Last week my baby brother Benjamin, better known as Chuy for no particular reason, asked me for a ride to see a car that he wants to buy. On the way to my mom’s apartment all I could think was how nobody would have to drive my little brother anywhere. He would soon be driving around the streets of L.A. learning to become a productive member of society without mom or dad giving him a lift. The baby in the family would now have to balance his eagerness to drive anywhere at anytime with his ability to pay for gas.
Chuy has been able to and licensed to drive for a while now but he’s never had the ability to buy a car. Even though we don’t mind taking him to work, or he having to bus it to work at Dodger Stadium, picking him up at night was not easy. Games ended at around 10:30 p.m., which meant he wasn’t off until about midnight. Sometimes I would pick him up so that my mom and dad didn’t have to go to work sleep deprived the next day. Don’t get me wrong; driving in the Dodger Stadium parking lot late at night, with a view of Downtown L.A., was always a great experience. However, it was still a tiring commute that late at night.
So watching Chuy salivate over his potential first car purchase made me excited about the potential extra two hours of sleep from not having to pick him up. It also gave me peace of mind knowing that my parents would be able to avoid having to stay up until midnight when they have work at 6 a.m. every morning. Yet, when we arrived to my cousin’s house to check out the car it hit me that my baby brother wasn’t going to need his big bro anymore…not as much at least. It reminded me of my first car, a baby blue 1974 Volkswagen Bug with rust spots on the fenders and holes in front of the passenger-side seat. That car symbolized liberty and independence when all I had was too much energy and enough time to burn it on nothing productive. I drove that bug to Ontario once to buy a T-shirt. Yes. That actually happened.
Now here I was in the middle of a horrible heat wave watching my little brother react to that 2002 Honda Civic the same way I reacted to my buggy. The baby boy that made us miss Halloween in 1993 because he couldn’t come a day sooner or later was now ready to jump into his own version of liberty and independence. The little kid that once fell asleep on my back as we both watched TV is ready jump into the nightmare that is L.A. traffic. I won’t miss driving late at night to pick Chuy up and I certainly won’t miss sneaking in a nap in the Dodger Stadium parking lot as he made his way out of work. What I’ll miss yelling at him to stop eating Flamming Hot Cheetos; even though it confused and irritated me, I will miss his attempts to convince me to adapt his taste in rap music (generational gap I suppose), and I will for sure miss is making fun of him and his Raiders on the way home. Most of all I will just miss shooting the breeze with my baby brother in traffic.