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Daily Prompt: Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In a family with two children, the terms “oldest” and “youngest” are black and white, apples and tornadoes. I am the oldest of two, the older brother who acted like an heir to the throne in high school and then like the off-the-hook kid brother in an extended Peter Pan near-adulthood, both of which must have presented my kid sister with unique challenges.

Family order and the psychological effects of being sibling number one or being sibling number nine is a favorite topic for many commentators simply because we all carry around with us the expertise of being a member of a family. (Being adopted can sometimes make these concerns even more unique or sometimes prove them to be universal, anyway. Being an only child can, too.) I will never know what it is like to be the younger sibling. (There should be a support group for us; I am a member of quite a few already as it is.) My sister will never know what it is like to be the oldest—unless our septuagenarian parents do something rather odd in the near future, such as murder me and then manufacture or otherwise acquire a new child. But my parents are not royals, and my family does not live in a “Game of Thrones”-type world in which something like that might very well happen over brunch next Sunday.

In a royal family, sibling order is truly defining. Sibling number one is the heir to a throne, any throne, and everyone else is tied for not-first. Every person born into a royal system has a job to do that they are born into; the first (and sometimes, only) job requirement is to be born. Not one successful royal on this planet has failed to be born—yet. In well-entrenched royal families, all of the other siblings (and cousins and extended cousins and all the myriad not-firsts, the “soblings”) have duties to perform and fiefdoms to fief over. Each one is number one in his or her own respective well-defined and limited roles and traditions, which usually require them to wear remarkable costumes. And then, in turn, all of their first-borns are the heirs and chief inheritors of whatever their specific fiefdoms include.

In America, the world of Big Business, we sometimes see something similar transpire with corporations and inheritances, but not as often as the soap operas (and the news programs that can seem like soap operas) depict.

Of course, the impending growth of the British royal family, the one that inspired today’s question, would be of no interest to us had it not been for the fact that in 1936 the then-king, Edward VIII, decided to quit and cede the crown to his younger brother. The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 9, asks, “A second #RoyalBaby will soon be joining the Windsors in England. Given the choice, would you rather be heir to the throne, or the (probably) off-the-hook sibling?” Edward VIII’s younger brother could have been an “off-the-hook” kickabout, but, per his royal training, he proved to a quite capable king (whatever that means), George VI. (This is a good thing, as many historians—not some, many—have found and shown evidence that Edward rather liked Hitler and his plans and would not have opposed a Nazi-governed Great Britain. The government under his younger brother appointed him governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of Europe for the duration of the Second World War.) The current royal family is George VI’s; his daughter is the queen and his grandson is the current heir, Charles; William is Charles’ first-born, and since William and Kate have already produced his first-born, the new baby is William’s potential gadabout, layabout, off-the-hook kid royal.

In the House of Aldrich, my not-at-all-royal house, I am the first-born but I spent much of my adulthood as the Failure in Waiting, so I have lived versions of both answers to this question. One of my larger contributions to my sibling’s adult life (she is only two-and-a-half years younger than me, so we have shared many experiences in life and sometimes she has a clearer memory of my life than I have) has been as an signpost warning her against venturing where I did. Perhaps my providing an example of how not to live has been a version of being a dutiful older sibling; now that my life is a bit clearer and happier, perhaps I am filling that role better now.

But we’ll never be royals.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 9 asks, “A second #RoyalBaby will soon be joining the Windsors in England. Given the choice, would you rather be heir to the throne, or the (probably) off-the-hook sibling?”

Daily Prompt: ‘That Was Random’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A young woman and a child, a toddler young enough for a stroller but old enough to walk alongside it, entered the elevator my friend and I were already on. The doors shut, and the child looked at me, looked me square in the eyes, and said, “Hi, Mark.” Precisely enunciated. Distinctly direct.

Mark is my name. I had never seen the woman, or boy, before. My friend looked at me and I suppose he saw a shocked look come over my face. When we got off the elevator—not at our floor, but the next available, because I was spooked—he asked, “Do you know them?”

“No. That was random. Did that kid say my name?”

“Yeah. Definitely. As if he was about to tell you something important.”

Every once in a while, I wonder about that encounter. In subsequent years, I have confirmed with my friend that this really happened, both the unmemorable banalities and the one memorable bit. When one describes an event as random, really what one is saying is that something incredibly specific took place with absolutely no context around it and none to be found. “It was like it happened at random.”

This was over 20 years ago. Was the child prescient and have I since become an important person in his life? No 20-something person that I have gotten to know recently has told me that I look familiar or asked if we have already met. How random can random be? Is there a scale to measure random? Is there an ultimate random?

If there is, I may have caught a glimpse of it one glorious day.

