Moon River Magic

I remember seeing my four year old baby brother curled up in bed in anguish as he tries hard to keep silent. He presses both his hands over his mouth and valiantly tries to stem the laughter threatening to escape. One that would most definitely get us both in trouble with our parents, who were in the living room watching Gilligan’s Island.

My brother Daniel is eight years younger than I and right up until I was 14, we shared the same room and we slept on an old pull out bed. Daniel chose to sleep on the top and I got the pull out. His logic for choosing the topside was so that, that way, if the monsters came, as they almost always inevitably did from under the bed, I would be the one to get eaten since I was the closest. And since I was bigger, they’d have their fill of me and leave my little brother alone.

Almost every night as we slept on our uneven platforms, I told him stories that I’d made up. Stories that spoke of fantastic voyages across violet rivers and pink oceans on the Moon. Stories of heroes who were enchanted teapots or clocks on some quest to save red ribbons. In the small darkened room with only the faint muffled sounds of Gilligan’s Island and the sliver of light seeping through from the living room – nothing was impossible for the mind’s eye. And without fail, almost every night my fantastic stories and the valiantly silly antics of my unlikely heroes made Daniel laugh. He’d laugh so hard that he would writhe in ecstatic agony and kick the covers violently begging me to stop.

Now it’s 22 years later and my brother’s with the BBC and I’m a Law professor. We’ve not spoken to each other in a long time. Sometimes when I lie in my bed fit for a queen, in my darkened room bathed in the silvery blue glow of the moonlight streaming in from the skylight above my bed, I remember seeing my baby brother curled up in bed in anguish as he tries hard to keep silent. And I press my blanket to stem the nostalgic tears that speak the question, “Where has the magic gone?”