A New Blog

My brother Ian and I have decided that this year we’re going to join forces out in the blogosphere. This is somewhat of a huge and scary step for me. You see, Ian happens to be the funniest human being I know. That’s saying a lot, because I tend to surround myself with very funny people (many of whom, if they’re reading this, I’ve probably just insulted by choosing Ian over them).

I know. You’ve read one paragraph, and you’re thinking, “Oh God. Emily’s finally proven once and for all that she’s a madwoman, fixated on her brother, having no idea she’s biased, and he’s a no-talent loser.” But ask Bob. Everyone knows how in-laws are supposed to feel about each other. He’ll tell you that Ian is the funniest human being he knows.

As a matter of fact, I’m very happy he’s my brother. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to claim him as a human being I know. It may be that I would have been lucky enough to have crossed paths with him at some point, possibly even have been introduced to him. However, I would have been far too intimidated by his brilliance, story-telling ability, and ironic wit (not to mention his championship ability to pun, rivaled only by my sister Lindsay. Don’t get the two of them together), to have done more than blush, maybe say “hi,” and then do something like trip over a dog who would’ve bitten me, thus providing fodder for a hilarious rendition of that crazy woman who tripped over Sam, the world’s most docile Basset Hound, and had to be taken to the emergency room, a story that would walk into rooms of bored-looking party guests and leave them in stitches, begging for more, for years to come.

My mother, being not at all a typical mother in her overenthusiastic convictions concerning the genius quotient of her children, used to engage in fantasies that equated her three daughters and one son with the Brontës. This was a fantasy that flattered and enthused me until I began to read all the research surrounding the Brontë children and discovered, they may have been extraordinarily talented storytellers and writers, but oh man, were they weird. Happily, I can note that although both my sisters have published books, not one of us has written a gothic romance.

My mother, however, was focusing on that storytelling quality of the Brontës, having herself been raised in the pre-tell-all-and-make-everyone-pathetic-victims-of-extreme-dysfunction-not-the-least-bit-worthy-of-admiration era. And, yes, I have to agree that all four of her children are capable of telling good stories. This isn’t the least bit remarkable, though, considering the fact we’re English, Scottish, and Southern.

Everyone knows the Anglo-Saxons were spinning marvelous yarns back in the days when America was nothing more than a many-legged monster ready to swallow up anyone stupid enough to go sailing off the edge of the world. And if you’ve ever been a child visiting relatives in Virginia, sitting on the porch of a house nestled between Poe’s Ragged Mountains and The Blue Ridge, cicadas, Bob Whites, and Whippoorwills singing in the background, while the adults sat around trying to outdo each other with one story after another, well, you’d know it’s pretty hard not to develop a knack for creating your own.

Those porches and gatherings of relatives are few and far between these days, but we do have the blogosphere. Ian was the first one in our family to venture into it, tempting me, but I wasn’t ready yet. He then walked out of it for a while, and that’s when I began my own exploration. At this point, he’s made a reappearance.

Now we’d like to do a little homesteading, building at least the porch, if nothing else, where we can tell a few stories. We both realize we have plenty of shared experiences, but that they don’t always sound the same when we begin to relate them. Like a game we used to play with friends as children in which we’d all sit in different parts of a room, a piece of paper and magic markets for each of us, choosing a theme, like “a farm” and then taking turns announcing something associated with a farm that would go in that picture, no one allowed to see what the others were drawing until we’d announced we were “done,” our stories surprise us with how completely different they are. And I love hearing his versions.

So here’s our plan: each month, we’ll choose one shared topic. He’ll blog about it. I’ll blog about it. Our only rule is that we can’t read what the other has written until we’ve written our own. My guess is they’ll be so different, you may be hard-pressed to recognize them as having the same foundation. We’ll see. You can visit us (we’ve got lemonade and homemade cookies and lots of wooden lounge chairs) over here, and I’ve written my first post. Now it’s his turn.