Hindsight is 20/20

     Blurry vision notwithstanding, soon after touching down at Naval Air Station Keflavik it became crystal clear that my identical twin brother's talents in the sport of basketball towered head and shoulders above my own.

     Like the windowmaker heart attack that eventually ended Cousin Rick's life at the age of 64, Mars slowly and then suddenly made his dominance known. His superior skills seemed to come out of nowhere, which both hurt and surprised me.

     By the time we started the eighth grade, Mars was on his way to becoming skilled and cagey enough to be a starter on the school's junior varsity squad. I felt pleased by his success, but also sick with envy.

     During the tryouts I desperately tried to keep up with him, but to no avail. His ascendance as the better twin simply couldn't be stopped. He understood the game better than me, and had more finesse and court sense, which allowed him to use his God-given attributes to their fullest potential.

     I was better than him at only one thing: choking shots. As a choker, when taking shots during real games, I tended to psyche myself out at the last moment, and in the split second before releasing the ball, worry too much about missing the shot. This caused me to miss a lot more shots than he did.

     That year in Iceland, Mars never once talked about his poor vision or said anything to me about his bad eyesight being an issue for him. At that point he probably wasn't cognizant of the problem anyway. Based on the way he outplayed and outperformed me from the eighth grade on I'm not sure how much his slight astigmatism hampered him as a player.

     On the subject of Cousin Rick, I'm also unsure how much his what's up, dummy? shtick was about us being stupid or him being a mean-spirited person. To my mind, Rick calling me a dummy seemed more like a callous term of endearment than a psychoanalysis of my shortcomings as a teenager. In any case, it's clear that our father's decision not to get Mars glasses when he needed them had a severe psychological impact on his life. 

     And one thing is also crystal clear: on a basketball court, my twin was a whiz. Although we both got cut after the tryouts, it wasn't long before Mars got brought up from the freshmen league to be one of the starting guards on the JV.

     In that freshmen league, Mars also got the luck of the draw. When the rosters came out, his team had been stacked with several of the better players in the eighth and ninth grades that year, including Glenn.

     But undeniably, Mars was the main reason his team won the league title that season. He was unstoppable, which made me feel madly jealous and dejected, especially during games when he soundly kicked my butt all over the court.

     But I also felt delighted by his success. I went to every JV game he was in, beaming with pride in the bleachers and jubilantly cheering him on. I was, in fact, his biggest fan.