Tyler

Tyler is my brother and one of my greatest friends. He’s getting married in t minus just around the corner, so in honor of the impending celebration, I will here celebrate some of the adventures we’ve had together.

Tyler was born the day before I turned 18 months old. He was my first sibling. It was great to have a sibling, an automatic friend that I could play with and talk to (and talk for…according to my parents, Tyler was a late talker because I did all of his talking for him). When we moved from the Brown House to the Yellow House (I guess I have to give this house a color assignment now because, after 20 some odd years, this house is no longer the Current House), Tyler and I shared a room. I had the top bunk and he slept on the bottom.

Because I was the oldest, I always had to do things first, a task which I usually did not enjoy. But after a year or so, Tyler was always there right behind me. And it was always nice to have him there. I had to start school by myself, but by first grade, he walked to and from school with me on his way to kindergarten. When I was in eighth grade and he was in seventh, we pretty much ruled the middle school. I had to go to high school first, but as soon as I was a sophomore, he joined me as a freshman. I got married just over a year ago, and sure enough, he’s following suit.

It was nice to have someone there to keep me company on those long walks to and from school. It made climbing the 101 steps up Grandview Hill to the elementary school easier because I had a partner I could race to the top with. We sometimes played games on those walks. My favorite was the Penny Game, which consisted of hiding a penny we’d found on the ground in a new spot every day and seeing if it was still there the next time we passed by. One penny, I remember, lasted a really long time, until Tyler decided that a great new hiding place would be over the fence in a pile of fallen autumn leaves. I wonder if it’s still hiding there in the dirt…

Tyler was always more adventurous than I was. He’s the one who discovered the Provo River Trail. He came home one day and told me he’d found this trail that went on practically forever and which had cool tunnels we could ride through. This trail turned out to be our ticket to the drug store where we’d go spend our savings on cheap candy. When we learned that this trail extended all the way from Bridal Veil Falls to the lake, we planned an expedition. So on one hot day we set out from our house near the Exchange Park and rode our bikes all the way to the canyon. It was very difficult, but Tyler was kind and waited for me when I just couldn’t go any further and had to take a break.

Sometimes we got to take classes together. In high school we took an early morning ceramics class. He was always the artistic one. We also took a beginning ballroom class. In a class where females largely outnumbered the males, it was nice to always know you had a partner for the first round of cha-cha. At BYU we took the Intro to Film class together and both had a pleasant time discussing how our miserable TA was pretty much ruining our lives, not to mention our grade point averages. While still in high school, we also got to work together in the book department at Media Play. Oh, the good times we had!

I could probably share a lot of other things that we’ve done together, but this is enough because I’m sure you can see that we’ve had a lot of fun adventures over the years. Well, Amanda, I guess he’s yours now. May you both have many exciting adventures of your own.