“A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.” (-JRR Tolkien)

I keep several sets of wine charms in some little nesting containers my brother gave me years ago: you know, like those little Russian dolls that fit into one another, each progressively larger than the last. Eddie said he knew I’d like them, and I think of him every single time I look at them on our kitchen counter top.

So, let me tell you a little bit about my youngest sibling, Eddie. He’s 7 years younger than me, and I remember the day he was born as if it was yesterday. My oldest sister, Mary Kate and I were always together until Claudia came along, and then the three of us were inseparable as siblings. People always referred to us collectively as “the girls:”

It was “Tony and the girls...”

...or “Mary and the girls.”

Suddenly, there was Eddie, and life as we knew it was never quite the same ever again. Eddie was an adorable little guy, and he was well-loved by his 3 older sisters. Overnight, we became “the girls and Eddie.”

Eddie was always gregarious, intelligent, and hilariously funny. As a teenager, girls always had crushes on my brother. Everyone knew there’d be fun if he was going to be around. As the one in the middle, I often felt as if I faded into the background, because it was either “you’re Mary Kate’s sister?!” (My older sister Mary Kate was very smart.) Or, “you’re Claudia’s sister?” (Claudia, my younger sister, could be a Wild Woman.) But most of all, it was “You’re Ed’s sister??” (Usually spoken in disbelief, and accompanied by a big smile: Eddie was handsome and cool and people just always gravitated towards him…even today, that’s true.) He can “work a room” like no one I’ve ever known. Everyone enjoys him.

When I was a single parent living in Virginia with my son Eric, Eddie came to live with us. He was going back to school, and he called me from New Jersey to ask if he could come stay with me until he “got settled” in Virginia. We never discussed it more—I was deliriously happy to have Eddie move in with us. In my mind, I figured he'd be with us—3 months? In his mind, evidently, there wasn’t quite the same finality. He wound up living with us for a number of years while Eric was growing up. They were many years apart in age, but Eric was raised almost as if he had an older brother, and I sometimes felt I had 2 sons. (Although, to this day, in our family, we all think of Eric as sort of the older brother to the older Eddie.)

Once, when my older sister's sons were small, they looked up at Eddie as he regaled us with one of his hilarious stories, and then, when Eddie left the room, her youngest son Michael watched his uncle leave the room and innocently asked, "Is Eddie a boy? or a man?" We all burst out laughing...we're still trying to figure that one out!

When my son was married, he was trying to decide who, of his friends, should be his Best Man at his wedding. Katie, Eric’s wife, said: “I don’t think there’s any doubt as to whom it should be…Eddie.” I was touched, and Eddie was amazingly flattered.

Eddie becomes the center of attention in any room he enters. He’s one of those people who takes up a lot of body space when he’s around, not in an obnoxious way, but just because he fills a room with his entertaining presence. He’s lovable and always interesting, because he’s just interested in everything. When he was little, Eddie’s bedtime reading with my dad consisted, for quite some time, of a set of encyclopedias for kids called Tell Me Why. They read those tomes from “Aardvark” all the way through to “Zygote,” and to this day, Eddie will come out with some wacky, little-known-fact that amazes me, and I’ll ask him: “Where’d you learn THAT, Eddie?!” His matter-of-fact reply will often be simply: Tell Me Why.

Now, he’s a dad, and he and his wife Jenn, up in Falls Church, VA, are the best parents of a wonderful son Graham, (affectionately called “Graham Cracker.”)

I’m very lucky in the siblings I have. We’re all very different, but I love them all. Eddie just makes me smile. You gotta' love him.

“Siblings are the people we practice on, the people who teach us about fairness and cooperation and kindness and caring—quite often the hard way.” (-Pamela Dugdale)

“It snowed last year, too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.” (-Dylan Thomas)