Anyways, Don’t Be a Stranger

Something I wrote while taking a bike ride down the river and thinking about childhood.

Sometimes I think that everything I know about life, I know because of my older brother, Caden.

Last week I took a trip back to my parents’ house. One evening they were gone, out with friends, leaving me home alone. I spent the three hours of solitude going back through the earliest photos on my dad’s Lightroom account, dated back to 2007 when a family friend got me a little pink camera. The favorite photo I found was Caden and I holding hands while roller skating through a park. In May of 2007, I would have been 5, Caden at 9. Back then, my biggest aspiration in life was to be just like my older brother. I did all the sports and activities he did, I always followed along with his friends to play tag in the neighborhood, and I even dressed up like him, one time in attempts to help him get out of a haircut the summer he was growing out his hair. I was convinced our parents wouldn’t know the difference if I put on his clothes, and they would cut my hair instead. That was back when I could kick on the bedroom wall that separated our rooms and he would come stomping in to tell me to be quiet.

In the past 17 years, nothing has changed and everything has changed. Sometimes I still question whether all my new greatest aspirations in life only stem from wanting to be just like, or wanting to impress, my older brother. But we no longer live in the same house, or the same state, and most of the time we're not even in the same country. And we haven’t been for quite a long time now. I was 15 when he moved out to Chicago to start college, and it’s disturbing to think that quite soon in our lives, we will have lived apart for a longer time than we lived together.

We had one year of high school together before he moved. At 14 years-old I thought that meant we were going to bond again. We hadn’t hung out as much since Caden started high school and was always practicing for sports, had hours of homework and studying for all his honors and AP classes, and was in that stage of life where he felt a three year age difference was too much to be actual friends.

We rode to school together every day in his car, occasionally his men’s soccer team would share the turf with my women’s field hockey team, once I stood up for him when his friend was trying to get me to convince Caden to go to prom, and one afternoon when we were driving home he turned to me and said, “don’t tell mom” then proceeded to speed through a neighborhood shortcut as his best friend followed close behind. That was about the extent of our newfound high school connection.

Although we didn’t connect much, being at the same school meant that we inevitably had to see each other more, especially since we were both playing sports. When I would have home games, it was always my goal to score in the first half. The men’s soccer team, who was practicing a parking lot away on the grass field, got out of practice and went home around halftime. If I scored in the first half, the announcer would say real loud over the loudspeaker, “goal by Calihan!” And as I was hitting sticks with my teammates to celebrate, I would imagine Caden up at practice smiling when he heard my name called, or nodding proudly if his teammates asked if that girl with the same last name as him who kept scoring goals was his sister. Sophomore year we spent Thanksgiving in Chicago, and it was the same season that Hudl started recording our games. Caden would lay on the couch, relaxing during a break from his classes, and I would log in to Hudl and make him watch all my highlights.

I don’t think I realized the effect Caden had on my life when I was a high schooler, not until senior year at least. But the signs were always there. If it hadn't been for the way he pushed me, literally and figuratively, athletically, I never would have made varsity as a freshman or held the scoring records that I do. I wouldn’t have even known about the possibility and honor in making varsity as a freshman if he had not have achieved it for soccer as a freshman.

My brother was the one who told my parents about AP classes and suggested that I take them my sophomore year, as I was bored in my classes freshman year. Then when I struggled with AP World History, he told me to come to Chicago one weekend so he could help me. So I did, very gleefully despite knowing we would just be studying all weekend. If it wasn’t for him pushing me academically, I never would have succeeded the way I did in high school, been accepted into the college I went to, or been able to graduate Magna Cum Laude a semester early (which he also did).

When I got my license, I drove his car to school every day, I still paid attention to how the men’s soccer team was doing, I decided not to go to prom my junior or senior year, and I still took the same neighborhood shortcut home when the main street was too crowded.

The first year without him was okay, he was only five hours away, so my parents and I would take a road trip to Chicago to spend time with him pretty regularly. It was nice to see him and stroll along the riverwalk, even if he was busy and preoccupied and oftentimes cranky. My mom told me that when I went off to college, I would understand why he acted the way he did (Note from the future: definitely understood).

When Caden and I were younger, our parents always made sure we were well-traveled, and knew about the places we were traveling to. On the long road trips or plane rides, we would always play the same game, even when we became high schoolers. We would pull out our book atlas and quiz each other on countries. I would name a country, anywhere in the world, and Caden would name all of the countries neighboring the one I said. I should have known, growing up memorizing maps and learning languages and cultures, that it would be very soon after he turned 18 that Caden would move abroad. That’s when it got harder, because there’s an eight hour time difference in Uganda and lots of exciting things going on, more exciting than a 15 year old sister sitting in precalculus class.

