Chapter 5 Tyler

Tyler’s whole name is Tyler Hobart Taylor, which doesn’t sound quite as bad as Tyler Taylor. All our names came right out of a Baby Names book. My parents were about two generations ahead of time when it came to picking out names.
He may have been born with blond, curly hair, but he was always all boy. He would never play 'house' or 'wedding', but be would play 'war' and 'doctor'. He was also available for 'Hill Dill' or 'Freeze Tag' or anything that involved running. When he got on the ice rink in the back yard it became a hockey rink. He was in favor of catching tadpoles, frogs, grasshoppers, and fire flies; cracking open rocks; burning things with a magnifying glass; and doing anything that involved a tool.
When we first moved to the country and we were after Dad to get us a swimming pool, Dad said, “start digging” and left for work. Tyler organized us all with shovels and we dug all day. When Mom objected, we told her that Dad told us to do it. By the time Dad got home from work we had made a rectangular hole about 5’ wide by 8’ long by 1’ deep in the soft soil in the back corner of the yard. Dad couldn’t say much; he blamed himself because we didn’t understand sarcasm yet. He talked to Tyler and they went off and got a load of sand. The swimming pool became our sandbox, where we spent many happy hours with trucks and various mud cooking-baking duties.
Tyler built forts and rode bikes and learned to hunt and fish. He was the one who taught us all to play mumbley-peg and built a wall of the newspapers my father collected in the cellar to fire his BB gun into (until someone got hit in the leg.) He organized the baseball diamond games that stripped our front yard bare of grass, and the basketball court games that stripped the back yard bare of grass. Dad had a little farmer in him, but he never could get that grass to grow back until we were all grown, even though it was really a meadow and not a lawn. We played football in the road, but since we played all the games all summer long, the grass did not get a rest.
When Tyler entered his preteen years he became very self-conscious and stiff and full of guy-pride. When he had to go to the dentist, he let my mother go too, but made her walk on the opposite side of the street. He made it clear that he was a bit embarrassed by us all.
He still had his coarse and playful side. He had to share a room with Robert and he considered Bobbie his personal plaything. He farted in his face and then covered my brother with a blanket to trap the noxious fumes. He called this “smotheration.” He didn’t just do this once; he did it many, many times. He also lit Bobbie’s and his own farts with a lighter. To Felicity and me this all seemed a very long way from Clark Gable.
It’s a wonder our house didn’t burn down considering all of us going through our “fascination with fire” stage at different times.
In spite of these gaseous activities, Tyler wanted “the good life,” which apparently, at that time, meant a cool car, an apartment, and a pretty girlfriend. He knew a lot about cars from all the time he spent hanging out under a car hood with my father, who kept any one of our procession of used cars running by performing some kind of magic under the hood.
When Felicity got her first car, the black VW Beetle, she didn’t have her driver’s license yet. Before she even got to drive her car, Tyler took it out for a joy ride with his friends and end up tipping it over in a field somewhere. Drinking was involved. He got out without a scratch, but the car was totaled.
As soon as he could after graduation, he got a job repossessing cars, got a girlfriend with long blonde hair, got himself a red GTO with 4-in-the-floor, and rented an efficiency apartment on the best street in the city.
All was not smooth sailing in Tyler’s world. The blonde was balky. She broke his heart. The GTO transmission never was right, and the apartment did not turn out to be a chick magnet. But Tyler didn’t burn his bridges with the family. He was home visiting all the time. Eventually he started going out with an auburn-haired, translucent-skinned beauty from his high school graduation class. Allison had a troubled family background, so they saved each other. Soon after they got married he had to go to Vietnam.
Tyler smoked for many years. I think, when he was in Vietnam, he smoked things other than tobacco.