This is for you, Doug, on your birthday. For a brother who died too soon. For a friend I met too late.

Let me tell you about my younger brother Doug. You would have liked him. You couldn't help but like him. Not that he was a Pollyanna or anything. He just had this quality of humanness about him. A sweet, vulnerable, caring humanness that was felt by anyone who knew him.

I guess Sue felt it the most. She was Doug's lady. And they were in love.

What a pair they made. Doug with his Panama hat flopped on top of his crazy curly hair - his hair that our parents never understood but quietly tolerated after a couple of years - and Sue with her amazing blue eyes that became so incredibly wide when she was pleased.

You'd see them together driving down the street in Doug's green van - the one they christened Tyrone, the same one they drove across the country two summers ago. And you'd smile. They were always headed someplace, or nowhere in particular.

That's why no one was surprised when they said they were going to Venezuela for 17 days in August. Venezuela? Why not? They had been invited by a friend who lived in Valencia to stay in his home. It would be a neat way to end the summer. Venezuela. Sure.

So they went to Venezuela, and about the end of the second week they died with 21 other people in a plane crash during a tour flight. They died quickly and they died together. And now they are buried 50 feet apart in West Laurel Hill Cemetery. Fifty feet. What are the chances of two unrelated families' purchasing plots in the same cemetery years before they would each watch one of their children, and their child's love, buried within minutes of each other?

We were a year and 10 days apart, Doug and I. That means we fought a lot as kids. We didn't just fight for fun. We fought about the important things. Like who got more french fries at dinner. And who was smarter. And who had to take the first bath. You know, the important things.

Yeah, we really hated each other when we were little. "You creep, gimme that back." "Oh, yeah, why don't you try to make me." Wham! Sibling rivalry ad nauseam. You get that way when you become engaged in pitched combat over a matching pair of socks.

But then a funny thing happened to us. We grew up. It didn't happen overnight. It took most of our lives, as a matter of fact. But it happened. And when it did, we found - to our mutual amazement - that we kind of liked each other. You could even say we loved each other. You could say it. We never did. Brothers never talk of love. Until it's too late.

Doug and Sue talked about love. They lived love. You could see it the way they fixed up Tyrone for their trip out West and into Canada. They transformed a 10-year-old, pipe-hauling junker Econoline truck into a paneled, carpeted traveling companion with curtain-lined windows and paintings on the walls. They created a good-vibesmobile, a friend that didn't let them down once in 10,000 miles.

They did the same with the apartment they rented in Harrisburg, where they went to school. Two happy people. It was good for them to be in love. They did it so well.

Of course, love has its price. For Doug, it was the disapproval of Mom and Dad. They were raised in an era when a young man of 21 didn't live with a girl of 19 until they were married. It was a shame that the tension existed
because it kept Doug away from home more than he wanted to be. He, more than any of his four brothers and sisters, cared about keeping the family together.

Mrs. Bedford, Sue's mother, wasn't too keen on the intimacy of their relationship either, at first. But after awhile her objections were worn down by Doug's smile and his enthusiasm for life and the way he cared for her daughter and probably by the poem that Sue used to leave taped to the refrigerator door. It was from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and Mom and Dad heard it for the first time as they stood 50 feet from Doug, listening to a minister say goodbye to Sue.

Your children are not your children, it began. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. . . . You may give them your love but not your thoughts. . . .

It was such a poignant poem. Such a beautiful, true comment. And it hurt to listen to it. Mom and Dad listened, and they understood.

Doug is 22 today. Most of those years we were roommates. That's a lot of memories; from slogging through wet cement together and sneaking downstairs before dawn to see what was under the Christmas tree, to playing rugby on the same team and watching him address his graduating classmates as student body president of Montgomery County Community College. He was a neat guy, my brother.

Happy birthday, Doug. If we could do it over again, I'd let you have more french fries.