Letter's in the mail

"Letter's in the mail," I told Harvey, who raised his eyebrows in mock horror. I had spent the better part of a week writing this letter to my brother. Greg might be the oldest in my family, but that didn't give him the right to lord it over us. Just because he had more money than God and was my parents' favorite, that didn't mean that he could dictate what the entire family would do for the parents' eightieth birthdays.

His barbed e-mail came with a lot of baggage. Invitation to his lake house for a long weekend in July. Said that we needed to do it this way because my nephew Christopher had a summer job at the lake and couldn't get any more time off. Did I get this right? Our entire family -- our eighty-year old parents, my brother who's General Counsel for a large pharmaceutical company, my sister-in-law who teaches summer classes at the local liberal arts school, their children, Harvey and me, both of whom have full-time, demanding jobs -- our entire family's plans revolved around a high school kid's summer job flipping burgers at the local Burger King?

I talked to Mom and Dad about this, and they said it was a wonderful invitation and that we had no business not accepting. Of course that would be their response. Greg was their favorite and Christopher was their oldest grandchild. They're nothing if not old-fashioned and British in the way of "primogeniture." That's just about the ugliest word in the English language, I think, and it's screwed me over a number of times. Mom and Dad told me a few years back that they were leaving me less in the will because I didn't have a wife and children. Ironic, I thought, since I'd already written my will, leaving everything to my borthers' children. So screw 'em, I'm going to change my will and leave everything to Harvey.

Being the youngest has its challenges and this is certainly one of them -- dealing with obnoxious heterosexuals and the obtuse way they subtly, and not so subtly, discriminate. So I wrote the letter to Greg. Told him exactly what I thought about his invitation. Told him that no one had made any summer vacation plans based on my summer jobs when I was growing up, and I didn't see why we should start now. So let's see where it goes, I told Harvey -- who said there'd be hell to pay. Told me that Greg wouldn't understand, would take it entirely the wrong way. He wouldn't understand. It would be an entirely foreign idea to him, that his youngest brother should question his decisions.

So it's in the mail. The ball's in Greg's court now, I guess. The die is cast.