politely apart, what ugly new modern invention will supplant the old? Families about occasional bridge on Sunday nights when you put out the good china and play stiffly and nicely, and nothing else?

Before he left for Berkeley again, in the middle of our polite farewell in the airport, I shook my brother's sizable belly hanging respectably over his waist band. Just to reassure myself that among all the people we barely know but bid polite fare-thee-wells to, I was different. I could still hearken back to days we blithely and rudely tussled in stores and embarrassed the other and still believed in God and Secret Pacts and the infallibility of promises. I was his sister. And I wasn't going to let it all go with the same wry farewells and empty KIT's you exchange with people you end up never seeing again, or only on off weekends.

And as a big sister, I advise all the brothers and sisters, elder and younger to do the same. Because modern-day appearances and experiences aside, brothers and sisters are not meant to grow politely apart. Play fiercely together instead, as in halcyon days and with the force of that play bar the dying of the day when extended families tussled, and belonged, absolutely together.