Today is my brother's birthday so I'm sharing a story from my archives about him.  Happy Birthday, Bobby.

My brother, the Sleepwalker

              My brother and I were unlikely roommates.   He and I are as different as night and day.  He has been a good ole' boy from head to toe since the day he was born and I am, well, I'm not sure what category I fit into.  Bobby is four years younger than me.  We were roommates, forever.  Something neither of us cared for. 

              Bobby was born not long after we moved to the Paradise community.  Our room was upstairs with a screened porch adjoining it. We frequently played on that porch.  I was careful with my toys, Bobby not so. When I was nine and Bobby five, I had a toy Roy Rogers Ranch set, complete with the fences and buildings for Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk and all the animals.  I would place them in a corner of that screened porch and play with them for hours, keeping things nice and neat, carefully putting them back in the box when finished.  Bobby loved destroying things.  He lost one of the horses and broke one of the fences.  He also had some pet white mice that he removed from their cage.  These critters chewed on Trigger and caused him to lose a leg.  I was furious.  I told Mama that I wanted a room all to myself.  I threatened to lock him on that porch with his pillow.  Of course, that didn't happen.  I was told to just be more careful with my toys.

We moved the summer before I went to the fourth grade.  Daddy built us a ranch style house on Jackson Street Extension, out in the country.  It had a long hall that separated the living quarters.  There was one house on either side of us and corn and cotton fields all the way back to MacArthur Drive.  Our pasture went all the way to Prescott Road.  The house was huge.  The fireplace alone had enough bricks in it to build a small house.  We both thought we would have a room to ourselves.  We didn’t. The bedrooms were off the long hallway, ours first and then my sisters.  We didn't have real doors, just an accordion style folding screen in place of one wall that separated us from the hallway. This was so we could have cross ventilation since there was no air conditioning. Mama and daddy were at the end of the hall with a real door, and a small window unit.      

We didn’t like that we had to share a room again.  Daddy had a headboard custom made by Leonard Lemell, our faithful carpenter, that had a shelf for books and stuff.  Our two single beds, connected by this headboard, were side by side with only a foot between us.   We were both unhappy. At least we each had our own closet and built in chest of drawers.   My side had sweet potato vines and books neatly arranged.  My clothes hung in the closet with short sleeves first, then long sleeves, then pants, all facing the same way, neatly spaced.   My underwear and tee shirts were carefully folded in the drawers.  I constantly told him, “Don't touch, that's mine.”   Bobby had jars of pickled rats and snakes.  He had clothes strewn everywhere, skulls of dead animals, wads of bubblegum stuck on the headboard.  His closet looked like the Tasmanian Devil had taken up permanent residence.  We fought, constantly.

            After about a year, Daddy became tired of our fighting.  The headboard that kept our beds so close was placed in the center of the room giving each of us our own space.  He threatened to build a wall between us if we didn’t behave.  He should have.  This worked, but the only problem was I had to pass his side of the room to go to the bathroom.  We co-existed, fighting often.  I still had to live with a brother that would place his cat on me after I was asleep.  Have you ever been awakened by a cat sucking on your neck in the middle of the night?    How that poor cat survived, I'll never know because it was slung upside the walls too many times.  He also found great pleasure in sneaking up from behind and choking me until I passed out. 

              One night, after both of us were asleep, daddy thought he heard a burglar in the house.  He walked quietly up the hall searching.  When he got to our room, he found me sitting up in bed talking in my sleep and Bobby sleepwalking.   Bobby became a regular sleepwalker after that night, and I continued to talk. 

            Soon the trouble began.  Bobby didn't just leave his sleepwalking to our room only.  Since we had no real door, he began wandering the hall to my sisters' room, into the kitchen and other places in the house.  Once he thought he was going to the bathroom and ended up going in the refrigerator.  Mama had a chain and lock placed on it after that.  Mama and daddy discussed things with our next-door doctor.  He said that when Bobby was sleepwalking, we were not to wake him suddenly for fear of causing trauma.   So, we put up with him wandering the house during the night.  It became a game like “Where's Waldo”.  Every morning we would search closets and rooms to see where my sleepwalking brother finally bedded down.  We got used to it.  

             We had a door in the hallway that exited outside. One night, Bobby went outside.  He was found sleeping on the patio in the back yard.  Since we lived in the country, we hardly ever locked doors.  We had to lock the door, now.   He found other doors.   When someone forgot to remove a key, he would unlock the door and head outside.   Soon, he didn't just leave the house and sleep in the yard, he began wandering to the barn, or was found in the pig lot or in the pasture among the animals, quietly sleeping with his pillow, cows and horses calmly ignoring him.  We even found him in the nearby woods off Prescott road.   Mama was beside herself and threatened to place a chain and lock on HIM at night.  Maybe she should have.   All of us were losing sleep.

Securing the doors became a hard-and-fast rule.   But that didn't stop him.  He still managed to escape.  One morning, we found him on the grass under the China berry tree, in our neighbor's pasture, fast asleep.   All the doors were still locked, and keys accounted for.  This happened for several nights.  I was put on watch, after that, to see how he escaped.  I really hated that, but at least I didn't go to sleep first to have that cat thrown on me.  That rascal had found the wood box next to our huge fireplace.  The wood box opened to the den and to the outside so we could load firewood from the woodpile without tracking the wood across the living room.  No one ever thought that it should be locked.  Bobby had managed to crawl through that space and leave the house. 

Bobby finally stopped walking in his sleep.  The reason?  One night he went outside and fell into a ditch filled with water, frightening him alone out there in the dark.   In the middle of the night he came banging on the door and screaming.  Bless his heart.  He was traumatized.

He was always in his bed every morning, after that experience, AND we continued being horrible roommates.

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