Brother Ed

Brother Ed
Originally uploaded by jbgreer

That's a picture of Ed and I taken by my wife this past Saturday in our driveway.

Ed and I met during our undergraduate days at university. I say 'met', though I know that at first I had heard quite a bit about him (and maybe vice versa) before actually meeting him in person, so in some respects he was my first virtual friend before the current internet craze.

During those early college years, Ed and I hung around similar circles, linked by a few common friends and an even more common quest to obtain access to various computers and use even more computing time. There was a small cadre of what amounted to independent contractors on campus, and we had a sort of gentleman's agreement not to poach each others plum positions, but not to be too greedy, either. Suffice it to say that Ed and I enjoyed our fair share of work in nearly every lab of importance at the time. Later during graduate school, one of those labs would become our home-away-from-home - sometimes quite literally if the weather grew too hot for an apartment we shared a half a block from campus.

Now, at the time Ed and I belonged, perhaps unconsciously, to that long-haired hacker-ish tradition of guys who wore fairly impressive beards. [ I did have someone once describe my school id photo as looking as though "I had come down from the hills to axe-murder my momma." ] So, imagine if you will, two fairly ursine fellows walking the breadth of the city, my 1973 Buick LeSabre being an expensive beast to feed at the time, We ate together, lived together, worked together, in short, spent pretty much every waking moment of our grad school existence together. I count it as a treasured complement that Ed later admitted that he didn't think he could put up with anyone else for that long.

And, so, Ed and I would would walk into one of our old haunts and, inevitably, sooner or later someone would turn and ask, "Say.... are you two guys brothers?" We even had someone ask if we were twins, which I thought was too funny since, as many readers know, I am a twin... just not to Ed. At first we were shocked at the suggestion, then amused, then almost expectant.

Well, time does go by, and grad school (the first time) has long since past, and I got married and even took to shaving most years, usually in the Spring but recently in the Fall. Ed I have now known each other over 20 years, making him one of my longest tenured friends. I grew up with 3 sisters, and Ed has become over the years the closest thing I'll probably ever have to a brother, which is what I call him and he calls me, though he has some to spare.

This past Saturday Ed and I bailed on a planned geocaching trip due to rain and decided to run a few errands instead. We were standing in line waiting to checkout when the man in front of us picked up his bags, turned, and said, "Are you guys brothers?" I said no and grinned, turned to Ed and said, "That hasn't happened in a long time." It's the truth, but it isn't, you see. Yes we are.