Growing Up Were

When I was six my older brother told me my grandfather was a bear.

I believed him. My grandfather was big and hairy, he looked fierce with big bushy eyebrows and huge hands and he tended to shuffle and loom and fill up any chair he occupied. Strangely, he had a high pitched voice which might not have fit the standard image of a bear but I have believed ever since a bear’s human voice is a squeaky tenor.

Having learned at an early age things are not always what they seem I am rarely surprised by the variances in people.

When, some years later, this same brother told me he was a werewolf I took his word for it and was only mildly interested. At that time I was entering my teen years and was more interested in finding some way of surviving adolescence than any idiosyncrasies of an older brother. His lurking about the house, sulks, dark moods and disappearances were less of a personal concern than his teenage acne which would have destroyed any chance I might have had to make it through high school sane.

And when he told me he thought he was gay I was more curious than concerned. His face had cleared up but he still was moody and secretive and I wondered how he knew. As far as I knew he had had no dates, male or female and spent most of his time staying in his room playing his guitar.

Despite my concern, I avoided most of the dreaded curse of adolescent skin problems and had even had a reasonably pleasant high school experience. When, at the age of twenty-two, my brother fell deeply in love with a complex and kind woman he met singing in a coffee house and they married within the year, I was only mildly surprised. It turns out he was not gay, he had just had a crush on David Bowie, was not really all that highly sexed as a teenager and confused about the whole gender identity thing.

However, he really was a werewolf. As was I.