If I Should Die Before I Wake, Who/Whom Should I Call?

My brother called me the other day. We're both senior citizens. He's 65 - a few years younger than me. I'm 68 and still counting. When he was little, probably around three or four, he was really cute. Blue eyes, curly platinum blond hair that sadly got darker as he got older. We grew up, went off to college, our parents died and eventually we went our separate ways. He never married and has no children and until recently I hadn't seen him for more than 20 years.

He lives alone in a cottage - a shack really - on the beach near me in Florida where I have a small, Spanish Colonial style house built in the 1940s that needs a lot of fixing up and I mean a lot. I moved to Florida a few years ago when I retired from a big advertising agency in New York. I am his only living relative. His is not a happy story, but he is cheerful enough. He still has blue eyes and wavy hair, but now his hair is thin and mostly gray, and his eyes are a bit faded, too. He reads a lot; knows politics inside out and always plays devil's advocate to my more liberal-minded ravings.

My brother is currently reading "The History of Sexuality," by Michael Foucault, the French philosopher who died of AIDs in 1984. Foucault is, perhaps, the most respected of the European intellectuals. you could say he is the thinking man's intellectual. He is certainly one of the most difficult writers to comprehend. Even his academic peers have a hard time with his ideas which they say are at times "maddening, unsupported assertions that cannot pass muster either as history or as philosophy ...."

Foucault, however, is considered right up there with Nietzsche, the radical German philosopher and, by far, the more famous of the two. I think my brother identifies with Nietzsche. I'm not sure if he understands Foucault - or Nietzsche, for that matter, but he puts his all into the effort. I, for one, prefer the thoughts of Jacques Barzun - everyman's intellectual - whose ideas are more accessible. He was the thinker who said, "Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball." Sad, but true, I suppose.

Recently, I gave my brother "All the Pretty Horses," by Cormac McCarthy; a book so well written it made me want to pack my kit and head out for yonder hills, but he said it was too sentimental for him. I suspect he couldn't handle a story about two young Texas men - boys really - setting out for Mexico on horseback to

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