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    Sickness and Jordan

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    With the Coronavirus scare going around right now, I feel like I should have some kind of story to tell you about Jordan and being sick. But the truth of the matter is, I don't remember him getting sick a whole lot.
    I'm sure he did, just as much as any other kid. But my memories of being sick are almost always me, because I was (and still am) a huge hypochondriac, terrified of every illness.
    What I do remember is that my brother was really tough. I recall him getting sick once before recess when he was in elementary school. He didn't want to be forced to leave school before getting to go outside and play, so he supposedly threw up inside his own jacket to conceal the fact he was sick.
    But the closest "sick" story I have off the top of my head was when he fractured his leg. That happened when he was maybe twelve years old, and it happened while he was playing soccer. 
    It took him out of sports and other activities he loved for months. For awhile, he was stuck on the couch in the living room because it was too much of a hassle to hobble and down stairs. But, as far as I remember, he wasn't the kind of person to let this get him too down.
    Oh, I remember him complaining that his leg itched under the cast. Or how much of a pain it was to have to go to the bathroom when he could hardly move his leg. But he didn't fall into some kind of depression over it, and he eventually recovered just fine.
    I can't help but think that, if he were to look at what's going on today, he would think we're all being silly. He would laugh at the people rushing to the grocery stores to stock up on toilet paper. He'd probably have some poop joke about why they "need" so much of it. And you can bet, if it were fishing season right now, he'd absolutely be taking advantage of lakes emptied by people hiding out in their houses.
    I can practically hear him saying, "Well, that's just more for me, then."

    -Amanda J. Tucker
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    A White (and Fishy) Lie

    We all know Jordan liked to fish. He had fishing shirts, he constantly talked about fishing, he made disgusting-smelling crappie sandwiches at home, and he took tons of pictures with his catches. I think there's even a video on YouTube of him somewhere chasing Mom or Bre around the house with a fish.
    And when you love something, you try to share it with the people in your life. One of those people, of course, was me.
    Jordan's love for fishing goes all the way back to when he was a little boy. And his constantly trying to convince me to fish goes all the way back, too. 
    I remember we went fishing on some lake I can't remember when I was maybe around five or six years old. It was me, Jordan, and a handful of adults. I had my rod in the water just like everyone else, not that I really knew what I was doing.
    At some point, someone called us all to let us know that lunch was ready. Everyone reeled in their lines and went to go eat. Jordan, however, wanted to stay out there fishing, and he convinced me to leave my line in the water while I went to go eat, too. 
    I was one of the first people back out there on the dock after lunch, and I was surprised to find that Jordan had caught a fish while I was gone. He told me he had actually caught it on my line. 
    When everyone else came back out, he told everyone that I had caught the fish. I'm not sure why. Maybe he was trying to inspire me to keep on fishing. Maybe he wanted me to feel accomplished. 
    To this day, if the conversation ever calls for it (which admittedly doesn't happen often), I tell people that the first and only fish I ever caught, I caught while I wasn't even there.  That's all thanks to Jordan. 

    ​-Amanda J. tucker
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    Gaming with Jordan

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    I have a whole plethora of video game-related memories with Jordan, but most of them are so brief, I couldn't really justify making a whole post of them. So I figured I would just put random snippets of memories here in this post - whichever ones come to mind first.
    The Super Nintendo was a little bit early for us, but we had access to one at our grandparents' house. We had Super Mario Bros (I don't remember which one), and Jordan was seemingly a pro at it in my eyes. He knew how to get Yoshi in all these different colors, and I was pissed because I could only ever figure out how to get him in green.
    We did more of our growing up up with the Playstation One. We didn't do as much gaming together on that, but I do remember Grand Theft Auto 2. We played it the most after Jordan fractured his leg when he was maybe around twelve years old. For awhile, he stayed downstairs on the couch because he didn't want to walk up and down the stairs with his big, clunky cast.
    We played GTA 2 a lot on the TV downstairs. He actually knew what he was doing in the game. He knew how to find a tank and go on a rampage. I just liked playing because if you pressed the right buttons, your guy would burp and fart on the screen. Maybe I was a simpler child at times.
    When the next generation of game consoles came out, Jordan got a PS2. He also was a well-established grumpy teenager by that time and wouldn't share it with his little sisters. Sometimes, if he was in a very generous mood, he would let us play something on it, but generally, he kept it to himself and played various sports games I wasn't interested in, anyway.
    That's why, after saving up some birthday money for a bit, I decided I was going to get a PS2, too. But Jordan argued that was stupid because we already had one (even if I couldn't really play it) and made me get a GameCube. It was probably one of the smartest decisions I made in my life at the time, which isn't saying a lot, I guess.
    I loved my GameCube, and it was all thanks to Jordan that I got it in the first place. He used to call it the "Game Cubicle" for whatever reason, while I just called it Gary. One of the first games I got on it was Super Smash Brothers Melee, which I used to play with Jordan and Bre all the time. We quickly unlocked all the characters together. 
    I remember when we unlocked Mewtwo. Jordan threw down his controller and said he wouldn't play anymore, because I was getting too good, and he worried I would be impossible to beat if I always played Mewtwo. Too bad he didn't play with us very often after that, because honestly, Mewtwo kind of sucks and I would have started losing if I played as him a lot.
    -Amanda J. Tucker

