The Many Thoughts of Wanda Kidd

Today would have been my brother Ricky’s seventy-fifth birthday. Many people who know me will be surprised to learn I had a brother. He was my half-brother, but that distinction was not called out in our home or community, even though he looked nothing like my sister and me.

It is one of those secrets that shape a family like a magnet dragging a metal toy car around the track.  It is moving, but how it is happening is a mystery to the casual observer.

 His biological father’s side of the family lived six hundred miles away, but they never visited nor invited him, despite that he was their only child and grandchild. As I got older, that mystified me, and it still does.

Between the Valentine’s Day that the Raleigh News and Observer carried a sweet picture of him on the front page of the paper until he had a catastrophic automobile accident when he was almost seventeen, his life was filled with many missteps, both his and the adults in his life. Still, there were some amazing things as well. 

Today, however, I want to celebrate his life.  He was brilliant (148 IQ), a reality that terrified my mother but was marveled at by friends and teachers who recognized and appreciated the gift.

He was a gifted athlete who rode a bike with no handlebars and pitched a no-hitter in the state all-star baseball game when he was fourteen.

He sang with excellent pitch and range and played the lead in the musical The Pied Piper because his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Rogers, convinced him he had talent.

He had friends in high and low places and was an accomplished pool shark who regularly beat the regionally famous Doug Clark from “Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts” when he was just sixteen. As the son of a Baptist deacon, I am not sure how they let him play at that pool hall at his age, but that was where he was hitchhiking home from the night he got in the car with a drunk driver. The night that changed many families’ lives.  Three died, and Ricky suffered a traumatic head injury that diminished most of his gifts and talents.  Yet he lived on fifty years beyond that night. He lived independently by working menial jobs. He offered refuge to people who needed a place to stay and a place to land for a while, and he maintained friendships that many would envy. Then, his health deteriorated until he needed to live in assisted living, where my sister organized parties and events that kept him engaged.

In many ways, his life was a Greek Tragedy. However, today, I want to remember the beautiful little blond-haired boy who hung a paper heart on his mama’s rental front door, and his uncle captured it with his camera. I was in awe of the boy who had an embarrassment of gifts, but I admired the man who lived beyond them with sheer grit and determination.