WORLD Brother Day can mean many things to many people.
One thinks especially of ‘brothers’ in a non-literal sense; people who served together in warfare – or sport, for that matter, and those with spiritual bonds.
The biblical Book of Proverbs speaks of ‘a friend who is closer than a brother’.
I (showing my age) can think of a number of songs that expound on the theme, like Simon & Garfunkel’s He was my Brother and Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms.
There was even a music group called Brotherhood of Man.
But my take today is on my literal brother: my identical twin brother in fact.
Older than me by 25 minutes – and constantly reminding me of that – Christopher (who sadly passed away a few years ago) and I had loads of fun growing up as mirror images.
For example, we would do a magic act with one of us nailed on stage inside a wooden box and the ‘magician’ with a spectacular drum roll and flashing of lights would make ‘him’ appear at the back of the hall.
It was always fun seeing people inspecting the stage floorboards after the show.
We used to box as a sport and would often engage in exhibition bouts, which always ended up in a drawn result as judges could not tell us apart.
We thought of one day joining the spy world and becoming a quadruple agent. Ironically, independently of each other we both learned to play guitar after school and formed bands; both became telecommunications technicians; and both left that to enter the ministry.
We were close until we left school and went our separate ways, staying in touch, as families do, at a forced distance because of working at opposite ends of the country.…until one day in the year we turned 40.
I was belatedly having my tonsils out in Cape Town – a minor procedure I didn’t think was necessary to inform the family of.
At exactly 8am, when I was placed under anaesthetic, my heart briefly stopped beating. It only lasted a short while and was soon sorted out.
In Umtata, my Telkom technician twin collapsed to the ground at exactly 8am. His heart had stopped beating.
After he was revived, he frantically phoned our mother (who could never tell us apart and called us both ‘twin’) asking if she knew whether anything had happened to me.
Eventually the incidence of mental telepathy was pieced together.
At some unconscious level or brain wave-length, he was ‘informed’ of my experience. An identical twin thing.
He did not, however, share the throat pain.
Nor is he from his present heavenly abode responding to my requests to telepath the winning Lotto numbers.
