contrast essay

Essay
Two peas in a pod. That’s what everyone called me and Stephen. He’s my cousin and he puts ketchup on everything. I prefer Pickapeppa sauce. Stephen (never Steve) and I grew up together and were almost indistinguishable when we were younger. There was a time when he was in Hawaii for a few years and I was in Florida and we hadn’t laid eyes on each other for a while when we literally bumped into each other in Logan airport. We both had grown beards and packed on a few pounds, and were the only ones wearing shorts and flip-flops that December. He was headed to Portland, I to Bangor and on to Bar Harbor for the holidays. I was a door to door encyclopedia salesman; he was a cable layer for AT&T out of Pearl Harbor. We talked while waiting for our flights, and I smiled at the ketchup stain on his shirts. That’s why we both wore loud patterned tropical shirts, we were slobs.
Uncle Steve had died a few years earlier, and Stephen had inherited a few apartment buildings in Portland. They provided a steady stream of income but it wasn’t enough. Stephen worked double duty on the boat, shacking his money until he could afford to buy real estate. He has houses in Maine, Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, and a few small construction companies. I have one house, and am barely keeping it while in school. I worked a few jobs here and there, with no real plan of keeping any of them more than a month. Stephen had a brand new Harley FLH (read; BIG bike) and I had a ratty old Triumph. As I listened to him talk about the old days, I noticed his flip flops were really $50 Tevas, whereas mine were from Reneys and probably were two different sizes. My Goodwill shorts were like his, just a little more broken in and stained. He got around to mentioning what a drag it was to see his mother and that’s when I realized how much I missed mine.
For my part I told him about snorkeling off Eleuthera and Belize. He wanted to know if this was at an all-inclusive resort. I started to tell him about the tent sites, but thought better of it. Luckily his cell phone went off, and he was absorbed in that for a second, letting me reload my mind. Stephen had a bottle of imported light beer, which he’d poured into a glass, while I had whatever beer came out of the wall even though it cost five bucks. After his call, he showed me pictures on his phone of him heli-skiing in Telluride, where Cousin Jane works in the winter. I’d been there, but could never afford to do that, I just went skiing with her pass. He showed me pictures of his bike in its own garage that had a tile floor. I told him Victoria slept in the basement. He remembered Victoria, having been on the losing end of a race against her even though he had a new Ducati. He said he’d been to Skip Barber’s racing school and learned to race IROC and open wheeled cars. I told him he was probably still a lousy bike rider.
When the conversation turned to kids, we found our common upbringing to be the reason we did what we did to, and for our kids. Stephen always was a doter, but in my eyes he spoiled Tom and Dennis by buying them crap as a way to get out of parenting. Brian earned what he got, or at least made an attempt at it. His boys came with us about ten years back on a camping trip for four days. Brian showed them how to catch bigger fish and skip rocks further, while they showed him how to get to level ten on their Game Boys. Now my son is married and I’m a granddad. Stephens’s boys went to Brian’s wedding, and in the pictures they look like three peas in a pod. When I asked about Tom and Dennis, he said he hadn’t heard from them in a while, they were probably “poisoned” by their mother.
The rest of the conversation was non-remarkable, just two cousins talking about sports, cars, bikes and women. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen Stephen; in fact that was the last time, right at Logan. Our lives have been running a parallel course, and probably will continue to do so. That course has minor corrections along the way, and if I weren’t in an observational frame of mind I probably would have missed the differences between us. Maybe we are two peas in a pod, maybe the contrasts are not as big as I make them, but I can’t help but think we’re as different as we are similar. Having said that, I will probably be calling his mom this weekend to say hi, and she’ll still think I’m Stephen ‘till the third sentence.