The Purple Patch - Missouri Valley College

With the trials of proper manhood still to materialize
before me, in the beginning I had little to guide me:
naïveness, careless optimism, and little else besides a deep
love for philosophy. Freshly out of my mother’s tender
care, a mildly autistic, homeschooled gentleman scholar
slash witless farm boy, I made a strange presence to quite
a few, confusing, irritating, even infuriating a few of them.
However, I never despaired or lost my drive to succeed;
this thanks to a stoic temperament he had helped to distill
in me, even from the beginning of his influence.
Casually, even callously, like bags of groceries,
Randy spent these formative years smoothly stoking fires
in the hearts of young women who passed between his
hands. Inside his heart, though, he was desperately walking
this wanton path to futilely search for the unmentionable
brand of love that once had seared him, and would eventually
cauterize me, before it again vanished into the mist. I,
too, failed to charm this golden opiate of first love, but that
bitter cloud of shattered dreams lost seeded a diamond of
memories and morose tenacity—tenacity that enabled me
to divert his energies from self-destructive womanizing
into building the character of the capable husband and
father he is today.
Now, as a reward for my struggles, I am a single, independent,
confident young man, far more educated than
he has ever dreamed of being. Today, I prepare to walk a
path his footsteps have long since evaporated from, even
as he, with two children and middle age looming just a few
decades from now, prepares to walk the path I have strode.
I realize, silently gazing over the nighttime lights glowing
in the valleys before me, a pang of remorse, longing, vivid
desire to once more, someday, be able to walk beside him.
A brother from another mother as none has ever been,
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