Robert Vaughan - Random Thoughts of an Old Writer

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Saving the Ants

Phil is my youngest brother and the only one of the three of us to have been born in a hospital. When I went there to see him for the first time, Mother held him up and introduced him. This is Phillip. What do you think of your new brother?

Hes fine, I said. But wheres Phyllis? Mother had already given birth to two sons, and she was so certain that the third child would be a girl that Tommy and I fully believed that you could just order the sex of a child, and that Mother had ordered a girl.

Dad was drafted shortly after Phil was born, and we followed him to Fort (then Camp) Rucker, then to Fort Sill. We made those long trips in a 1941 Ford, with Tommy and me sleeping on a pallet in the back seat and Phil sleeping on a pillow in the seat next to Mother. There were neither seat belts nor car seats in those days.

On TV now, there are all these touching pictures of fathers returning from the war and reuniting with their children. My first view of Dad, when he came back, was when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and saw him standing at the toilet stool. That probably would not have made one of those heart-warming vignettes they like to show on TV.

At least I knew who he was, and I welcomed him home. Not so Phil, who cried every time he saw this strange man in the house. To get him to eat, Mother would have to turn his high chair around so he didnt have to look at Dad.

Phil has always had a sense of compassion for other life forms. Being kind to animals is one thing, but Phil took it a step further. When he was very young, I saw him sitting out on the sidewalk. I thought nothing of it, but several minutes later, he was still there.

Curious what he was up to, I walked over and saw he was holding a stick against the concrete walk.

Phil, what are you doing?

Im turning the ants so they wont go out in the road and get run over. Now, this from someone who had two older brothers who loved playing war against the ants, smashing as many as we could with our finger.

Because Phil was five years younger, I didnt have as much interaction with him as with my other brother. Tommy wound up in the DEA, I did three years of combat in Vietnam, but in many ways, you could make a case for Phil having the most courage of the three of us.

Let me tell you why.

Phil was in the third grade and playing with the other kids as they were waiting for the bus to take them home. Someone jumped on his back and, when he fell, he broke his arm. I had broken my arm at about the same age, so initially I didnt think that much about it. But there was a tremendous difference between the simple fracture I had, and the life-changing fracture Phil suffered. In the almost 70 years since that happened, he has not been able to move his arm at the elbow.

I remember lying in bed at night, listening to Mother and Dad talking.

I just dont know what that boy is going to do, Dad would say. With his arm like that, he wont be able to do anything. How is that boy ever going to be able to make a living?

Ha! Phil did not let a little thing like a frozen elbow stop him. He is a handymans handyman and can fix just about anything. He became an AHC, (Architectural Hardware Consultant), which in the construction business is a highly respected title, and he made good use of that title, first as a well-paid employee, and eventually to build his own million-dollar business.

Dad had always equated making a living with being able to handle d-pound bags of sugar so you could load and unload trucks. As it turns out, using your mind is better than using your muscles.

Although Phil is 77 years old, to me, he is still my little brother, and Im proud of him.

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The Promise

Our hometown of Sikeston, Missouri, was flanked by a series of drainage canals that had been dug in the first decade of the 20th century to drain the swampland and produce some of the richest farmland in the country. We called them ditches, and as kids we would fish in them. But we werent supposed to swim in them, as polio was rampant then, and swimming in such unsanitary water was considered a leading cause.