Here's a one~page essay I wrote about that pic above, in October of 1994 at the Iowa Writers Conference [the last time I was with the greatest love of my long long life]; there's a lot I would change about this story, but it is what it is:

Squinting one eye tightly against the cold, I press the other to the viewfinder of my coveted Kodak Brownie camera, a bulky and primitive device which resembles a tan Bakelite die with a single pip on each of three sides. My hands fumble about the other three, grasping them as steadily as I can.

My squirming subject this afternoon is my brother, Scotty, who "arrived" six months ago. His round face is a moon winking at me beneath the bleak skies that shroud "Greater Chicagoland."

That’s what the weatherguy called where we live this morning, blasting it out at us through the screen of the new color television that my daddy brought home last night. Daddy declared that it was "Christmas in November!" and snatched Mommy and us kids up in a big hug. Then we all watched Hawaiian Eye in living color.

Yesterday the weatherguy was as gray as the clouds above. Today I can see him for what he is: a balding huckster in a green plaid suit, who looks a lot like the guy that sold Daddy our blue station wagon last year.

Scotty doesn’t yet realize that he is, apart from the color Zenith, the most wonderful thing that’s come stumbling into this seven-year-old’s life - for I finally have a brother, whose life I can help shape, who I can take to baseball games in a few years, and play catch with, and maybe even eventually talk to about girls.

Observing the proceedings is Kimmy, my younger sister. Two years and no less than one thousand differences of opinion divide us. That’s her, lurking below the Indian corn arrangement that Mommy made, just to the right of the open door.

"Kim! Get off the porch!" She doesn’t budge. "I don’t want you in this picture! Come on!!"

Despite my exasperation I love her a lot, most days.

Wait. Did I just say "the open door?" Good thing that my daddy’s still at work - he’d kill me if he saw the front door gaping open on a chilly day like this. I’d better hurry up.

"Smile for me, Scotty! Next month we get to build a snowman!," I exclaim, inching back toward the sidewalk. One of his pink hands slips out of sight, hiding inside the sleeve of his banana-colored snowsuit. I make a funny face and a laugh bubbles out of his lips, for he is indeed a happy little baby.

Abruptly, the skies darken. I look upward and attach my flashbulb set~up.

None of us...

~ not Mommy, who is dousing tonight’s meatloaf with catsup

~ nor Daddy, stuck in traffic on Halsted St., stabbing his horn and cursing up a storm

~ not Kimmy, still planted against the white brick under the dried holiday cornshocks

~ not Scotty, grinning and slobbering all over the Bugs Bunny picture on his snowsuit

~ nor myself as I maneuver the tan Brownie, angling for the best shot of my new brother

...can have any idea, as Scotty’s first winter approaches, that by the time he reaches his 32nd and probably final Christmas, the malignant tumors which are to eventually claim his life will have begun their maddening game of hide and seek: popping up initially on his lymph nodes before sneaking to an area just under his left arm, growing in size like that snowman which Scotty will help us to build next month, finally coming to an irrevocable and inoperable rest on his spleen and adrenal glands, all in the span of one short year.

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