This song is about the loss of my youngest brother Lyndon when he was just two and a half years old. I was only eleven when this occured. My only refuge came from music where I cried, pounded out my anger and frustration. The song is built on layers of this absolute angel of a brother.
In the first verse I give you a glipse of this very happy boy who never fought even when others might be spoiling his fun. In this verse I talk about these tiny plastic cars that my Dad bought for him on one of this week long training trips to Racine Wisconsin. He loved lining them all up on the floor. There was this one time when my Aunt and Uncle were visiting and they had a young daughter who was just in the kicking stage. You know they just started to walk and the next level of their confidence is to kick things. Well she went right over to where these 100 cars were all lined up and started kicking them. My little brother just collected all his cars and went into his bedroom and closed the door because he knew she was not able to open doors yet and played with his little cars in peace.
Lyndon was eight years younger than me and you may have trouble understanding how we could have been so close. It all happened the summer that my Mom and Dad decided to go on a nine week vacation where they travelled all over Europe. We were left in the care of my Dad’s oldest sister and her family and they moved into our house. My brother Rodney, who was just four years younger than me, had a hard time adjusting to the fact that they were taking over our house and would argue with my Uncle over that fact. In the meantime my mother had written us a letter and in it she says “Donald, I hope you are taking good care of Lyndon as I have left you in charge”. I left my brother Rodney to battle out who’s house this really was and spent every waking minute with Lyndon. We became unseperable from then on. I took him on bike rides with me as he would sit side saddle on the bar and hang onto the handle bars. After that summer ended we carried on this ritual where he would be waiting for me at the end of the driveway with my bike and we would go up and down the block before we went in for lunch.
When Mom and Dad came back from their big adventure, my little brother did not know who they were and just clung to me. This was the trip that my Mom had big regrets over and took it so hard that she missed the nine weeks of that summer as he died later that year. It has been over 50 years ago, but I still miss him and I still feel his presence around me especially when I am talking about him or writing songs that I know he has inspired. In some ways this is how we still communicate with each other. I hear him in the songs that he sends. How could music not be my first big passion. This is where it began from a life that was cut way too short, he left us way too soon.