313

313:

I screamed my way into the world at 3:13 a.m. on March 13, 2001. My brother knew the trouble he was going to cause our mom for the rest of his life, so he let her rest and finally came out at 3:13 p.m. Fraternal twins born twelve hours apart. However, we’re still going to have fun with everyone who can’t tell us apart.

I will tell you the way to tell us apart, the eyes, I have ice blue, and my brother has green. Other than that, we are mirrored images of each other. We even both weighed 6lbs. 5oz. at birth.

They quickly learned that we could communicate with each other in the nursery. When they separated us, we would make so much noise that all of the other babies would chime in, too.

Mom tried to give us our own identities by not dressing us alike every day, but we would sometimes change into matching outfits to emphasize the point that we were twins. We made the same gross noises, the same stupid jokes, and the same stupid mistakes.

Separation wasn’t required until puberty. My brother was never the cleanest person in the world, but sharing a room after the first time I woke up to go to the bathroom and found he had pitched a tent on his bunk, and it was raining, was the line in the sand.

Something clicked in my mind on that Wednesday, our eighteenth birthday, the TV channels all interrupted the regular scheduled program to report that they were going after Jimmy Hoffa on bribery charges, which was confusing to me; wasn’t he already dead? Or had I been doing too many recreational drugs? Maybe it was time for a change.

Fact forwarding to today…

March 13, 2026… our 25th birthday. As children, we did all kinds of pranks and enjoyed watching people laugh at us, but I realize that you have to grow up sometime.

On our 21st, I had to bail my brother out of the County Jail. On our 22nd, he dragged me to a strip club and left with a date, stranding me with no ride home. I have been ghosting him for a week before and after every year since.

I’ve been in my job since high school, and I have worked my way out of the dead-letter department of the U.S. Postal Service. The post office has been good to me; they paid for me to get a degree in machine maintenance. I’ve always been a tinkerer, hence my nickname “Tinker.” Growing up, I would take apart anything using electricity: electronics, kitchen gadgets, vacuums, and there was no guarantee that I could put them back together.

My brother, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with hard work that left you dusty, greasy, or feeling good about your accomplishment at the end of the day. He went to college for two years and dropped out when he needed to declare a major. Don’t take it the wrong way; he is smart, and I sometimes wish I had his guts to be a free spirit. He always liked pretending to be a news anchor, and somehow, he landed that job after leaving school.

I’m not jealous of him…. I wonder how luck seems to follow him. Once, around lunchtime, we were in a convenience store line to pay for my hot dog, chips, and Mountain Dew, with a long line behind me. He walked up and wanted to cut in, so I gave him my spot. He purchased lunch and a scratch-off ticket and won $5,000.00.

I met my current girlfriend outside the main post office that memorable evening in 2020, on our birthday, when her car decided not to go on another errand. She had a bunch of packages, groceries, and a child in a booster seat. After a failed attempt to restart the car, we transferred everything from her vehicle to my compact Toyota, and I gave them a lift home. We chatted on the ride to the apartment complex. We have been neighbors for three years and never even noticed each other; no more than a wave, which you do in passing, and living four doors down from each other.

I was pondering the idea of being a stepfather before I knew her name. Whew, she runs a daycare from home, and the child was not hers. I’ve never been hit by a lightning bolt before, but she wasn’t like the other females I have been out with. Our conversation flowed easily, and she laughed and got my stupid jokes.

Usually, I am in my own headspace when I clock out and don’t pay attention to the people in the parking lot. She didn’t even ask for help, but I guess it was a divine intervention.

In the past, when I showed interest in someone, my brother would find a reason to dislike them and drive a wedge between us. This time, I took my time to get to know Connie before introducing her to the family. She has a twin sister, and I wasn’t sure whether a meet-and-greet with both of them was a good idea. Connie and I agreed that no matter what happened between Kelli and Stan, we would not let it affect our relationship.

Who would have thought my brother could care about someone other than himself? I didn’t know I was at that point in my life where I would even be thinking about marriage. They met three years ago, and now we are planning a double wedding.

Life has been good to me, and I don’t usually take advice from my brother, but we all have been playing our birth numbers in the lottery. We have hit 313 at least five times this year. $500/ticket × 4 people = $2,500 total added to the pot. It’s a nice nest egg, so we decided to buy adjoining duplexes.

The most interesting thing about the four of us is that we were born within minutes of each other, in the same hospital on March 13, 2001, at 3:13 a.m., 3:31 a.m., 3:13 p.m., and 3:31 p.m.