We were able to be in Pennsylvania to celebrate with my brother Don on his 60th birthday.

My brother is nine years older than me, but regardless of our age difference, we are very close to each other.  Like any sibling relationship, we’ve had our disagreements over the years.  When we were growing up, he’d take pride in trying a new wrestling move out on me or simply beating the crap out of me for no apparent reason (at least not in my mind).  However, he was also my biggest protector as well.  If anyone ever even thought of laying a hand on me, he was there to defend me no matter what.  If they did lay a hand on me, things could get pretty ugly for them.

From my first memory, I remember looking up to him.  At first, I looked up to him both physically and emotionally, but by the time I was about 13 years old, I started to pass him in physical height.  Now, even though I tower over him physically with my 6’-1” frame compared to his 5’-7” height, my admiration for him has never waned.

I’ll never forget the feeling when I was second grade and attending the Oley Fair.  He had a soccer game and I was walking from the fairgrounds across the street to the high school to watch him play soccer.  As I was getting closer to the field, an ambulance was pulling out.  Once I arrived at the field, some friends had told me that it was my brother who was being taken away in the ambulance because of a broken leg.  I felt like my world had been crushed.  How could this larger than life hero of mine be hurt?  I was a mess, trying to find my parents, not knowing what was going on.  When you’re that young, you don’t even really know what a broken leg even means, you’re just scared because your favorite person on earth, your protector was hurt.  As it turned out, it was a bad break, his leg was broken in five places, but all-in-all, in my eyes, he was again larger than life because he could overcome such a bad injury.

About a year later, he was in a car accident, I was home alone when the call came to our house and again, I felt like my world was falling apart until my mom came home from the hospital with him and he was ok.

When I got hit by a car riding my bike, he dropped what he was doing and sprinted about a half mile to make sure that I was ok.

He enlisted in the army to become a paratrooper after he graduated from high school, when I first saw him in uniform, I again thought that he was larger than life.  Whenever he’d come home on leave, he’d always buy me something, which I thought was very cool.  My mom and dad seldom told me when he was coming home because they always seemed to want to surprise me for some reason.  Those were always the greatest surprises of my childhood.

My mom and dad got divorced while he was in the army.  My mom and I moved to Florida and when he got out of the army, he moved to Florida with us.  I was in heaven; my hero had returned.  He bought a convertible Triumph Spitfire when he first moved down there with us.  Trips to the beach and the Sabastian Inlet in that car with our golden retriever, Lady were some of the best trips that we had.

Even though I was so much younger than him, we really did do so many things together.  On spring nights, we’d just drive around in the Triumph and look for the lights of baseball fields.  When we saw one, we’d go there and watch whatever game was being played at the time.  It didn’t matter if it was a Little League game, Babe Ruth game, adult game, we’d stop and watch it.  Sometimes for just an inning or two, sometimes longer.  We’d leave and go find another set of lights to drive to and watch another game.  We never had a plan, we just hopped in the car and started looking for the lights.  It was so cool.

He played in an adult soccer league for a team called Melbourne United.  His friends and teammates immediately accepted me as one of their own.  All of sudden, I went from having one really awesome older brother to an entire team of awesome older brothers.  I rarely, if ever, missed a game.  Sunday soccer games were something that I looked forward to quite a bit.  I would tag along with him to all of the Melbourne United functions.  Post-game meals, pre-season parties, post-season parties, mid-season parties, Super Bowl parties, if my brother was going to a Melbourne United function, I was going to be there with him.  After a little while, I started my first venture in writing.  I started the official newsletter of the Melbourne United soccer team called the “Melbourne United Post.”  I would literally hand-write a little newspaper out on notebook paper of the teams game highlights each week.  I would do a write-up on the game and even list the team stats and league standings.  The guys would all pass it around before and after the game reading it and so did their wives and girlfriends.  I think seeing all of their reactions is one of the things that gave me a passion for writing.  I really don’t know how good the writing itself was at the time, I mean I was in middle school and was getting pretty bad grades at the time due to some other distractions in my life, but I certainly always looked forward to getting the newest edition of the Melbourne United Post into the hands of the players and fans each week.

I have so many great memories with my brother it’s tough to even list them.

I was there when he met his wife, Kathy.  It was on Thanksgiving Day in 1982.  My mom would always invite people who didn’t have a place to go for Thanksgiving over to our house.  My mom loved feeding people.  She knew that giving someone a good cooked meal was a great way to make them happy and feel loved.  Kathy and her mom, who was a friend of our grandmother’s, didn’t have anywhere to go that Thanksgiving, so mom invited them over.  The rest, after almost 40 years, I guess you could say is history.

I was in his wedding during my senior year of high school.  I missed the rehearsal dinner because I had a baseball game in Pennsylvania that Friday night.  I flew down to Florida early Saturday morning in time for the wedding.  Unfortunately, I went 0-for-2 during my game, but the wedding was great.

He was the best man in my wedding, not because he was my brother, but because he truly is my best friend.

When our mom passed away in 2005, it was he and I who left late on a Friday night for Florida to beat a snow storm that was coming in.  When we received word that she didn’t come out of her open-heart surgery, I had just gotten back from a coach’s clinic in New Jersey.  He packed his stuff and picked me up at my house late that evening.  We got out just in time.  We hit a little bit of snow around Richmond, drove through the night and made real good time otherwise.  We may have exceeded the speed limit once or twice on the trip.

We stopped for breakfast at a Waffle House in Lumberton, North Carolina. I broke down in tears after a Tim McGraw song, “Don’t Take the Girl” and a Blake Shelton song, “The Baby,” came on in the Waffle House back to back.  He so eloquently said to me, “Big man, get yourself to the bathroom and clean-up a bit, people are starting to stare.”

When we went to spread my mom’s ashes in the ocean the following summer, he and I were right next to each other in the boat when we broke into the Atlantic Ocean from the Sebastian Inlet in what turned out to be quite a ride.

Among his other traits, my brother is a great storyteller.  He’s always the life of the party.  He does have a bit of a temper at times, but that’s ok.  He’s actually a great writer, better than I am in my opinion.  He proofread quite a bit of my first book and made some corrections before it got sent off to my editor.  I hope that someday, he decides to write a book of his own because I know that it would great.

He’s been asking me a lot of questions about the RV since we bought it.  He mentioned that we’re traveling in a little more style than what our mom did.  I’m thinking that maybe he’s getting the itch to hit the open road soon too, but time will tell, I guess.

Of all the things that my brother has done for me over my lifetime, the greatest honor that he ever gave me was naming

My hero, me, and my namesake.

his youngest son after me.  Everyone always assumes that my nephew, Daniel is my son because we’re both Daniel Clouser.  I don’t mind correcting them to tell them he is my nephew. The only difference is that his middle name is Cole and mine is Charles.  The funniest thing is that without my prodding, Daniel loves baseball, probably even more than I do.

I thank God every day that He gave me such and awesome friend and brother.

Even though I’ve said that it was fortunate that we were back in Pennsylvania for Don’s 60th birthday, that’s not entirely true.  It was intentional.  I missed a lot of my brother’s birthday’s because of working a tournament over the past 30 years, I wasn’t about to miss this one.

No matter where we were in the country, I was going to make sure that we were back in Pennsylvania on October 3, 2020 to celebrate with my hero.

Here is his speech after we sang “Happy Birthday” to him.