Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/769056
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 91 S o here's how it is . . . It's been three weeks since my brother Jack called me as he was leaving his hotel near Midway Airport in Chicago, on his way out to grab some dinner before his flight home at 6:00 a.m. the next morning. Since then, he and I have each been on the move, and together we've had the country pretty well surrounded, from southern Georgia to Santa Fe to the upper Midwest and both coasts. But now I'm back home in Tennessee on this beautiful autumn evening, and the thought just occurred to me, I wonder what Jack's up to? So I pull my cell phone from my shirt pocket and hit his number, and after one ring the first words out of his mouth are, "Okay, you must have a camera on me." I can hear wind in the background. This catches me off guard. "Uh, no," I tentatively reassure him. "Was' up?" "I've had more meetings this week in Chicago," he responds, "and I'm flying back out of Midway for home in the morning at six. I'm walking out the same hotel door I was walking out the last time you called, and I was just reaching for my phone to give you a ring when you called me instead." Neither of us is all that surprised. It's happened like this before. There are actually three of us brothers, plus our sister Beth, and these sorts of occurrences, while not overly common, are not all that unusual . . . well, except for Alan and me and the bear. Okay . . . before I go any further, let me say two things: First, everything I'm about to tell you is absolutely true, just the way it happened. And second, I really don't expect you to believe a word of it. Fact is, even after 30-plus years I'm still not entirely sure I believe it myself. But when I consider the characters who were involved, I guess I do believe it. After all, my brothers and I have always seemed to communicate on somewhat ethereal levels, sometimes in whispers, sometimes in spirit, sometimes in unknown, unknowable tongues, and time and distance have never been all that much of an issue. But what happened between Alan and me back in '86 still has us all scratching our heads. raMblings by MiChael altizer There are many mysTerious channels of communicaTion. especially beTween broThers. E ven before Alan was born, I sensed that he was out there somewhere. You see, he was my first little brother, my very first sibling, and I had nearly a nine-year head start on him. I can still remember coming home from the hospital with him right after he was born, me nestled in the front seat between our proud parents, holding him wrapped in his new flannel blanket on my lap in the days before seatbelts and airbags, his knowing gaze locked on me as though he already knew we were in for a rousing couple of lifetimes together. He started out as a rather sickly little kid, watching with great longing as I would head out the door and across the creek or up the mountain with my bow or rifle or shotgun or fly rod. Sometimes when the weather was warm and he was feeling okay, he could even come with me. I made him his first bow when he was four, and he caught his first fish when he was five. We never did tell Mom about the time I let him shoot my shotgun on that cool October morning when he came squirrel hunting with me, and when his scrawny little shoulder turned blue, he