I like to think I wanted to ride my bike across the country just because I wanted to, but I can’t let go of the idea that I needed to do it because Sam did it first. I enjoyed running a lot more when I was younger, before I had this sick dad-bod-but maybe it’s because I was running through a construction site or across a private golf course with my brother, trying to make trouble as quickly as I could avoid it. But then again, I like riding my bike because I grew up doing that with my brother. I like to think I did these things that my brother did not because my brother did them, but because I wanted to do them, because I was interested in them.
#Bike wanderer dies free#
My dissertation was called, “Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage.” So yeah, I kept reading Shakespeare.Īs a twin, I’m not sure if you’re ever really free from the curse of imitation. I also remember that I started reading Shakespeare-outside of class, mind you-because my brother took a lead role in the Shakespeare club.īy the way, in September of 2018, I earned my doctorate. I started getting interested in poetry and fiction, largely because Sam did. I eventually quit cross country-but only because Sam did first. One time, we jumped into the Monocacy in January, and then spent the afternoon running around like wild people trying to get ourselves warm until our mom came and picked us up, looking disappointed and embarrassed. Sometimes, instead of going for an eight-mile run, we would just run a half-mile down the Monacacy and jump in. The Monacacy is a sad, shallow, and probably carcinogenic body of water that runs through downtown Bethlehem. I started swimming in the Monacacy creek too, following Sam’s example. I jumped off a bridge into the Lehigh river one time, but only because Sam did it first. (Mind you, there were some things I wasn’t brave enough to do, either). There were a number of things I imitated about my brother in high school. My mistake was thinking that I could talk to other people the way I could talk to my brother. I think in longhand, intimacy is easy to mistake for, well, intimacy, when a brief hello is all that was ever due.
More times than not, my writing of letters to friends actually got me in a good bit of trouble and may have even cost me a friend or two.
Today, I think of that torment as “privilege,” and I usually just call these people hipsters.
#Bike wanderer dies manual#
It was a difficult habit to maintain, and I never felt like I was really saying what I wanted to say-which was maybe that I was pretending to be interested in something that I wasn’t, or that I was trying to appear like a disciplined and tortured intellectual, who was so tormented by the technological innovations of the modern world that he could hardly bear to drive in a car or to own fewer than three manual typewriters. When I was in college, I started writing letters in longhand to some of my friends because this was something I noticed Sam doing with his friends, and something Sam and I had been doing for a while. Do it in front of people who don’t know Sam, or who don’t know you’re a twin. I don’t like to think of myself as a copycat, but I also think that being a twin has turned my entire identity into a gimmick: just do what Sam does. Whenever I hear people say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I always want to tell them how Webster’s dictionary defines cliche. I told you about how I hurt my brother (without meaning to), and then how I tried to redeem myself at his wedding, where he married another identical twin.Īnd I told you how, almost exactly two years after Bill was killed, I started out on a cross country bike journey of my own. I also told you about how Sam started writing music to heal from his loss, and to remember his friend. I told you about how Bill’s mom briefly and accidentally mistook me for my brother at her son’s memorial service, and how it forever changed the way I would see my brother and think about our relationship.
I told you about Bill Crenshaw, Sam’s best friend from college, who died tragically while riding his bike across the country with my brother and their friends. On the last episode of Someone Else’s Blues, I introduced you to my twin brother Sam. “Since You Left (Ain’t Nothin’ Been the Same)” - Album: Since You Been GoneĮpisode 2: Death was out riding his horse in the desert “Hell of a Day I’m Havin’” Album: Since You Been Gone I Ain’t Even Had My Coffee Yet” - Album: Words, Words, Words “Someone Else’s Blues” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues“ “The Restless Wanderer’s Lullaby” - Album: Sam Steffen SOMEONE ELSE’S BLUES: A PODCAST by Will Steffen EPISODE 2: “Death Was Out Riding His Horse In The Desert…”
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