This is me speaking. I was curious as to the reason that my older brother Bobby chose to stay home from the huge family vacation in the summer of 1970 so I called him. He lives in San Antonio.

Turns out, he said, that he was twenty at the time. He had no desire to spend the summer scrunched up in the car with the little siblings. I don’t blame him. However, he missed the things that we saw and ended up spending a lot of cash later on from a house sale to tour the country and see these things, too.

Plus, he spent all his earnings that summer from the job he had at a nursery, fixing up the yard at our house. He had no money left to go to school and ended up taking out a loan for his fall semester at Texas A & M.

But I missed him.