I felt sad when I read over the story I told yesterday of my brother refusing to play chess with me after I started beating him. I felt sad that my older brother could not enjoy being beat by his younger brother. I felt sad that he gave up when I began to beat him instead of reading the same book I had read and fighting back. I felt sad that our time together depended on who won and who lost. I felt sad that my brother was not father-like enough when he was 18 or 19 or 20 years old to be proud that his little brother was so smart and learned fast. I felt sad that, in a real sense, our relationship ended instead of changing and growing.

I gave up too. I stopped asking him to play chess after he said no a few times. I did not taunt him into playing by calling him a chicken. I accepted no as the answer and turned further inward to my own company.

One thing really does lead to another. I was not close to my mother or father while growing up. I thought my brother was, but maybe he wasn’t. Spending time together and doing things together is not the same as being close. I was jealous of the relationship my brother had with my father because I saw them doing so many things together. Now I suspect that he had no idea how to be close to me because no one was close to him.

My father became the man of the house in which he lived early in life. He was the oldest boy of a bunch of children and his father left the family, moved across town, and started a new family. My grandfather didn’t bother to divorce my grandmother. He just moved in with another woman and started having more children.

My father maintained active relationships with his mother and his brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins all of his life. And my father was good to me in all the outward ways fathers are expected to be good to their children. He worked hard and got us out of the trailer in which I was born into a brick house on four acres of land. I always had food, clothes, and a bicycle to ride. He took me fishing and he accompanied the family to church even though he did not become a church member until he was pushing 60.

But one thing really does lead to another. Maybe the failures of my grandfather meant that my father never learned inward things about being a father. So maybe my brother never got what a boy needs from his father. That something that I do not know how to describe in words. So my brother had no chance of being father-like with me. And I was looking for that something I do not know how to express in words from my older brother because I was not getting it from our father either.

I’ve never become a father. Maybe because I’ve sensed for a long time that I was missing something a parent needs to do their whole job.

The story about my older brother refusing to play chess with me is not about pettiness. It is a sad story about three generations of boys who needed more from their fathers than they got and how one thing really does lead to another.