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    Kiddie Wars

    One thing I think you could say about the Tucker kids is that we had no shortage of imagination. Looking back, I can remember countless dumb games that we used to play that are varying degrees of embarrassing to recount.
    I remember a silly skateboarding phase we went through. We had a cheap skateboard, and Jordan would try and teach me how to skate. (Spoiler: I never got good at it.) He had a pole laid on the ground, and he would make me try to grind the skateboard over it, helping me balance all the while.
    Or this stupid game we used to play on our cousins' trampoline. It was called "Worm in an Earthquake." One kid would lay in the middle of the trampoline while the others all jumped in a circle around them, chanting, "You're a worm in an earthquake, it sucks to be you." 
    Or all the times we'd go down the hill we lived on on our scooters, amassing all sorts of scrapes and injuries. I remember walking back up hill with our scooters in hand, banging on our shins. 
    The rock fort we made in the middle of our grandparents' property, ostensibly there to wage war against Bigfoot. Jordan actually destroyed our fort as a prank, and I know I was salty about that for a couple years.
    One game we played for a long time was with our step siblings at our biological father's house. The boys and the girls were divided into two opposing "armies." We pretended we were in a some kind of kiddie war, gearing up in some old military helmets and camo jackets we found.
    Jordan was the general of the boys' army, and I was the general of the girls' army. Our "battles" consisted of increasingly silly pranks we played on each other. The boys would leap out from around corners scaring us, charge into our room shrieking in the middle of the night, or steal our toys.
    In turn, we would employ our own "strategies." One thing I was especially proud of was the invention of the sock bomb. I took a baseball, tightly packed a bunch of dirty socks around it, and rolled it through the boys' room, so it deposited stinky socks everywhere.
    Of course, all things must end, and so, too, did our war. Jordan and I, the opposing generals, agreed to a treaty. We sat down together, writing out the terms of our treaty in gel pen on Lisa Frank paper. It was all I had to write on. It was no Treaty of Versailles, but it was good enough for us.
    -Amanda J. Tucker
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    Lessons from a Big Brother

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    An older sibling can teach you many things. They might tell you how to handle upcoming classes or help you with homework. They might teach you how to do some kind of hobby, like playing a game, hunting, or fishing - as was the case with me many times, actually. They might even teach you how to play a sport. 
    If I thought about it hard enough, I could probably tell you about several different lessons Jordan taught me. Maybe I'll write posts about them later, as I remember them. 
    But one of the first things that comes to mind is the port-a-potties. (I'm not sure I'm spelling that right. I think that's how you'd write it?) I'm not sure how Jordan figured it out, but at some point, he learned how to lock those portable Johns from the outside. 
    One summer, while we were out camping with our grandparents up at a campground on Lake Vermilion, Jordan told me he would impart this precious secret with me for seemingly no reason. He took me to the ring of portable Johns in the middle of the campground and demonstrated on one. 
    It was pretty simple. I learned it quickly, and I put the knowledge to use. Right before we left the campground, he and I locked every portable John from the outside. 
    I'm not sure how anyone discovered what we did or what happened. I imagine lines probably formed outside of them, and when no one ever came out of any of the bathrooms, someone probably reported it to the campground administration. 
    Sometime later when we came back, I found that all the portable Johns had levers on the inside that made it extra-difficult to lock them from the outside, so we didn't bother with that again.
    However, every once in awhile, to this day, I remember what he taught me when I see a portable John. And I get tempted to lock it from the outside.
    It's a dumb thing to remember, but it's one thing I think he'd be proud of.
    ​-Amanda J. Tucker
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    Bonding over Pokemon

    This isn't necessarily one particular stories, but I guess kind of a series of them. Pokemon was a thing that brought Jordan, me, and Bre together for several years.
    When Pokemon first came out (the trading card game, gameboy games, and the TV show), it was pretty much immediately huge. All the kids at school were into it. All the kids at the apartments we lived in at the time were into it. It wasn't surprising and that Jordan and I got into it, too.
    But we weren't able to afford to as many cards as everyone else, and a gameboy was out of the question for a bit, although we ended up getting one later. So in the beginning, what we used to do is sneak out at night. There used to be a gathering of kids in the nearby playground at night that would trade cards in the dark, almost like it was some kind of black market. 
    We didn't have anything to trade, but many of the other kids would give us cards they had two of, or cards that weren't very valuable. Jordan and I amassed a small collection together that way. Eventually, we had our own binders of Pokemon cards. 
    When we got a gameboy, Jordan was the first one to play Red and Blue version. I didn't really get into those, but when I did try playing them, he taught me that cheat with MissingNo. The one where you get 99 of an item in your bag if you find that creepy, glitchy Pokemon off Cinnabar Island. He insisted that I must always save my game every time I played.
    I got more into it when Gold, Silver, and Crystal came out. It was at that time that Jordan started to become bored with it. He said he would pass on his card collection to me or Bre, and let it hang over our heads for a few days like we'd have to compete for it. In the end, he decided to give it to her because her own collection wasn't as big as mine, and she needed cards more than I did to round it out. 
    Unlike Jordan, I never really grew out of it. I still actively play the new Pokemon games to this day. I wonder what he would think if he knew how valuable some of those old cards we used to collect are now?