TODAY IS EDDIE'S BIRTHDAY

I had one brother.  His legal name was Edward Stephen Baril.  Nobody called him that.  He was “Eddie”.  Today, March 25, 2006, would have been Eddie’s 50th birthday.  

Eddie was the 2nd of three children- three children who were very close together in age.  Virtually nothing was known about the importance of “birth order” in child development back in the 1950s and 1960s.  Dr. Kevin Lehman has been a pioneer in this field.  Lehman’s research cites middle children as being very vulnerable to all sorts of problems and setbacks- this particularly being true if the middle child is the same sex as the oldest.  Eddie had an older brother and a younger sister.   Psychologically and spiritually he was an accident waiting to happen.  Such a middle child would require very diligent parenting with lots of positive reinforcement  and (as much as I hate to quote her) lots of support from Hillary Clinton’s “village”.  My parents were good parents and generally good people, but they didn’t have a clue what lay ahead.

Eddie did not look like me.  I tended to look very French, he was all Scotsman; as my mother used to say, “built for the kilt”.  We had very little in common.  Eddie liked to do things with his hands.  I’m very unhandy and uncoordinated.  As a kid, Eddie was just very open and vulnerable.  I was more on the shrewd side.  I learned early-on to strategize and be careful to make a good impression.  On my very first day of school I was scared to death, but (in my mother’s words) I acted “just like a little soldier”.  Two years later, Eddie screamed and cried and almost had to be pried away from my mother as she awkwardly left the first-grade classroom.  He was the honest one.

My parents made a lot of my accomplishments and of my sister Dianne’s achievements.  I was always the FIRST to do anything...the first to be in high school, the first to start college, the first to get a driver’s license, etc.  Each was a big milestone.  Dianne had all those experiences as LASTS, so they were also milestones.  For Eddie, these events would have some importance, but they would never be milestones.

In time, Eddie became a very good mechanic.  No, he became a GREAT mechanic.  He was a one in a million mechanic.  For those of you from the Framingham, Mass. area, I’ve only known one other guy who was THAT good of a mechanic, and that’s Bill Lincoln.  I became an accomplished public speaker and learned how to “snow” college professors on term papers.  That kind of stuff, well it just wasn’t Eddie.

There IS something Eddie hated.  He hated General Motors cars.  Hated them.  Eddie predicted the demise of G.M. over twenty-three years ago.  If he knows about this year’s news of General Motors’ massive layoffs and plant closings, well, I hate to say it, but he’s laughing and saying, “I told you so!”.

Eddie is buried in the “Baril family grave” in Boston’s attractive and woodsy West Roxbury section.   It meant a lot for my father to have Eddie’s casket placed above that of Dad’s mother.  On Eddie’s birthday in 2000, my daughter Amy and I visited the grave and played a recording of country singer JoDee Messina singing “Silver Thunderbird”.  Eddie’s FAVORITE cars were Ford Thunderbirds.

My 50th birthday a year and a half ago was a really big deal.  As I write, there’s a deep sadness.  There will be no party- no “over the hill” jokes, nothing like that.  You see, Eddie had serious substance abuse problems.  He died many, many years ago.  Eddie was engaged to be married at the time of his death. It’s really sad the wedding did not happen.  He sired no kids.  He died so young.  You know those tee-shirts that say something like , “My folks went to Las Vegas and all I got is this stupid tee-shirt!”?  Well, the only present I could think to give Eddie was this stupid blog entry.

I hope it touched someone’s heart.

Today, March 25, 2006 is Eddie’s birthday.

“O God, thou hast taught me from my youth:”  (Psalm 71:17)