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My father owned a big lot of land behind the house. The houses in the neighborhood were set up in sort of a ring facing out, and my father owned the center.
So, playing in the back woods of our house was like playing in the back yards of many houses.

The one two over from us also had two boys. Steve was 3 years older than me, Barry 1 ½.
Our mothers used to encourage me and Barry to play together.
We never got along. And, Barry often beat me up. Never badly. Mostly tripping me, knocking me down or things like that.

I’d complain about this to my mother. She’d either tell me I was wrong or had it coming to me for picking on my younger brother. She would often go on about how clumsy I was so my “falling down” a lot when playing with Barry fit her narrative.

While my younger brother and I did fight, it was rarely physical. He was far to adept at getting me in trouble as it was.

An example of that is there was one week when he was off at camp. I was sitting in the living room and my mother came in and hit me.
“What was that for?” I demanded.
“For making your brother cry!” she shouted at me. “I was in the kitchen and heard him cry because of whatever you did to him.”
“He’s at camp!” I shouted at her. “He’s not even in the same town as me!”
She paused.
“Well then I hit you for something you did to him I didn’t catch.”
I’m not saying we never hit each other. But, it certainly wasn’t as much as my mother assumed.

Barry, however, did hit me far more than she ever realized.

It came to an end one fall day when I was nine.
For reasons I don’t remember, Barry had come over to our house and found that I had been raking leaves. My father had a bunch of bags he wanted me to put them into that were in the garage, so I was filling up those bags.
Barry came into the garage, knocked me down, sat on my back and began stuffing leaves into my mouth.

As this happened, my father came around the corner to check on my progress.
“What are you doing?” my father asked.
“Making him eat leaves,” Barry said.
“Stop it! Get out of here!”

Barry got off of me and wandered away.

“Why did you let him do that?” my father asked.
“He’s older, bigger and stronger than me,” I said. “I had no way of stopping him.”
“Why was he doing it?”
“I don’t know. He does this kind of thing fairly often.”
“Why don’t you tell someone about it?”
“I do.”

My father instructed me to finish with the leaves and he went into the house.
I never was forced to spend time with Barry again, and he never came over to our house again.

I assume my mother believed my father, and said something to Barry’s mother.
But, who knows?

Due to him being a year ahead of me in school and the way the Westwood school system restructured itself in the 70’s we went to different school buildings for the next several years.
Since I was no longer forced to be social with him, I hardly saw him at all in that time.

By the time we were both on the swim team in high school, I was considerably taller than him, generally outswam him and had more friends on the team. We did not interact much.

I only came face to face with him one more time.
I was in college and my friend and I had gone downtown to the mall.

As we walked across Main street he was standing on the corner.
“Barry why are you in Worcester?” I walked up and asked him without preamble.
He looked up at me. Then my friend who was just as tall as me.
“I’m dating a girl from Holy Cross,” he said. “I’m supposed to meet her here.”
“Bad idea,” I said. “You don’t want to be in Worcester.”
I could see his memory of our youth in his eyes.
“I’d rather she came to see me in Boston anyhow,” he said.
“So, we’re not going to find you hanging around Worcester any more, are we?”
My friend and I walked off.
I’ve never seen him again.

I have seen his profile on LinkedIn:

He’s a blogger?
Maybe someday I’ll look that up…

The rest of what it says there indicates he has done well for himself.
Good for him. Glad it was nowhere near me.