Brothers

Quick refresher course: I like video games, I rented them often, I thought my brother was the greatest video game player when I was a kid. With that in mind, let's flash back to the year 19xx.

The year is 19xx (I don't actually remember the year but I was around 7 or 8 years old). My brother and I had rented Mega Man 3. Mega Man 3 was a game where you weren't just a regular man, but a weird robot man that could absorb special powers from other robot men by killing them. So your goal was to pick a stage, get past the evil guy's lair (mostly by jumping and shooting) and then killing the guy himself at the end. There's more to it, but you get the idea. Each Mega Man game had eight evil guys you had to kill before getting to the final evil guy, and you could do them in any order you liked. When you beat a boss, you were given a password, and if you wanted to turn off your Nintendo, you could restart your progress by inputting the password when you started playing again.

Anyways, so my brother and I had rented this game. We took turns trying to beat the boss. Most of the time this involved me failing miserably and then handing the controller off to my brother who would do much better. In fact, I think he had beaten every one of the evil guys except for one: Magnet Man.

Look at this guy: dude has a magnet on his head. He's serious business. He was serious enough business in fact, that Doug and I had quite a time trying to beat him. I remember us trying more than once before having to call it a night and both having to go to school. After school got off I went home to try my hand again at the dreaded Man of Magnets. I had some time to the game myself before Doug got home, and I had to relish it. We were lucky to have a second TV in our house, and it didn't have cable, which meant it was free for Doug and I to play all we wanted. That said, sharing was strictly enforced. Once Doug got home, we had to take turns (unless, of course, one person "broke the other's concentration" which was a policy liberally enforced). In the time before Doug got home, though, somehow I had managed to beat Magnet Man. Don't ask me how; it was some combination of blind luck and sheer force of will.

This was a big moment for me; I think it was the first time I beat Doug to anything. Of course, I didn't really think of it that way. I thought of it as doing my part for the team. Doug would come home, hear the good news, and then we'd progress straight on to the boss together. That, unfortunately, wasn't the reaction he had. Doug wanted to beat the level for himself, and he was actually kind of mad that I had done it without him. We had what resembled an argument between brothers seven years apart, and I'm not even positive we played that night. The next morning though you can be dang sure we kept going in the game. Doug and I had a neat relationship growing up; we could get mad and yell at each other, but once we got a good night's sleep, all was forgiven. No apologies were sought for or given; we just reverted to being brothers without grudges. It was understood that whatever had happened before happened, but it wasn't big enough to get between us. We just let it lie, and moved on.

I remember at times wondering if there should have been more apologies handed out, but now I don't think so. The dynamic between us, at least from my angle, never begat any grudges, and I hope it was the same way with him. I wonder if all brothers are this way. I think the moral of the story is: don't let stupid nonsense get between you and your brother/friend/partner/whatever; there are magnet men (and their proverbial counterparts) that are far more important to focus on.