When it comes to family, there’s no escape

The X-Men: Most days, my two sons Zane and Aidan don’t like each other. Aidan steals Zane’s Legos, so Zane puts dog fur in Aidan’s milk. At some point, they bro-hug it out, and Zane shrugs, “It’s family. You can’t get away.” Then they team up against me. Brother X and I are as close as two brothers can be. Well, two brothers born eight years apart. Who live on opposite ends of the continent. Who have canceled each other’s votes out in every single presidential election since Ford versus Carter.

When I was 4, Brother X handed me a fork and told me to see what happened when I stuck it in an electrical outlet.

Five years old, in South Ozone Park, I had a Lassie coloring book. Now, Brother X thought I ought to be playing stoop ball rather than sitting on the stoop with my eight Crayola, so the minute that I took a break from it, he grabbed the purple crayon and wrote as a caption: “Kevin is a germ in germ city.” Fifty-five years later, this remains the longest note he has ever sent me.

As I’ve stated previously in this column, Brother X prefers to remain anonymous. He’s afraid that people will talk about his accordion skills, or his performance in the kindergarten pageant.

Nurse Vivian, whenever Brother X peed on his Peter Rabbit costume or got left back in second grade, or got cousin Debbie sick in a radish-eating contest, would look him in the eye and say, “I hope you have a son just like you.” Never happened. Brother X, after marrying Mrs. X, had the sweetest, most abiding children ever put on the planet: Daughter of X and Son of X. She works for the New York City Police Department, so perhaps Lieutenant X would be better, and he teaches biology, and if Marvel Comics doesn’t mind, I’ll call him Professor X.

Nurse Vivian had many skills, but aim was not one of them. Her curse went off course. Hit the wrong sibling. Me, the kid who never missed a day of high school, the captain of the nerd-for-saken Math Team, I got the two most mischievous brothers since Fred and George Weasley, with a sibling rivalry that makes Cain and Abel look like besties.

My oldest brother, Harold Earl, does not mind having his name mentioned in a column. He just calls himself “Not Brother Brand X,” or Not-X for short. Like me he doesn’t let a good story get weighed down by facts, but unlike either X or me, he considers children an unnecessary eccentricity. Although he once kept a rat alive for a year, (Mini P. Earl), he embraced W.C. Fields’ precept that “Anyone who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad.”

On April 7, 2018, all three of us got old. Son of X got married two years back, and, after they kept a dog alive for two years (Hound of X), they decided to produce children. Thus, last week, Seaford, Long Island, was changed forever in the birth of Grandson X. Still trying to avoid getting sued by my own sibling here, so I’m not gonna mention that they gave the dog a Christian name and the child a dog name.

But it does bring up a dilemma for me: Am I great or grand? Uncle that is.

Grand expectations: Depends on the dictionary. Or the website. You’d think that if X was Grandpa X then I would be Grand Uncle Y, but if I was Great Uncle Y then he would be Greatpa Y. But even Ancestry.com says the terms are interchangeable. I expect that the copy editors of the Voice of the West, the San Francisco Chronicle, will figure out the right answer, but for now I’m sticking with Gruncle.

So we sent my great-nephew/grandnephew everything a newborn could need: a Batman onesie, a Captain America onesie and a Superman onesie. This adds up to a threesie. As coincidence would have it, Grandson of X developed a minor medical issue called bilrubin, and so he gets to wear a blindfold during light treatments. Daughter-in-law of X sent a picture of him with the caption, “I’m off to fight crime, just like Batman.”

I told Brother X that I was glad to know that my crime-fighting genes had once again trumped his MBA genes, and he said, “There’s no way that I can keep this out of your column, is there?”

And I replied, “It’s family. You can’t get away.” Kevin Fisher-Paulson’s column appears Wednesdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com

The minute that I took a break, he grabbed the purple crayon and wrote: “Kevin is a germ in germ city.” Fifty-five years later, this remains the longest note he has ever sent me.