MT Repetitions

Whatever being a Big Brother is, it’s not what you expect.

There’s a handbook they give you when you start. A binder of information: rules and ideas for what to do. The rules are useful but otherwise, there’s a good chance you won’t really use it.

Before you start, you’ll think that the Little will be just like your real little brother or nephew or cousin. He won’t be.

You might think he has an idea of what he’d like out of the relationship. Nope. You might think it’s like the time you helped out at the local school or church, or time you coached or well, some other time. . . It’s not.

It is like meeting someone entirely new in a neighborhood you just moved in to. You do have a sense that there is some common interest. At least a common interest in having someone else there, a common feeling that somehow your lives will hook together. It will happen, and after it does, you still won’t know what happened. If you think about it too hard, you might just mess the whole thing up.

You will notice that after meeting a time or two, he’ll look at you with a different type of appreciation. He’ll listen a little more closely to what you say. If you’re lucky he’ll even say something.

And when you really start getting together every week, you will have a range of planned activities. You’ll go to the beach, play Frisbee, and go to the movies or maybe McDonalds. It will be great. But then it will become, “I’ll pick you up at 1:00” with no plans, no ideas and you might just walk through Home Depot and look at tools or hit the pet store or wander around and stop at a local park and tromp through the bushes. You’ll notice that he really likes to poke and prod tiny animals and that hey, it’s still pretty fun. You’ll know he doesn’t like to do anything that might put him on display or potentially embarrass him, but he’ll love to see you do something stupid. You’ll realize that while he doesn’t seem to care about school he’ll remember the minimum temperature required for a Monarch Butterfly to take flight from a tour you took three months ago.

And then after you sit through 15 baseball games he might actually wave to you when you’re in the bleachers. His grandmother will tell you you’ve made a great difference in his life and she’ll thank you for all the time you’ve spent. Time? A few hours one day a week. One day a week I get to hang out with a good friend and get back to what’s really important: learning day to day, sharing what I know and taking the time to play at life. It’s a great experience.