Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,10

hot sun. Maybe that’s why he never cried. He was in shock—the only baby I’d ever seen with a tan line. “Cute kid,” Greg said one afternoon, and I worried that he might win over Paul and my mother the way he had my father.

The summer of ’68 was even worse than the one before it. The club started serving a once-a-week prime-rib dinner, dress up—which meant my blue wool sports coat. Sweating over my fruit cocktail, I’d watch my father make his rounds, stopping at the Sakases’ table and laying his hand on Greg’s shoulder the way he’d never once put it on mine. There weren’t many people I truly hated back then—thirty, maybe forty-five at most—and Greg was at the top of my list. The killer was that it wasn’t even my idea. I was being forced to hate him, or, rather, forced to hate myself for not being him. It’s not as if the two of us were all that different, really: same size, similar build. Greg wasn’t exceptional-looking. He was certainly no scholar. I was starting to see that he wasn’t all that great a swimmer either. Fast enough, sure, but far too choppy. I brought this to my father’s attention, and he attributed my observation to sour grapes: “Maybe you should work on your own stroke before you start criticizing everyone else’s.”

Things will be better when the summer is over, I kept thinking. We continued going to the club for prime rib, but Greg wasn’t always there, and without the swimming there wasn’t as much for my dad to carry on about. When fall arrived, he got behind a boy in my Scout troop. But my father didn’t really understand what went on in Scouts. The most difficult thing we did that year was wrap potatoes in tinfoil, and I could wrap a potato just as well as the next guy. Then one night while watching The Andy Williams Show, he came upon Donny Osmond.

“I just saw this kid on TV, and I mean to tell you, he absolutely knocked my socks off. The singing, the dancing—this boy’s going to be huge, you mark my words.”

“You didn’t discover him,” I said the following evening at dinner. “If someone’s on The Andy Williams Show, it means they were already discovered. Stop trying to take credit.”

“Well, someone’s testy, aren’t they?” My father lifted his drink off the table. “I wonder when Donny will be on again.”

“It’s the Osmond Brothers,” I said. “Girls at school talk about them all the time. It’s not a solo act—they’re a group.”

“Not without him, they’re not. Donny’s the thunderbolt. Take him out of the picture, and they’re nothing.”

The next time they were on The Andy Williams Show, my father flushed me out of my room and forced me to watch.

“Isn’t he fantastic? Just look at that kid! God Almighty, can you believe it?”

Competing against celebrities, people who were not in any sense “real,” was a losing game. I knew this as well as I knew my name and troop number, but the more my father carried on about Donny Osmond, the more threatened and insignificant I felt. The thing was that he didn’t even like that kind of music. “Well, normally, no,” he said, when I brought it up. “Something about Donny, though, makes me like it.” He paused. “And the hell of it is he’s even younger than you are.”

“A year younger.”

“Well, that’s still younger.”

I’d never know if my father did this to hurt me or to spur me on, but on both fronts he was wildly successful. I remember being at the club in the summer of ’69, the day that men walked on the moon. Someone put a TV on the lifeguard chair, and we all gathered around, me thinking that at least today something was bigger than Donny Osmond and Greg Sakas, who was actually now a little shorter than I was.

That Labor Day, at the season’s final intraclub meet, I beat Greg in the butterfly. “Were you watching? Did you see that? I won!”

“Maybe you did, but it was only by a hair,” my father said on our way home that evening. “Besides, that was, what—one time out of fifty? I don’t really see that you’ve got anything to brag about.”

That’s when I thought, Okay, so that’s how it is. My dad was like the Marine Corps, only instead of tearing you to pieces and then putting you back together, he just did the first part and