My brother is a cop.

I'm proud of him. And I envy him; he makes a difference in this world, whereas I take up space in an office, writing boring time-management-and-billing software that will be used nowhere except in this office. I have never been so proud of him as the day our mother sent me a newspaper clipping which showed him in action, putting his life on the line for the sake of the people in his community.

In a way, it's kind of ironic that he became a cop; for a while, he was a longhaired, hippy Deadhead -- not quite the sort of person you usually expect to become a police officer! Then there was the time he and his friends decided to trespass onto an abandoned missile base and climb down one of the silos in the middle of winter; when they decided to come back up, their fingers were so cold they couldn't climb back up the rope. It was only through sheer fortune that my brother had recently injured his shoulder, so he stayed up at the top while the others climbed down. He went and got help, and they were promptly arrested (which is still better than starving or freezing to death at the bottom of a missile silo).

But he eventually became a police officer, and I'm really proud of him. But I've never been able to tell him that, and I don't know why.

Once upon a time, when we were kids, we were really close. Sure, we had the usual sort of sibling rivalries -- I tried to put his head through a wall, he tried to put my face in a puddle of urine behind the tent at Boy Scout camp; that kind of thing -- and we often got into escalating wars of ratting on each other to our parents. But though we never discussed it, the important things remained off-limits to snitching.

For example, he never told my mother that I would frequently circumvent the worst punishment she could levy against me -- taking the cord of my Apple ][ computer to work with her so that I couldn't use it after school -- by fashioning a (hideously unsafe) replacement from a discarded extension cord. And I never told her about...

Actually, there wasn't anything really important I could have ratted him out on. My brother was the good one; he did his chores and his homework, never talked back, didn't take expensive devices apart just to see how they worked, didn't require endless parent/teacher conferences. (In school, I once heard one of the teachers refer to me as "David Lee's brother" -- and I'm the elder sibling! How's that for humiliating?)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. When we were younger, despite the rivalries, we were very close. When push came to shove, we knew we could count on each other for anything. But we grew apart as we got older; while my friends and I would geek out with computers and AD&D, he and his friends rebuilt cars and played sports. And now, when we talk on the phone, it's clear that we're both grasping to try and find something in common to talk about. We have each other's email addresses -- yet I can't remember the last time we exchanged email.

If only I could tell my brother how much I admire him.