I have few specific memories of the event; the fact it was a woman with a boy with a stroller is remembered, but both of their faces have receded into blank, amorphous, generic people-faces. Were they on my right or on my left? If I work on it, I can remember myself facing in either direction. I have said hello to strangers on elevators many times since, and all those people have similarly melted into faceless, generic folks. (If I am ever required to give evidence in a trial, I will be close to useless, as I do not notice specifics like what someone is wearing or what color anything is—which is one more way in which I really would make a terrible new boyfriend if I was single, so I am lucky that my girlfriend accepts me as I am—but I retain quite precisely the things people say. I am now constantly working on remembering details, to be a better boyfriend and a better writer.)

I remember the distinct precision of that anonymous little boy speaking my name, clearly and randomly. That is what remains; the creeped-out and surprised feeling remains ever accessible to me.

It is one of those moments that I feel like I flubbed on my first go at it, and I have lived the 20 years since as if waiting for something similar to happen again, to get it right this time around; I will not leave the elevator in surprise next time.

Of course, the chance of a next time, the possibility that something like this will ever happen again in my life is almost nil; this was a true-life encounter with infinite probability, with something similar to the infinite monkey theorem—you know, the thought that given enough time (infinite time), a chimp pounding randomly on a keyboard will accidentally or coincidentally type out all of “Hamlet.” One will encounter many children who are learning words for things and names of people and how to talk and one of them may blurt a name out and coincidentally it will be yours. It happened to me and I am writing about it two decades later.

probability

I will not leave the elevator in surprise next time. No, I will confirm my name and tell the child who accidentally said it about how rare it is to encounter this moment twice in one’s life—the true random moment—and how moved I am by the opportunity to experience it again. I will tell the child to celebrate the fantastic accidents that make life special, the “fabulous realities,” as one of my teachers used to call them.

And then the mother and child will quickly leave the elevator, before they reach their desired floor, a bit spooked.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 8 asks, “You’re sitting at a café when a stranger approaches you. This person asks what your name is, and, for some reason, you reply. The stranger nods, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ What happens next?”

Daily Prompt: Humble-Bragging and Secret-Keeping

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The word “humblebrag” has been around long enough that even I have heard of it. (Is that a humblebrag?) A collection of examples has been collected in a book that I have not yet read entitled, “Humblebrag.” The word is common enough that it is even in the Oxford Dictionary, at least in the online edition. For some reason, I only recently learned the term and, egomaniac that I am, I thought that I had come up with the concept years ago. I certainly had not.

The word describes the craft of hiding a brag about oneself inside a seemingly self-deprecating statement. For instance, if and when I name-drop a famous person and simultaneously mention how nice they were to li’l ol’ me, which is something that I certainly have done, that is a pretty standard humblebrag. A humblebragger gets two social rewards for the price of one: a congratulations for the achievement that they are proud of—and perhaps ought to be proud of!—and a verbal pat on the shoulder in recognition of their semi-sincere humbleness. “I met Oprah Winfrey once,” is a minor brag that is almost no brag at all, unless the conversation is not “famous people we have met,” but instead it was your reply to, “Have you decided what you’re getting yet? I’m starving.”

“I was hanging out with Oprah Winfrey the other day,” is a big brag if you merely saw her at O’Hare Airport. We have been taught that people do not like braggarts and that humbleness is a positive attribute to be celebrated.

“I bet Oprah Winfrey tells just about every li’l ol’ barista that they make the best (insert name of coffee concoction here).” That is a humblebrag.

Today’s WordPress Daily Prompt is an invitation for writers to humblebrag about ourselves. It asks, “Can you keep a secret? Have you ever—intentionally or not—spilled the beans (when you should’ve stayed quiet)?” If I were to tell you that I am good at keeping secrets, am I not inviting you to test this self-theory on me? It would probably be a test that we would both somehow fail. Conversely, if I offer up an example of a time I goofed and let the cat out of the bag about a surprise birthday party or whatever, because (shrugs and makes a crinkle-face) I’m just so darn honest, I would be humblebragging.

(In full disclosure, I am not a barista and I have not met or otherwise encountered Oprah Winfrey. I have been in O’Hare Airport.)

If a new acquaintance tells you that he or she is good at keeping secrets, test this and tell them something about yourself that you do not mind becoming public. Or give them one detail that is new and different and memorable from other versions of the story; in this way, when you hear that particular detail get repeated back at you, you will know who broke your confidence.

“I didn’t know you’ve been arrested,” a friend told-asked me one Monday morning. I have not yet been arrested or even ever been inside a police car, but I did know with whom I had planted that particular Easter egg in the video game of my life. Trust is something that can withstand minor tests like that.

As I reflect on it, it seems to me that trust is not something that needs testing to know that it exists in one’s life. “We are only as sick as our secrets,” I have heard, so I do not need to add anyone else’s to my own.

But I can not wait to tell you about the time Sammy Davis, Jr., took me aside and told me in confidence not to tell my friend that I am too modest for a career in show business …