His international living went on for all of my junior year and the majority of my senior year of high school. It was May of my senior year when the entire world got sent to their rooms though, and Caden was forced to come back home (after we lobbied to our state representatives to send him an emergency plane in Morocco because they weren’t letting him leave due to the virus, but that’s another story). I was so excited that Caden, required by a sudden force of nature, would be living in the same house as me again.

He was the first class to be searching for full-time jobs completely remotely. It is very odd looking back on that time now. I would sit in the living room while listening to my dad quiz Caden on case studies every night. In the morning I would sneak into the dining room where they had studied and look through Caden’s notes before he was awake to see what he was working on. Throughout my college career, I have held the exact same case study schedule with my dad, drawing up cases the same way I remembered he did from those dining table notes. I regularly would get kicked out of the house so he could have an interview. I’m now sitting at my table writing this as a December 2023 graduate, trying to navigate a totally virtual recruitment process, as it’s still foreign to me despite the past three years of life being this way.

Caden, having earned a 4.0 from a top university, landed a full-time job very quickly (but not easily or without much studying/practicing) and after he did, he turned back into that nine-year-old who would go roller skating at the park with me then out for ice cream afterwards. Since I decided to go online to the community college my first year of college due to COVID and health problems, we had more time together. By the middle of the first semester, I was already feeling healthier than I had in the past two years, and I was able to acknowledge that I actually would have a future, and maybe it was time to start thinking about and planning that future. Caden sat down with me to go over possible majors (I ended up studying the same thing he studied economics), possible colleges (I ended up going to the university that was his second choice), and helped me set up a LinkedIn (he was my first connection). There is a picture of Caden – still dressed in business professional from when my dad was taking headshots for him – sitting on the couch holding my laptop as I sat next to him – wearing a gray shirt with paint down the front, vans that used to be white until I colored them to be tie-dye with my Sharpies, and a whole slew of necklaces that I had made myself – setting up my LinkedIn account. I’m not sure why my brother looked at me at that moment and thought “economics” but he has always been good at seeing all sides of me, no matter which one I was outwardly portraying at the moment.

Just a couple months after he got that great full-time offer, it was my turn to leave. Moving to Arizona was a tough decision to make since we were finally back in the same city, but at the same time it was very easy. I was 18 and finally healthy enough to be excited about the world outside of my parents’ four walls again. Also, I knew Caden wouldn’t stick around for too long once the restrictions were lifted. That signing bonus was itching to be spent on an international trip. The same week in January that I moved to Arizona, Caden left on a plane for Egypt with one of his friends who was doing online school. One of the women I used to work with would always shake her head and say, “your poor mom.”

Since I had a lot of college credit from high school and I took an ungodly amount of credits my first semester of community college (26) I ended up getting my associate’s degree in one year. I was so excited. While nobody just watching my life would have been able to tell, there was a deep fear that I would never be able to attend, let alone graduate from, college. Although I planned to graduate from a four-year university after community college, the act of getting a certificate saying I was basically already halfway to a bachelor’s degree made me ecstatic and was the physical representation I needed that this concussion I had was not the end of my life. There was a ceremony back in my hometown, but I was still going to be in Arizona then. So my roommate and I started to plan a trip to the Grand Canyon for the same weekend as the graduation ceremony. I even had a cap and tassel I was going to bring with us. As someone who also struggled with a bad concussion, my roommate told me that she understood what it meant to me to graduate. But then one day in early May she came back from the gym and said that she was going to go out of town to practice tennis with her friend in Portland the same weekend we had planned to go to the Grand Canyon. I asked her about the trip we planned, and she responded laughing, “You know how selfish I am, she invited me to come so I said yes.” We’re not really friends anymore, but not just because of that.

Caden happened to call me later that afternoon when I was in the middle of biking 15 miles to get out some anger. My biggest pet peeve is when people commit to something then don’t actually do it, no matter what it may be. I told Caden about what happened, was quiet for a minute before saying, “What if I came and met you?”

It was literally the best four days of my life. Two days after Caden returned from Egypt, he left on a road trip, spent a couple days in Utah while I was finishing up finals. He Facetimed me while walking on the BYU campus in Utah, trying to convince me to go there (we’re not Mormon), then came down to Phoenix. I cooked chocolate chip cookies for his arrival, and he ate all of them in two days, which made me extremely happy given he doesn’t really eat sugar. We spent a whole day in Phoenix hiking, going to the huge mall to see the Teslas, eating in downtown Scottsdale, and watching the sunset from Papago Park before leaving for the Grand Canyon the next day. We camped in the car, hiked the Grand Canyon, he took pictures of me at the rim wearing my grad cap, and we drove around northern Arizona exploring some ghost towns we had read about.

