These Stories Need No Embellishment

My brother is getting married tomorrow, to a fabulous girl. To borrow a phrase from my husband, he is definitely marrying above himself. Tonight we had a dinner for the two families. We spent a lovely evening getting to know each other, all the while enjoying fabulous Greek food. As the oldest sibling, I felt it my duty to bestow a few words of advice to my new sister-in-law; if my little brother got roasted in the process, well, so be it.

Here are a few snippets:

When Anthony turned 3-years-old, my mother took him to the bakery to pick out his birthday cake. He chose one with a girl in a bikini. If you know my brother, that's par for the course. My mom, being the instigator that she is, allowed him to take the three candles and place them according to his desire. You can imagine where the first two went. The third was strategically placed in the frosting lady's belly button.

I gave his fiance three birthday candles to save for when there's a lull in the romance department.

Anthony has always been very concerned about his looks. I've often commented that he is more of a girl than I am. If you were to compare our two vanities, mine would have four products: soap, toothpaste, lotion, and Chapstick. His would contain the entire Clinique collection and then some. When he was in kindergarten, the big VHS movie we watched around our house was Superman II. The villain's name was Zod. He dressed in black and had very slicked-back hair. Anthony decided that this was the look for him. Getting ready for school, he would use no less than half a bottle of hair gel, ensuring his Zod-like look would last all day long.

I gave Charlotte a large bottle of hair gel, to get the happy couple off to the right start.

When Anthony was a teen-ager, he was often up to mischief of one kind or another. Somehow, our mom would hear about it through the grapevine, and would anxiously await the return of her prodigal son. Usually, she was waiting with some kind of weapon; a shoe, a wooden spoon, whatever was within reach. That, unfortunately, was often the remote control. She broke an untold number of remotes on Anthony's backside, or whatever limb he was using to protect himself. The running joke in the family became that if Dad wasn't home it was because he was at Walmart picking up a new remote control.

I told Charlotte to save her knuckles and gave her the largest remote control I could find. She's gonna need it.

And so, I wish for my brother (whom I took for show-and-tell in the second grade) and his beautiful bride, a long and happy life. And if one day, they have a little boy who chases his sisters around the house, threatening to pee on them, well, I hope Charlotte has the remote control handy.