My older brother t’Jacques (pronounced tee-jahk) and I are very close. He’s only a year older than me, but he’s the smartest, kindest, most patient person I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. He would do anything for me and I know that and plenty of times have taken advantage of it, by always taking the aux cord or making him drive, and he’s very often the butt of the siblings’ jokes at the dinner time, but still he never gets mad or loses his patience with us and loves us beyond what anyone deserves. He has my father’s brain and my mother’s ear so he can learn anything he wants to, including over ten instruments- his current favorite is banjo.
There truly is no nicer man than t’Jacques, although he can be a bit of a pushover; I remember once a story of a time we went out to dinner, and all the kids were small, so we were playing in the kid’s section of the establishment which had a Lego table, coloring books, play-doh, you name it- it was a kid’s dream true. What a kid probably didn’t dream of, however, was the yellow play-doh tater tot I made, that t’Jacques watched me make. I told him it was a real tater tot and asked him to eat it and he gently informed me he had serious doubts about the verity of the so-called tater tot seeing as how he had watched me make it out of play-doh, and in his experience tater tots were more crispy, less monochrome and less play-doh-y in general. Even though my plans were foiled, I continued to insist it was a tater tot, and to placate me, t’Jacques played along and took a bite. He ended up throwing up and we had to leave but that’s just the type of guy t’Jacques is, always putting the people he loves first. Now that I’ve convinced you all of how good a guy he is, I think I’m allowed to embarrass him, so here we go.
t’Jacques never slept too soundly as a kid. He was always pretty sickly, a severe asthmatic, so our parents paid special attention to him and his health, giving him lots of breathing treatments, checking in on him at night, that whole deal. They were used to listening for the slightest hints of sound upstairs to know if something was wrong, and one night when they heard some rustling, they knew they better go check on him.
t’Jacques, apparently besides having health problems, had sleep walking problems, as most of us do as children, and he was experiencing an episode that night, where in his slumber, he attempted to navigate to the bathroom attached to his bedroom to relieve himself, but instead of turning right to the bathroom door, little sleeping t’Jacques turned left towards the hallway. He turned left again, after that, to what would have been the toilet if he had made it to the bathroom, but instead was the stairs, at the bottom of which stood my father, dumbfounded as little t’Jacques dropped his trousers and began to urinate.
I imagine the whole scenario was very funny to my father at first, until he realized that my brother could trip at any moment down the wooden stairs made slippery with his own liquid excreta on a one-way trip to brain damage. Dad tried calling out to my brother but to no avail- nothing could get t’Jacques’ attention but the task at hand. I don’t personally know how much a sickly kid’s bladder can hold, but apparently t’Jacques was peeing like a camel this night, a steady stream still going strong as my father rushed up the stairs headfirst into the spray to ensure his little boy didn’t fall down the stairs in his sleep and suffer a traumatic head injury.
Another fun thing about sleepwalkers is, besides not being able to find the bathroom, without their eyes open, they don’t really care about aiming, so t’Jaques was ‘willy-nilly’ if you will, which resulted in my heroic father’s robe being far more saturated in his son’s urine than any article of clothing ever should be as big Jacques grabbed little t’Jacques and shook him awake. They both needed serious showers after that.
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