It was the first time we had traveled together, just the two of us, and I was trying my hardest to prove I was the best travel companion. I had been campaigning for years for Caden to take me with him on one of his international trips, but he never seemed too keen. I was hoping that by me sleeping in the hot car, peeing in a desert bush when we were on an unmarked road in the middle of the desert, eating three apples one day instead of breakfast or lunch, and dry shaving my armpits in the middle of a park at 7 a.m. would convince him that I was low maintenance enough to do another trip with. I know that the real reason he will never see me as a legitimate travel partner is because to him, I will always just be his kid sister. Most of the time I do everything in my power to change that perception and prove to him that I’m older now, I am an adult that he should be able to see as a peer. Sometimes it’s nice though, because in a world where everyone seems to think I am old enough to have everything figured out, I’m still someone’s kid sister that needs to be asked, “Are you hungry? All you ate was an apple today.”

The summer following my spring semester in Arizona, Caden headed the initiative called, “Calihan Needs to Figure Out Where She’s Going to College.” Caden has three boys who he has been best friends with since high school, and each one of them went to a different college. I met with the first one, Gable, over sandwiches after they had been playing football together. Gable told me all about the college that he went to, which Caden visited regularly and was the one that was his second choice. I had never spoken to Gable before, but as I asked him questions he kept shaking his head and laughing saying, “That’s exactly what Caden would ask, you guys are so much alike” and when he made fun of Caden for wiping some of the sauce off his sandwich, Caden exclaimed, “She does that too!” and motioned to me. I felt like I was one of the boys.

The second one we talked to was Jace. His college was only 45 minutes away and he was staying there over the summer, so Caden and I did another little road trip to tour the school and eat lunch with Jace and his fiancé. It was a lot smaller and in the middle of nowhere, but Jace tried to talk it up.

His third friend is Camden. I asked Caden one day when I was sitting on the porch, pondering where I saw myself for the next couple years, “What about Camden? Does he have a pitch for his university too?” Caden responded, “I asked Camden if he wanted to talk to you about the school he went to. He said to tell you it sucks and to not go there.” I stopped considering that school, and didn’t get to meet Camden (at least not at that point). Camden is the friend of Caden’s that I think I would get along with best, because he’s also a little unorganized and doesn’t have it all together and can be perceived as slightly unhinged at certain points, which I think is good for Caden.

I ended up picking that school Gable went to and moving cities again the same month that Caden moved back to our hometown to start his full-time job. He was rarely there though, he traveled almost every week for work. So even when I did occasionally drive back, he was rarely there. He was always somewhere cooler like San Francisco or New York or Atlanta.

Looking back, that summer after my freshman year was really the last time we spent any period of time together, just the two of us. I spent my sophomore year at college, then I moved to Madrid, then I spent the summer in New York. There was one Saturday in early June when Caden and I happened to be in New York City at the same time, so we met up for lunch and walked around Wall Street together. The only other weekend, in early July, when he was back in New York, I got food poisoning. My mom asked Caden if he would go over to my apartment to check on me, because it was in the two week period in which I was living alone and didn’t know anyone else in the city. He said no, because he didn’t want to be around me while I was sick, but he would pay to send me some soup via Uber Eats. He knows I don’t like soup.

The only time the two of us are in the same city, without work or school, for an extended period of time is over winter break. The point where I am in between courses and couldn’t do any work even if I wanted to, and Caden always gets an extended period of time off in December. But in the past two years, we haven’t even been able to connect during this time we have together. The winter break of my junior year, after I had been in Madrid for six months, Caden brought his new girlfriend into the house to live with us because she didn’t have any family in St. Louis. I like her fine, but I was a little overwhelmed with a stranger in my house after I had just been abroad for six months.

Also, I wanted to be able to spend time with him. But more than that, I wanted him to want to spend time with me. At the present moment, I’m trying to forge a friendship with Girlfriend, but I believe, given I did my best to avoid her when she was in my own house, she is proceeding with caution. I was actually just texting her this week.

Again, it’s not that I don’t like her. She’s probably a very lovely person, and we would probably be friends if we had met in class and she wasn’t just the girl from Portugal dating my brother. But the proclamation was like a crushing weight on me, because it meant that there would be no time in the unforeseen future that I will be able to drive back to my parents’ house, walk into the front room, sit down on the couch next to my brother, and watch Impractical Jokers or a Youtube video on whatever country he’s interested in at the moment with absolutely no added hassle. Onward from May, when they move in together, we will no longer be co-inhabitants of a singular house, I will be a guest in the house of Caden and Girlfriend. I will have to text him to plan when I can come over and see him, and he is pretty bad at answering my texts. There will be no more waking up in my childhood bedroom to the sound of Gilligan and the Skipper traveling faintly from the living room.

After the Christmas that integrated Girlfriend into my life, Caden and I kind of butted heads until I went back to university. We had some good calls that spring semester of my junior year though, when I was going back and forth about what I was going to do that summer and he gave me much needed career advice. Something that, over the past three years of me being in college, he has improved at giving and I have improved at receiving.

