My happy memories of my brother are, I suspect, not really my memories at all. My mom has great, silly stories about my brother and me as kids, but I don't remember them. I suspect I've been lied to.

The only happy memory I'm certain of is the two of us running up the stairs to the second-floor landing and dropping the cat over the side to see if he would land on his feet.

The toss.

The spinning drop.

The over-the-shoulder.

We giggled like mad as we tortured the poor cat. I was in preschool then, so my brother must have been around eleven years old. Old enough to know better.