From the Womb to the Tomb

Mitchell, left, and Marshall, right, eating mud pies on Ensenada Court in South Mission Beach, San Diego, CA circa 1962

     
      My identical twin brother Marshall and I joined the world on June 19, 1959, in La Jolla, California. I came out first, with Marshall, whose nickname is Mars, sliding out from our mother's womb two minutes later. If you're reading this we're either old men or dead and gone.
     We grew up in a family of six. Our father, Thomas Earl, hailed from West Virginia, but eventually made his way to sunny Southern California as a frogman with the Navy. After leaving the military, he enrolled at San Diego State University to study engineering. While working as a lifeguard in Mission Beach, he rented an apartment on Ensenada Court that happened to be right below the house where our mother, Marsha Anne Herman, lived with her family. The rest is history.
     We have one older brother, Byron Joseph, and one younger sister, Anne Grace. Byron and his wife Nancy have two children, Benjamin and Jordana. I have one daughter, Jessica Joy, born in 1987. Anne never married and has no children. Mars got married twice but also has no kids.
     My siblings and I spent most of our childhood in San Diego, but our dad liked to move around so we also spent time growing up in Anchorage, Alaska, Frankfurt, Germany, and Keflavik, Iceland.
     Mars and I are turning 65 this month (June 2024). That's a lot of years to live and we've had our share of ups and downs and good and bad experiences to go with them. In our early sixties we wound up living 360 miles away from each other. I live in Da Nang, Vietnam, and he lives in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
     In the summer of 2023 Mars and his Cambodian wife, Eang, flew to Da Nang and stayed for 10 days. It had been seven long years since we'd seen each other. They met my Vietnamese wife, Lana, and my stepdaughter, Hai My. We ate delicious meals at home and at local restaurants, visited Marble Mountain and Hoi An, and spent time swimming and drinking morning coffee at the local beach. Our reunion and brief time together left me feeling both exhilarated and melancholy.
     My feelings for Mars are deeper and stronger than those for my other siblings. Twins are naturally closer, sharing a kinship that goes beyond the common ties of brother and sisterhood. It's like we still feed off the amniotic sac from our first nine months together, uncannily bound by an inseparable and unbreakable twin connection. It's a bond of love that lasts a lifetime!