The second winter break, this most recent one in which I was a senior, takes us up to, basically, the present moment, and the reason as to why I felt called to sit down and write about my older brother with the title, “Anyways, don’t be a stranger.”

When I arrived home from university after graduating, Caden was not home. He was in Las Vegas with Girlfriend, who had flown in from Portugal to see the city with him. The problem with multi-country relationships is that seeing each other always involves an international flight, therefore every time they see each other, they get sick. When Caden finally arrived home, he very quickly got diagnosed with COVID, and Girlfriend did as well back home in Lisbon. My dad is high risk, so Caden had to leave and spent a week in a family friend’s empty apartment. We spoke twice in the time we were in the same city but he was in a different apartment. Once on Dec. 21 when he called me to say, “Hypothetically if I was trying to get a Christmas present for a 20-year old girl I know, what would she like?” to which I responded, “Caden do you seriously not know that I’m 21?” then sent him a list of three things he could easily order off Amazon for my Christmas present. The second was when he asked me to go pick up his Christmas present for our dad at REI at the worst parking lot in the city, knowing that I have trouble parking. I told him I was never, ever going to do that. An hour later I had the present sitting in my closet, fully wrapped.

Caden returned to our house the afternoon of Dec. 23 just in time for our extended family Christmas gathering and to get to Christmas Eve mass, where he has this fun tradition of squeezing my hand as hard as possible when we’re shaking them during the sign of peace.

But his return home did not bring back those five and nine year old kids, because he was getting ready for his next international expedition that created a certain amount of tension around the house. Neither of my parents necessarily wanted him to go on this particular little adventure because 1) he was leaving the evening of Dec. 26, meaning we only spent approximately three days together 2) this time, he had only bought a one-way ticket. He was also nervous for the trip himself, which contributed to the weird vibe in the household.

Caden took a long leave of absence from one of the most sought after jobs – a company that hundreds of Harvard grads flock to every year begging for a job – to sell coconuts in Oceania.

He spent over two years at an elite consulting company and he was ready to get back to international living and starting his own company. And it’s not just coconuts, it’s a whole logistics company focused on figuring out a better way to transport produce and crops from one city to another in a country full of rough terrain. He’s not someone who does things on impulse, so I know he’s put a lot of thought and calculation into it when he says he thinks he can make more in Oceania than he does in the US at his old job. I’m skeptical. My parents are skeptical as well, as they are both Baby Boomers and feel very strongly about being loyal to a job, especially one paying you well and giving great benefits. It doesn’t help that we are currently seeing one of the worst economies and job markets in years (I would know, I studied economics and now I can’t get a job).

When we first moved, we used to talk quite a lot. He was just starting up the company and he needed my help making business documents because in the city he was living in at that point, he had to pay by the minute for Wi-Fi. But he didn’t have to pay to use the phone, so he would call me late at night and walk me through a document he needed done, and as I was formatting and exporting to PDF we would talk about life. He ended up naming his company after the model of his first car, the one I inherited, and I wonder if while he was naming it he ever thought about his senior in high school when he drove his sister to school in it every day. Or about the icy days when we would never start to defrost the windshield soon enough, so he would put down my window and make me stick my head out like a dog to ensure he wasn’t going to hit anything driving out of our neighborhood. I wonder if he thought about that every time he signed a business document the same way I did whenever I had to make one.

Now all the documents are done and he doesn’t need my help anymore, and as of this current moment I haven’t talked on the phone with him for over a month. I only started texting with Girlfriend this week because it had been eight days since my parents or I had heard from him, even just liking a text we sent, so I reached out to see if she had heard from him. Yesterday, after both my parents got on our family chat at the same time saying, “What city are you in now?” and “How are you?” He responded by saying he drank some bad milk, got diarrhea, and pooped his pants a little in the middle of the night. He didn’t elaborate much. The joys of having a brother!

Usually out of the three of us, my two parents and I, I am the most supportive of his crazy lifestyle choices. Mostly because someday I hope to be just like him and have my own outrageous stories that I can tell him that might make him think, “Wow, Gable was right, we are a lot alike.”

However, it is progressively challenging to endorse his lifestyle when that lifestyle is taking place over 8,000 miles away from me with a 15 hour time difference and no set date of when he will return. The only reason he will leave Oceania at this point is if he can’t make a profit from his company and therefore has to abandon the idea.

It’s hard when the only thing that will bring him back to the States is the failure of the dream he's tirelessly cultivated for years. Of course I want to see him succeed, but it would also be nice to see him in person occasionally. At this point, all I can wish for is that we do not become strangers who can only connect on the memories we once made together.

Yours truly,

Caliahn