I was classical music; he was rock and roll

The real differences were personality. I was classical music; he was rock and roll. I was a pacifist; he always h I was classical music; he was rock and rollad a chip on his shoulder. I was eager to follow whatever rule; he constantly objected. I was tidy and punctual; he smoked, didn't comb his hair, and didn't groom at all.

Yes—that is much more than ordinary sibling difference. What you describe sounds almost like opposite default orientations toward the world.

You: order, restraint, conformity, cultivation, punctuality, classical music, pacifism.

Him: independence expressed through opposition, informality, rock and roll, disregard for convention, and a rather combative temperament.

And the interesting part is that these aren't just preferences. They reinforce one another. Someone who likes rules is likely to keep things orderly and arrive on time; someone who instinctively resists rules may experience tidiness, grooming conventions, and punctuality as things imposed on him rather than things worth doing. Likewise, your pacifism and his chip-on-the-shoulder temperament sound almost temperamentally antithetical.

It would make the Latin teacher's observation especially understandable. She wasn't seeing two brothers who happened to dress differently; she was seeing two people who seemed to have been assembled from different sets of instructions.

And I suspect that may partly explain why you were never close. Extreme difference doesn't necessarily produce conflict—sometimes it produces fascination—but if neither person has much natural overlap with the other's way of being, there isn't much conversational or recreational territory in which a sibling relationship can develop.

I went to Harvard; he went to Colorado School of Mines, no mean achievement, so he wasn't dumb.

Absolutely. Colorado School of Mines is a very strong counterexample to any assumption that his differences from you reflected intellectual ability. It is an unusually demanding technical school, particularly in engineering, mathematics, geology, and the physical sciences.

So you had two highly capable brothers who happened to express their abilities in very different directions. Harvard and Mines are hardly evidence of one brother being the intellectual and the other not.

In fact, your descriptions suggest a potentially more interesting distinction: perhaps you shared considerable intellectual ability but had radically different temperaments and interests. You were drawn toward ideas, culture, order, and observation; he toward a more technical and perhaps more confrontational mode of engagement.

There is something rather pleasing about the symmetry, too: Harvard and Mines—both formidable, but almost stereotypically different institutions.

I was always all thumbs and clumsy, with athletic prowess going to brute strength. He was handy and repaired things and played basketball.

That fills out the contrast rather nicely. You weren't simply different in interests or temperament—you seem to have had almost complementary physical abilities.

You had the brute-force athletic advantage: big, strong, but awkward and not particularly coordinated. He had the practical dexterity: the person who could actually figure out how something worked, take it apart, and get it working again—and then go out and play basketball, which requires considerably more coordination than you had.

So even physically, you weren't just variations on the same theme:

• You: strong, substantial, awkward, cerebral.

• Him: thin, coordinated, mechanically handy, athletic.

• You: classical music, rules, tidiness, punctuality, pacifism.

• Him: rock and roll, resistance to rules, untidy, confrontational.

And yet both of you were evidently quite capable intellectually—Harvard on one side, Mines on the other.

It makes the picture of the two of you as children rather vivid. I can imagine an outsider knowing nothing about the family seeing you together and thinking, Surely these two can't possibly be brothers.