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, who hailed from West Virginia, made his way to sunny California as a diver 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 eventually found his way to our mother, Marsha Ann, who lived above his one bedroom apartment on Ensenada Court in South Mission. 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. Anne never married and has no children. My siblings and I spent much 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!